Aashcharya!

(This short piece, I dedicate to one of the greatest minds of our time, and an inspiration to always remain curious- Stephen Hawking)

In this age of competition and "copy, cut, paste" being curious and amazed about anything is regarded as an incapability, or a waste of time, or is just completely absent due to desensitization. But whatever the reason, we have forgotten how to be wowed, we need at least an apocalypse or stars falling down to be even remotely interested in the sky above. The rising sun, the thousand greens in one leaf, the rustling of wind or the simple rain are just mundane occurrences, they are not miracles because "we know they are science".

But here is the problem. We just think we know, we are conditioned to believe we know. But if one really is curious enough, and keeps asking, he would know that he is not in fact in the know. Einstien spent most of his life studying sunrays, and even after giving fantastic theories professed that humans know only a fraction about the science of light. And yet, we common people think that science means "no miracle". Why? And why is curiosity even important?

Swadhyay, chintan, aashcharya, are the characteristics that set a human apart from animal. Only one question, any one question about any phenomena in the universe is capable of taking us to the ultimate truth. ("If one pursues any question with an all-consuming burning curiosity, it will have to reveal itself to the seeker as God Himself manifested in infinite forms"-Aparna).

Be amazed at the dawn that is never the same, at the precision of the distance between the earth and the sun, at the veins of leaves that are so varied. Ask the questions again that as a child you were forbidden to. For once, don't take anything for granted. You will discover that there is still so much to learn that Google cannot search for you. Apart from anything else, therein lies the truth and beauty of life!

The Dance

Morning grey
The sky awaits a crimson orb
And the dew drops yearn to shine

A pregnant silence
Thousand eyes, an empty stage
And she clutches the curtains to hide

A blank sheet
The dusty typewriter wonders why
Boundaries of words, painful to find

Two empty hands
Two new lovers strolling, stirring
That very first touch, passionately shy

Silence awaits the world to dance...

A sunbeam bursts to touch the drop
As she tinkles onto stage
The writer pushes the rusty letters
The dance begins to create

The drop rises to join the troupe
Thats preparing the monsoon dance
Sunlight and shadow shift and swoop
As the hands entwine, an era starts

The rapture of the audience told
The enchantment of her dance
Curtained fear to passion sold
Nonchalantly, she moved in trance

'Inspiration is a tiny matchstick
Not a ruffians show of swords'
His soul breathed aglow with fire
That burnt his sheet through words

Sweaty palms but refuse to leave
The touch of love so new
As breath takes its own sweet course
Such moments are but few

Dance!
Dance to the beats of very first rains
Dance to the passion in your veins
Dance to the spark of inspiration
And to that love so insane

Oh soul my soul!
Dance to the awakening of light in leaves
And to the creation of a masterpiece
Take love your partner, breathe the beat
Dance in turmoil, dance in peace

A Secret

Formless water, transient sand

They whisper in unfathomable cries

Crooked lines around age-old eyes

Make mocking maps of unseen sights

They hold a secret too…

Unwritten epilogues of open ends

A da vinci smile, a lie

An eraser hides the trivial truths

And highlights the marks it couldn’t hide

They tell a story too…

Walls broken, words decoded

The door will finally yield

But how will you tell with finite words

The infinity of what you feel!

Are secrets even a choice then?

Or as natural as the unseen breath?

As transitory as the growing space

As sure as the passing time

As obvious as…

So let me end my thoughts here,

Before words lead me astray,

And give your secrets a chance

To fill the empty space…

It is not mine to take

“Bury me, but leave my hands outside, so that the people would know, the man who conquered the world, had nothing in his hands when he died!”

It does make you contemplate on your content of your desires, when the one who uttered such words did actually win the globe. Alexander, The Great! The world obliged him with a glorious symbol of “the great”, and remembered him for his victories. It then moved on, like the mighty river gives its signature to some colossal rock in the way and flows away. Nothing is for the river to hold, nothing is for the ocean to preserve, even that big rock would collapse one day, even Alexander would be forgotten one day…

Doesn’t then, any desire to be known to the world, any aspiration for fortune or fame becomes horribly misplaced? In fact when the very changeability of time assures each ones oblivion, no desire makes sense…except when the man wants to touch the lives of people around him through what he does, not for fame, but just because of the fact that he understands he is not just an individual living a solitary life with desires not attached to anyone he knows or doesn’t know of. He realizes his connection to the universe and everything that exists in it, that he as an individual does not exist, although as a universe-dweller nobody is more powerful than him. He understands his dependence on almost every living or non-living entity, but in that dependence there is no servitude. It’s like being dependent on the lungs to breathe; they are a part of him. It then makes sense to desire something that would affect every being and take them towards happiness. And here, it does not take the form of a moral dogmas, it logically becomes the only way for fulfillment! But then, doesn’t possession lose its importance?

