happy new your to all my friends!!!
i am engaged in a fight where total focus of mind is necessary.
so i am keeping out the blog from my attention.
hope to write about this experience soon, and also visit other blogs to see what my friends are doing.
the ongoing experience is not the new. Arjuna might have experienced it aiming his arrow at the eye.
i am watching what is possible if you turn weightless,
nothing distracting you,
no gravitational pull excercising its influence on you,
no fear touching any corner of your heart,
nothing mattering,
you turn just into a flame burning smokeless.
*****
Wednesday, 5 January 2011
Sunday, 21 November 2010
A truly religious person
It was my good fortune the other day being asked to cover for my newspaper an interaction between Dayabai, a social worker, and the media in Thiruvananthapuram. What struck me from the very beginning of the exchanges was the feeling that here was a woman who was on the verge of enlightenment. I use the word 'verge' to underline my feeling that she still was not fully settled and peaceful in the poise of her being--her quest was still not over--but she seemed well on the way to conquering those final steps also. I copy here the story I had written for The Hindu issue dated 18th November:
*************************************
In search of truth… in tribal land
How Dayabai transformed herself and the people around her.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Life is message:Human rights activist Dayabai and documentary film-maker Shiny Jacob Benjamin at a meet-the-press in Thiruvananthapuram on Wednesday. –
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: What moves Dayabai, the woman soldiering on alone in her quest for something? What is her quest?
A discussion with Dayabai, who lives among the Gonds of Chhindwara district in Madhya Pradesh showing them the way out of exploitation, was organised by the Trivandrum Press Club on the sidelines of the release of a documentary on her life here on Wednesday.
She was Mercy Mathew when she left home in Kerala's Kottayam district at the age of 16 to join a convent to become a nun more than four decades ago. She gave up the convent life to study social work as a subject, do a bit of teaching and then lead a wandering life as a social worker. She had kept moving and her journey had taken her to Mother Teresa, Bangladesh and wherever she thought she could find truth.
When asked, she said she had never been able to stay for more than one-and-a-half years anywhere. At a very young age, what struck her about relationships was how there was an imposed gap between one person and another, between one entity and another — the separateness that was keeping things apart. She thought a nun's life was her calling, but in the convent she found this separateness there also. There was the hierarchy and the gradations that go behind all institutions.
She said whenever she was in doubt she would go to the Bible and therein read what Christ had said. Religion was something that happened within each individual and she knew she had to find her own truth.
Finally among the Gonds in Madhya Pradesh she reached. Dayabai said they were once a community belonging to the ruling class among the tribal people there. They had a tradition and culture of their own. But they had been alienated from much of their land and they were under severe exploitation.
“One remark I heard during my initial days with them was very striking. One of them asked me why I should stay with them who were like monkeys in the forests. They had lost the pride of their identity,” she said.
Mercy Mathew became one of them and assumed the name Dayabai. She felt one with them in all senses, but she had to remove the separateness that was in the tribal people around her also. How she transformed the people around her was the theme of the documentary Ottayaal taken by Shiny Jacob Benjamin, a journalist.
Dayabai's life is being seen as something depicting the theology of liberation in practice.
Asked about this, she said such interpretations were being given by others. Religion happened when one became part of the whole struggling life.
And what does she fear, she was asked. “All these cameras,” she said, sweeping her hand in the direction of the cameramen covering the interaction. She was wary whether it would change her small life.
*****
link: http://www.hindu.com/2010/11/18/stories/2010111863530400.htm
*************************************
In search of truth… in tribal land
How Dayabai transformed herself and the people around her.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Life is message:Human rights activist Dayabai and documentary film-maker Shiny Jacob Benjamin at a meet-the-press in Thiruvananthapuram on Wednesday. –
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: What moves Dayabai, the woman soldiering on alone in her quest for something? What is her quest?
A discussion with Dayabai, who lives among the Gonds of Chhindwara district in Madhya Pradesh showing them the way out of exploitation, was organised by the Trivandrum Press Club on the sidelines of the release of a documentary on her life here on Wednesday.
She was Mercy Mathew when she left home in Kerala's Kottayam district at the age of 16 to join a convent to become a nun more than four decades ago. She gave up the convent life to study social work as a subject, do a bit of teaching and then lead a wandering life as a social worker. She had kept moving and her journey had taken her to Mother Teresa, Bangladesh and wherever she thought she could find truth.
When asked, she said she had never been able to stay for more than one-and-a-half years anywhere. At a very young age, what struck her about relationships was how there was an imposed gap between one person and another, between one entity and another — the separateness that was keeping things apart. She thought a nun's life was her calling, but in the convent she found this separateness there also. There was the hierarchy and the gradations that go behind all institutions.
