The eclipse

On 21 st July 2009 we woke up to find the world blanked out. The birds in the trees seemed to keep still and the crickets went silent .Even the train hoot one heard at that time every day was missing from the morning’s silence. The darkness spread in our garden and to the compound wall and thence to the sky above our house. The solar eclipse was total and lasted for four minutes when light began to emerge from behind the monsoon clouds and covered the world once again .The solar eclipse could not be seen because of the overcast sky.

Awareness is all

In today’s pre-dawn I listened to the honk of the train that had come piercing the morning silence as always I do at such time .It was such an exquisite sound but one extra thing I felt was the layers of exquisite sounds that came as though they had come one on the other-the horn came on top of the rising crescendo of the clackety of the wheels as the train approached the city .The sensory impressions created were so exquisite that I looked for similar excitement in the other senses trying to remember parallels in the visual and olfactory experiences as well. I then thought about the sunlight entering my room directly as a shaft of light and the glorious mixture it creates with the reflected light that comes bouncing off the walls of the room.Another similar sensory impression is created by the fragrance of the jasmines in bloom coming on top of the moist fragrance of the morning mist on the grass.

Awareness is all.

Poetry at Kalady

We were called to the lake resort of Kumarakom for a three day retirement counselling programme recently by my bank.The lake resort was simply amazing.While returning we(self and spouse) visited Kalady ,the birthplace of Adi Sankaracharya .We saw the magnificent temple and were returning to our car when a most unexpected thing happened.We saw a man calling us from the courtyard . He offered us a meal we could not resist and it was truly delicious. Was it Sankaracharya himself who fed us on our hungry stomachs?

On visit to Sankaracharya’s birthplace,Kalady

He seemed to have called us over for lunch
In Kalady’s heat the stomach yearned for it
When we had gone past the river of green
Which had changed the course at his behest
To suit his mother in old age, her water pot.
The river with the crocodile of death in its belly
The crocodile which had set his foot free
On the promise of his forsaking the world.
There is this shadow all the while, in the river,
On the temple, in the tree of the snake-jasmine
The flower that adorned the God of destruction
The shadow that accompanied him everywhere
So he never forgot life’s transience and futility.

Sankaracharya was a great philosopher ,who belonged to the 8th Century A.D. He is the founder of the Advaita school of philosophy which says that the physical self and the spiritual self are not separated from each other but are one and the same. The legend says he had ,through his spiritual powers, brought the river Purna nearer to his house for the convenience of his mother .It is also believed that a crocodile dragged him by his foot into the river and his mother was forced to consent to his renouncing the world by the crocodile which would let him go only if she consented)