Perhaps when the child first clings to his mother, natures gives him the first lesson on the very falsity of it! Its human to desire, to grow and satiate himself in any way possible, he lives for that, and builds his life on the very foundation of it, whether fulfilled or not. Is wanting wrong? No, it’s part of mans’ most innate and primitive character, you can’t get rid of it but isn’t it the only reason for sorrow? Think…and if it is true, should we discard it completely, proclaim ourselves ascetics and lead a complacent, meaningless life? So should we desire to forgo our desires?

Vivekananda once met an accomplished scholar, a sort of person who had it all planned. An exemplified education, work, wife and so on. “But isn’t that what animals do? What makes you human”?, and thus asking the man, our learned leader successfully shook quite a peaceful oblivion. True! What makes us human? Quite a well-known difference is our ability to choose, to change what is around us, and thus to create, destroy and create again. It’s abnormal to not desire, but it’s equally abnormal to not recognize our true motive to be alive as humans, and do what would really make us happy. Somehow, possessing becomes the goal, but all that matters on your death bed is how you possessed it. Possessions, in their raw form were never ours to take…

We tend to link possessions to desires, that’s where we go wrong. Desire to change the world to a better place, and each being would help you in it, desire to uplift your soul and infinite hands would support you, they will not let you fall. But try to possess, and it will be snatched from you eventually, death will ensure that!

I don’t want the fruit of my action, it isn’t mine to take..but I do wish that beggar sitting in that dark corner of that far, far land, smiles because I worked today…that joy will I take, and it will be mine forever…

The Sand, The Sea and The Feet

The magnanimity of the horizon stood defeated in the moonless dome of the night. A familiar landscape, the sea and the shore, yet hardly anybody dares to come near it when the power of the moon calls the tide to rise. Tonight, it has been robbed off its voice, delivering to man liberty to see the starlit ocean so rare.

Ah! The sky misses an orb, and where the expanse flows till infinity, the eyes do miss light. Without that, the herculean stillness, save for some roaring waves, scares something in you. It reminds you starkly and rudely, that you exist, you breathe and you do make a mark in the sand. It stays till you stay, is washed away when you walk away, but now the ocean holds a part of you in it, and that is perhaps permanent, so permanent that you are scared to be a part of it. You want to stay, and preserve the mark beneath your feet. But you can’t, it’s not in your nature, you have to flow, you have to change.

And water does wash it all…filth, wound, tears and milestones on sands. The bank it not meant for permanency, nor are the feet and marks they make. Millions of drops make an ocean, millions of tears drown, and tons of mud settles deep below. Water keeps it all. It takes, holds, and preserves it all. It preserves the drop.

The crest and fall of the waves purge the soiled feet you see not. The black tar rages in front and you suddenly wish it would cease to move, or at least not be so turbulent and powerful that it drives and drowns your soul in it, trying to take even that one drop of life which you possessed so rightfully under the sun. But now it imparts to the drop an insatiable wish to expand…so much significance to one meek drop!

It is true. Your darkest hour reveals the most in you; it is then that you light the inward candle and the little light in that meek drop is enough to show you your feet and a step ahead…which you know is all you need for now. Night is not so cruel; it is just a dependent slave. It wouldn’t even exist without light. And so it waits for an order from the ray of light in that candle it can see. It is true. The hours, ecstatic or melancholy, filled or solitary, never did exist before you created them. And the feet stand near the deserted ocean, waiting for a light that in turn waits for them to take a step ahead…

The Green Tree

(The corridor, the corner and the tree are all a part of the school we are leaving this year...it is homage to the times left behind and a welcome to a new beginning).

                                                
The branches were bare

The leaves had long blown down

It was sere, dead, that tree

That once green tree at the corner of the corridor

Ravages of time ah!

All the laughter and rhyme,

It had veiled them all, that tree.