She said whenever she was in doubt she would go to the Bible and therein read what Christ had said. Religion was something that happened within each individual and she knew she had to find her own truth.
Finally among the Gonds in Madhya Pradesh she reached. Dayabai said they were once a community belonging to the ruling class among the tribal people there. They had a tradition and culture of their own. But they had been alienated from much of their land and they were under severe exploitation.
“One remark I heard during my initial days with them was very striking. One of them asked me why I should stay with them who were like monkeys in the forests. They had lost the pride of their identity,” she said.
Mercy Mathew became one of them and assumed the name Dayabai. She felt one with them in all senses, but she had to remove the separateness that was in the tribal people around her also. How she transformed the people around her was the theme of the documentary Ottayaal taken by Shiny Jacob Benjamin, a journalist.
Dayabai's life is being seen as something depicting the theology of liberation in practice.
Asked about this, she said such interpretations were being given by others. Religion happened when one became part of the whole struggling life.
And what does she fear, she was asked. “All these cameras,” she said, sweeping her hand in the direction of the cameramen covering the interaction. She was wary whether it would change her small life.
*****
link: http://www.hindu.com/2010/11/18/stories/2010111863530400.htm
Friday, 5 November 2010
back home
my son was back home today from bangalore third month into his first job, lean and clean eyed.
he brought neha a toy, a dog that rolls paw over paw, shaking its head, when dragged by a string;
his sister a watch and his brother-in-law a shirt;
his mother a mobile phone
and his father two books--'Communism & Zen Fire, Zen Wind' and 'Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi'-- both by Osho,
and a Peter England shirt,
in which i looked handsome
in the mirror.
*****
he brought neha a toy, a dog that rolls paw over paw, shaking its head, when dragged by a string;
his sister a watch and his brother-in-law a shirt;
his mother a mobile phone
and his father two books--'Communism & Zen Fire, Zen Wind' and 'Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi'-- both by Osho,
and a Peter England shirt,
in which i looked handsome
in the mirror.
*****
Sunday, 24 October 2010
right lighting conditions
a crow,
the full-black species we have in our countryside,
cawed at me from a bough
and i found
myself walking in the sun,
back-lit and sparkling
against the background of a sprinkling of wild flowers,
fresh from an early morning drizzle.
he clicked me now with both eyes intensly focussed
over his beaks,
now with the left eye and now with the right,
from different angles,
excited,
like a wildlife photographer
accidently encountering the tiger
in the forests
in the right lighting conditions.
*****
the full-black species we have in our countryside,
cawed at me from a bough
and i found
myself walking in the sun,
back-lit and sparkling
against the background of a sprinkling of wild flowers,
fresh from an early morning drizzle.
he clicked me now with both eyes intensly focussed
over his beaks,
now with the left eye and now with the right,
from different angles,
excited,
like a wildlife photographer
accidently encountering the tiger
in the forests
in the right lighting conditions.
*****
Monday, 18 October 2010
Time and Space
"There are still these questions baffling me," Sashi* told me, not because he was actually baffled, I am sure, but because he wanted to probe what my answers would be. "Is there something called Time? Is there something called Space?"
He told me he wanted a simple answer. If he were to ask me whether I was thirsty, I would answer him 'yes' or 'no'. If I wanted to drink a glass of water, I would know it spontaneously. I would not have to think and select the appropriate answer from my accummulated stock of knowledge and experience. He said he wanted such a spontaneous answer.
However, instintively, I started thinking for the answers, because thinking is a habit we nourish and carry with us as an extremely important quality in life. We are not used to acting spontaneously. We think, calculate and then act. We introduce the time-and-space factor into all our responses.
I told him: "The last time we met, you told me about looking at things without giving names to anything I see. I have tried it. I see my wife, but I don't give her a name. I don't give a name to our relationship either. I see a cow grazing in a valley, but I don't limit either the cow or the rest of the scenery to names and symbols. I don't allow my brain to go into its trained function of decoding from memory the impressions that reach it, giving each impression a name, reducing each impression to a symbol...There is a strange stillness and a flooding in of something when that kind of seeing happens, which is not always. Then everything becomes fresh and new, with neither a past, nor a future. Everything IS. In that stillness, is there 'Time', is there 'Space'?"
Sashi was amused by my answer. "You can also answer my question by posing the same question back to me," he said, laughing.
"Why do we have this concept of Time and Space," Sashi asked. "Isn't it a creation of thought, the basic nature of which is to seggregate, compartmentalise and grade the seggregated entities in different ways, pitting one entity against the other and grouping some entities together, arranging all these in an order in our mind in Time and Space?"
