LETTERS TO MY DAUGHTER : LIFE IN BITS AND PIECES

Dear Daughter,

You turned Five last 20th April. Unfortunately, I was not able to be with you, wish you personally. I know it hurts. And I offer no excuses to vindicate the hurt. You will find answers yourself as you grow up gradually. All of us are always growing up. Growing up stabilizes the mind that oscillates between questions and uncertainty. I know you are growing up too. You yourself shall seek out Answers. You have Freedom to seek your answers, and the freedom belongs to you only. Nobody can ever take away your Freedom from you. 

My Fair Lady, have you noticed (I'm sure you have) how Life is "growing up" with you. This is not an assumption, it is truth of Life. If understood well, this realization helps. You become more responsible. And if all of us, in the entire planet realized this, it would have been a much more wonderful planet to live in. 

Time, the game-changer, does not leave Life ever. The nature of Life becomes the same with the nature of Man. Just as we come to an answer, after smiles and tear drops, life also puts itself as a Truth, but not before a series of trials and errors. Just as we do. If life helps you, you should help life back. Let me tell you how I, just like you, have been seeking my questions most of which are the same as yours. The answers do not fall on your lap on a beautiful day of green dales and rainbows. Until one starts to look 'inside' the rainbow instead of looking at it, nothing will come.

When a child is born, he is completely free from pre-formed perceptions, having still not been affected by the "conditioning" through which the human mind lets itself gets influenced by as it moves on with time. Soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. A simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armour of the ego. Not until years later does a realization come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. Some of us, with sensitive seeking minds, "realize" this fallacy somewhere ahead in life, learning through events and experiences. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.

The more you will grow, the more you will realize that inherent in every Intention and Desire is the mechanics for its Fulfillment. Intention and Desire in the field of pure potentiality have infinite organizing power. And when we introduce an intention in the fertile ground of pure potentiality, we put this infinite organizing power to work for us. We can do so because we have got talents. And you knopw what? Everybody has a talent. What is rare is the courage to nurture it in solitude and to follow the talent to the dark places it leads to. Each of us comes into this world with a specific destiny -- we have something to fulfill, some message has to be delivered, some work has to be completed. No one is here accidentally -- we all are here meaningfully. There is a Purpose behind us all. The Whole intends to do something through us.

We tend to define our reality by the words that we use, both with the spoken word, as well as the words we never say. Yet reality can only be seen in the absence of thought and belief when it comes to understanding our own selves. The reality of the other person lies not in what he reveals but in what he cannot reveal. Therefore to understand man, we should listen not to what he says but rather to what he does not say.

When we look around us to see and understand, we actually try to understand what has been called Reality by our forefathers, one that flows along the stream of Time. Understanding this Reality helps us know how we have evolved. We learn and realize that evolving into more advanced forms increases the specificity of their attributes, and make them more different and independent of each other, despite cohabiting the same bracket that encloses the primitive, unevolved form. In effect these brackets contain anthropological singularities with fewer complexities. Studying these singularities helps us retrace the path along Time through prehistory, back to our origin.

We also believe that this evolution has been progressing faster and faster over time though nobody till now has figured out a strong Reason behind it. This is actually the most dominant perception amongst us. Greater possibilities of evolving into more varieties bring more and more people into its fold of belief -- that the pace of our evolution has an element of acceleration. The spectrum that is available for us to study across its height and depth is much more wider. That leaves us with more freedom to ponder upon, more choices, more perspectives, and thus more 'depth of knowledge' for us to acquire. I would like to dampen this 'reassuring or lucrative' perception that most people develop in a bid to completely understand origin of species, because man, by nature, wants to learn, to seek for answers that provide more insights into our 'origin'.

Studying History of Mankind, and trying to correlate and connect the dots in where History has tended to be vague, keeping in mind the parallel movements of anthropological and archaeological revelations give us this information - the 'effective degree' of evolution that has taken place over a given span of time, say 70,000 years back had taken a far more wider span of time to occur  amongst us, or rather when a lesser evolved species (which we can claim to be our "forefathers"), walked upon our planet say two million years ago. In a way, what it tells us is that the more primitive we are, the greater variability of perceptions we possess.

There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing -- man is not the voice of his mind. Man is what he hears from his surroundings. When his intention changes the way to understand things, the things that his intention wants to understand change too. This is the actualization of transformation. Of Change. 

There comes a time when the pain of continuing exceeds the pain of stopping. At that moment, a threshold is crossed. What seemed unthinkable becomes thinkable. Slowly, the realization emerges that the choice to continue what one has been doing is the choice to live in discomfort, and the choice to stop what he has been doing is the choice to breathe deeply and freely again. Once that realization has emerged, one can either honour it or ignore it, but he cannot forget it.

The Truth I have realized after consciously unlearning a few basic concepts of life is : What has become known can not become unknown again. You shall too, I am sure, seek out your Truth and realize it for life.

-- Baba

AUDACIOUS IN DEFEAT

The Indian National Congress is not willing to learn its lesson. Its representative declares on a National news channel that the BJP wanted a deeply polarized electoral process, if we go by the validity of the exit polls.

What does Mr.Sanjay Jha and his Indian National Congress mean? I'm a common Indian with everything common about me - my intelligence, my intellect, my ways, my means, my output to society. I'm not even a supporter of the BJP, but I thank the party for putting Modi up. I voted for Narendra Modi. Because I wanted a stable government, a strong leader and good governance.

In 2010, Manmohan Singh attributed part of his decision making to the compulsions of coalition politics. He was looking at the interest of the coalition between the Congress and the DMK, instead of the interests of the people of India. Was he re elected to power for that? The result was the 2G scam.