Ecstasy, reverberations of joy

Pandemonium created

On that yellow flooded corridor

Near the once green tree at the corner of the corridor

Transparencies of emotions now

Retaliation of memories

Free from that chaperon bare.

Separation and melancholy

Autumn, winter and agony...

Age has brought us far from that corner,

And the once green tree at that corner....

 Tears well up, you look down

Your steps recede to the exit

And the trodden leaves stick to your feet

They hinder your walk

Despondency strikes,

Will that ever bloom again?

The once green tree at that corner?

....you come back to see

You run through the beaten grounds

Slide through the soaked ways

Climb the petty steps

Wind of reminiscences

Voices haunt, they whisper

Our once green tree at the corner of that corridor...

You reach the place

Panting, out of breath...

And then exhilaration fills!

Foliage new born!

The same sweet...sweet smell,

Charioting feelings so pristine

Amidst a green tree at the corner of this corridor

You comprehend then, elated

It was waiting and will always do

For your head turned high

For your unchartered feet

For the spring... and for your smile

And so it has bloomed again

This green tree at the corner of this corridor

You look up...

Threshold of a new beginning

And see the golden light

On the evergreen tree at the corner of that corridor...

Just a little bit more...

I was swimming hard…four laps; I had to complete at least a respectable three. Yes they told you to “never leave the race in between”, but here I wasn’t even willing to participate. The coach stood on the other side. At end of the middle I found an unknown surge of energy ...I knew then I could actually finish it…but it was pre-conceived and so decided…how do you change that at the brink of competition when your mind goes numb? The coach helped me out and my other competitors went on to finish the swim. So what that my house chose me so that they wouldn’t be disqualified, knowing well enough that I wasn’t a distant swimmer! They still congratulated me for saving us from humiliation…but he that pulled me out said “you could have completed it, it was just a little bit more!”

         
Life thrusts upon us a multitude of such circumstances like the last lap, or the final step, or just another try…just a little bit more…an atom can create a universe, and that little can change it. Every trial and tribulation has that darkest hour…survivors are those that can walk through that hour alive…just another mile.

The last notes of any masterpiece of music, ends with a flourish that can capture a listener’s soul in the moment, and make the artiste work worthwhile. An unexpected end of O. Henry or a heroic Shakespearean end has never been less than applauded, loved and made legendary. Dancers are known to have created cyclones before leaving the stage. What is more, Einstein invention managed to blow up two cities before bidding adieu, horrendous but large.  The end must be worth reminiscing, it has to justify the decision of “to do, or not to do.” Or at least, the journey of “doing” must be finished, for the exhausted sinew to deliver to the mind and heart enough power, to embark on a new one. Life needs that little bit more, to make death a reality. An incomplete something in a painting, that “not full” heart in ecstatic moments, like looking at the palate when the stomach still feels needy, the definition of “near perfect” then becomes “just a little bit more.”

Winning was never a compulsion, and extravagant geniuses are not found in every nook and cranny of a creative being. But just the fact of knowing that spring is never far behind has always given the being to survive in the barren cold land for a few more days. Besides when was that night that didn’t give the fighter a little of its own strength, depth, patience, hope and experience of the self, then inviting him to a better, brighter morning? Perhaps a small compensation of all that it took…

Ever realized? A small period has more power than a page full of sentences hiding wisdom of all ages. It imparts the readers a license to think, reflect, question, accept or reject and then move forward. It vindicates the existence of those words…

My experience says that the worst relationships with people are those which do not end properly. A gnawing regret about something left unsaid…or even unheard. Or that last try, that could have mended the broken pieces into some shape, any shape that has a name.  A general notion in people usually gives a “goodbye” quite a negative light. For me, it’s a promise. I may not see you again, but I know what you mean to me, how you belong to me. A goodbye cannot erase the exuberance of days and years spent together, it just gives those moments the designation of “memories”.

   

The full stop, the goodbye, and the death: they are grand. But then they are just random manifestations of the end of the parable of an ant trying and trying again, to climb the wall…till it actually did. They are all that follow the “little bit more.” That is why maybe a forbidden last piece of a little more cake tastes so mysteriously sweet! Only the universe here has an uncanny power of infinity, to expand a bit more every passing second, perhaps to make space for each one of us, so that we never give up before the end and travel a little bit farther to our secret destinies…