[*Sashi is an old friend. Some of my other friends are of the view that our discussions with him should be recorded. I had a one-to-one discussion with him on Friday.]
*****
He told me he wanted a simple answer. If he were to ask me whether I was thirsty, I would answer him 'yes' or 'no'. If I wanted to drink a glass of water, I would know it spontaneously. I would not have to think and select the appropriate answer from my accummulated stock of knowledge and experience. He said he wanted such a spontaneous answer.
However, instintively, I started thinking for the answers, because thinking is a habit we nourish and carry with us as an extremely important quality in life. We are not used to acting spontaneously. We think, calculate and then act. We introduce the time-and-space factor into all our responses.
I told him: "The last time we met, you told me about looking at things without giving names to anything I see. I have tried it. I see my wife, but I don't give her a name. I don't give a name to our relationship either. I see a cow grazing in a valley, but I don't limit either the cow or the rest of the scenery to names and symbols. I don't allow my brain to go into its trained function of decoding from memory the impressions that reach it, giving each impression a name, reducing each impression to a symbol...There is a strange stillness and a flooding in of something when that kind of seeing happens, which is not always. Then everything becomes fresh and new, with neither a past, nor a future. Everything IS. In that stillness, is there 'Time', is there 'Space'?"
Sashi was amused by my answer. "You can also answer my question by posing the same question back to me," he said, laughing.
"Why do we have this concept of Time and Space," Sashi asked. "Isn't it a creation of thought, the basic nature of which is to seggregate, compartmentalise and grade the seggregated entities in different ways, pitting one entity against the other and grouping some entities together, arranging all these in an order in our mind in Time and Space?"
[*Sashi is an old friend. Some of my other friends are of the view that our discussions with him should be recorded. I had a one-to-one discussion with him on Friday.]
*****
Saturday, 2 October 2010
The night we discussed suicide
My friend had come from a place on the outskirts of the city and was waiting for me at the gates of my newspaper office when I finished the day's work and came out around nine in the night.
"Where to," I asked him. He said he knew a toddy shop some distance away, where we could get very good toddy. It was a little way off my route home, but I had decided to give that evening to him shelving everything else I had planned.
We were silent as I negotiated the city traffic. When the road cleared, he said he had come to meet me to discuss the question of suicide. He wanted to commit suicide. Then he thought I was the kind of person with whom he could talk about it.
The toddy shop was not crowded and we could have continued the discussion there without much fear of being overheard. But he was silent through our first bottles.
"Let us go out into the highway," he suggested. So we got a plastic can loaded with toddy, borrowed a couple of glasses, and set off towards the highway. I parked the car at a dimly lit place on the side of the road.
We talked for nearly two hours, spilling quite a lot of toddy in the car. The car was going to stink like a toddy godown tommorrow, I thought...
Our very serious discussion on suicide, as was quite inevitable in such circumstances, was punctuated by frequent references about the quality of the toddy we were drinking. He had big influence with that toddy shop, though he was not a regular drinker. "Any time you feel like having good toddy, Venu, you tell me. I can arrange it for you," he said. We both laughed when he said that.
We also discussed, in between our discussion on the subject of why he wanted to commit suicide, our common problem of always wanting to be recognised--within our families, within our social circles, among our friends and within our organisations. The desire to be spoken well of by others and understood by all for our good intentions and how all these are basically the result of our own habit of being totally immersed in ourselves.
He was extremely emotional at the start of our discussion. When the story unfolded, he would now and then break out into laughter seeing how his mind had been at work right from the time of a simple incident in the morning to make it snowball into something so shattering that he saw no longer any purpose in living. We talked about this funny quality of the mind and marvelled at the way the mind worked.
We were now on a high and he asked me whether I had any old Malayalam songs to put on the music system. When I said I had no music system in my car, he said not to worry, he would sing a couple of songs himself.
He sang beautifully and his face was all music and expression in the light of the headlights of the vehicles that moved past us along the highway. There was still some toddy left in the can and as I filled the glasses without spilling, a police patrol jeep, red lights and all, rounded into our side and stopped.
I opened the car door and stood outside. An officer climbed out of the jeep and walked to the car to inspect want was on.
"We are having a little toddy," I broke clean. "I finish work very late... Errr.. the other chap is my friend... He too is drunk," I confessed, adding, "we were discussing a serious issue..."
The officer blinked a torch into the car. He saw my friend's beaming face, the plastic can, the toddy-filled glasses, the mess on the dashboard...
He switched off the torch. "Okay, okay," he said, curt and very official. "That's enough. Pack up, go home." They had been watching the car parked on the side of the highway during their patrolling the past couple of hours.