There was rampant corruption in the ranks and files of the government and the bureaucracy, including the Prime Minister's Office itself. There was the CWG scam, and the Devas-Isro scam, and the helicopter scam, and the Kargil for profit scam - the Adarsh scam, and Coalgate and Railgate and...phew!
The inflation tugged away at my pocket relentlessly because prices of edibles went up again and again.

Our dumb, mute Prime Minister conceded Balochistan to Pakistan at Sharmal Sheikh, we do not respond strongly when violations of ceasefire on our western border are breaking past records, and the Chinese army make audacious incursions into our territorries in Arunachal Pradesh.
Narendra Modi seemed strong to me, made the right noises, at least they sounded right to me, at the right time.

Have I participated in a communally polarized mandate with a communal mindset??
I do not believe in organized religion, and in the perception of a personalized god/God much to the chagrin, frustration and disgust of people related to me. My idea of an omnipresent supraconsciousness is different, it is my private domain and I do not impose that on anybody. I abhor fundamentalism, whether it be in Hinduism, Islam or Christianity. If I have slammed Islam fundamentalism and Muslim pacifists, I have slammed my own mother much to her sorrow and shock, when I found out that she did not TOUCH the statues of Hindu deities, a bambino, a picture of Guru Nanak, and a Budhha-in-lotus at our own home when she was having her periods. I shall continue to do so though my blood relatives are disgusted with my nonconformist ways whose list is pretty long. Have I voted for Narendra Modi because he will commit Muslim genocides? Is he mad? Or am I?

What right does the Indian National Congress have to belittle my choice? It hasn't learnt its lesson. The leader it was trying to project is completely out of touch with ground reality. He does not have the craft, the poise, the confidence to sit through a journalist's interview. How can he make strong decisions and rally behind them in the Parliament, forget getting them down to the executive level when they reach the people?

Is this how this party will react on the 16th of May, when it will have nowhere to run, hiding behind possible fallacies of exit polls? If so, god, - he god of religious fundamentalism, save the party.

This is just the voice of a very common man. A very angry voice.

ME, SHE AND MY FRIEND

Two years back in the midst of all the pre-, intra= and post - Puja  greetings and pleasantries, I reconnected, after a hiatus of 12 years, with a friend - a medico who was my colleague when I was working - my first "job in the private sector" (1994 : Kothari Medical Centre, Alipore, Kolkata). I was especially pleased to see that the son of a gun had posted all the way up from Queensland.


He was one of the most vicious animate objects to engage in any conversation with. An inborn armoury of the blackest humour that supplemented a tongue that turned increasingly caustic over the years, built for me, a repertoire of sharp one-liners, each new and fresh, that could jab and stun, more than an Ali or a Tyson.

Anyway ...

He had written in our regional language Bengali in his own inimitable way. The first sentence was not a statement. It was a question. It, if translated in the Queen's Language, crystallizes to : "ANI, HOW'S SHE?" (the rest of the words, mere reinforcements to the query don't need translation. And shouldn't, too. 

The first question is this! Yet I wasn't surprised or shocked at all.

There was a time when She was in both of our lives, simultaneously.. She, at that age, had captured our fancy, both of us. And Boy! Did she seduce us! She played second fiddle at times, and dominated at times. We just gave in to HER. Soon She 'Had' us.

She bedded us both, giving us our First 'Taste'.

She did it endlessly, almost like a Maniac, like a 'she-dog', with an Obsessive Passion -- which neither I nor my friend could override even once.

Both of us were frank about our privacy, talking about HER Promiscuity, and Jealousy or Masculine pride never intervened. In fact, we did empathise handsomely, while sharing our Amorous episodes. How She would get us 'Up and High' like never before, only to get us slumping and dropping dead, exhausted completely.

Her Passion simply overpowered us, and none of us had the masculinity to 'subjugate' her, to a slave, with whom we would have in our way, the way the Primordial Primal Primates -- our forefathers --- would have done eons back.

So after all these years, as my old friend asked 'how is SHE', I smiled wryly. I wondered how passionately deep she'd controlled us that he remembered her so as to ask about Her, ahead of all other questions which we both wanted to know, about how things have been since.

I remember a casino waiter asking : "Shaken or Stirred?" to which Daniel Craig muttered coldly, "Do I look like I care a damn?" no wonder....  I wrote back, " LIFE IS STILL A BITCH..."

** Note: the title of this note is the English translation of a Bengali movie. I did it myself, and have not checked about 'Copyright Issues'.

HAPPINESS

"Are you happy?" asked the little princess and the petals seemed to open up towards the sky, as if to touch the warmth of the morning sunshine. 

"Is that for me?" she asked inquiringly and threw her head back. Her gaze lazily swept across the blue sky, searching for a happy face somewhere which the morning blossoms seemed to greet coyly. It was a vast blue, as cloudless as it could be. She felt the emptiness once again, the sort which filled her up when sheI looked at the sky on autumn blue mornings, cloudless and silent.

It was when she looked at the petals once again that she felt a rush. She saw a face there. She didn't know it yet it made her strangely comfortable. Perhaps the silence of the face didn't make her run away, it made her feel safe.. And after a long time she heard the voice of the flowers once again. She was happy and felt peaceful. It was going to be a fine morning alright.

"Happiness is a state of mind which you can consciously choose to be in. We become too conscious of happiness at times, in an effort to deal with a confused, burdensome abstract of sorts, in the face of stark reality and its collaterals. The definition of happiness shouldn't change with time. It's not about what one's got, but about how and whom to share with what one's got. You might disagree - I will happily agree with that..".