"Certainly, sir, right this moment," I said, getting immediately back into the car. The police jeep followed us for a couple of kilometres to make sure I could hold the wheel and, reassured, turned back.
"Venu, did you notice the policeman's face? What a lovely face! I felt like kissing him. Isn't it a wonder he should understand the seriousness of what we were discussing? Isn't it a wonderful world?" My friend was delirious in his happniess to be in this world.
It was well past midnight when I dropped him home. The door opened the moment the car stopped at the gates. Both his wife and daughter were at the door. They were waiting for him to return.
I could see them smiling from ear to ear as he sang out good night to me and, with meticulous deliberation to keep his steps steady, started walking towards them.
*****
"Where to," I asked him. He said he knew a toddy shop some distance away, where we could get very good toddy. It was a little way off my route home, but I had decided to give that evening to him shelving everything else I had planned.
We were silent as I negotiated the city traffic. When the road cleared, he said he had come to meet me to discuss the question of suicide. He wanted to commit suicide. Then he thought I was the kind of person with whom he could talk about it.
The toddy shop was not crowded and we could have continued the discussion there without much fear of being overheard. But he was silent through our first bottles.
"Let us go out into the highway," he suggested. So we got a plastic can loaded with toddy, borrowed a couple of glasses, and set off towards the highway. I parked the car at a dimly lit place on the side of the road.
We talked for nearly two hours, spilling quite a lot of toddy in the car. The car was going to stink like a toddy godown tommorrow, I thought...
Our very serious discussion on suicide, as was quite inevitable in such circumstances, was punctuated by frequent references about the quality of the toddy we were drinking. He had big influence with that toddy shop, though he was not a regular drinker. "Any time you feel like having good toddy, Venu, you tell me. I can arrange it for you," he said. We both laughed when he said that.
We also discussed, in between our discussion on the subject of why he wanted to commit suicide, our common problem of always wanting to be recognised--within our families, within our social circles, among our friends and within our organisations. The desire to be spoken well of by others and understood by all for our good intentions and how all these are basically the result of our own habit of being totally immersed in ourselves.
He was extremely emotional at the start of our discussion. When the story unfolded, he would now and then break out into laughter seeing how his mind had been at work right from the time of a simple incident in the morning to make it snowball into something so shattering that he saw no longer any purpose in living. We talked about this funny quality of the mind and marvelled at the way the mind worked.
We were now on a high and he asked me whether I had any old Malayalam songs to put on the music system. When I said I had no music system in my car, he said not to worry, he would sing a couple of songs himself.
He sang beautifully and his face was all music and expression in the light of the headlights of the vehicles that moved past us along the highway. There was still some toddy left in the can and as I filled the glasses without spilling, a police patrol jeep, red lights and all, rounded into our side and stopped.
I opened the car door and stood outside. An officer climbed out of the jeep and walked to the car to inspect want was on.
"We are having a little toddy," I broke clean. "I finish work very late... Errr.. the other chap is my friend... He too is drunk," I confessed, adding, "we were discussing a serious issue..."
The officer blinked a torch into the car. He saw my friend's beaming face, the plastic can, the toddy-filled glasses, the mess on the dashboard...
He switched off the torch. "Okay, okay," he said, curt and very official. "That's enough. Pack up, go home." They had been watching the car parked on the side of the highway during their patrolling the past couple of hours.
"Certainly, sir, right this moment," I said, getting immediately back into the car. The police jeep followed us for a couple of kilometres to make sure I could hold the wheel and, reassured, turned back.
"Venu, did you notice the policeman's face? What a lovely face! I felt like kissing him. Isn't it a wonder he should understand the seriousness of what we were discussing? Isn't it a wonderful world?" My friend was delirious in his happniess to be in this world.
It was well past midnight when I dropped him home. The door opened the moment the car stopped at the gates. Both his wife and daughter were at the door. They were waiting for him to return.
I could see them smiling from ear to ear as he sang out good night to me and, with meticulous deliberation to keep his steps steady, started walking towards them.
*****
Wednesday, 22 September 2010
i belong
i belong to the blood
that pulsates in your heart
and gushes
through your arteries,
to the odour of your sweat,
to the moisture in your breath,
to the deep recesses of the earth
from where your roots
drink in the salt of the soil
and spread triumphant your boughs
towards the sun,
i belong.
*****
that pulsates in your heart
and gushes
through your arteries,
to the odour of your sweat,
to the moisture in your breath,
to the deep recesses of the earth
from where your roots
drink in the salt of the soil
and spread triumphant your boughs
towards the sun,
i belong.
*****
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