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.

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.

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)

We thought we understood it all-from the day we were born .There is an  unspoken sarcasm in the way the world is made and declares itself to you. If there is no sarcasm explicitly present then there is irony all-present in the scheme of things. As though somebody up there has decided to pull your legs. That was what we had been thinking.And we thought we were one up on life when we understood this and walked around proudly with the knowledge .Then one day we were proved wrong and shown that the real irony was in the way we were led to believe that we have understood it all.

Irony

There had got to be something
Beneath all this big movement
And umpteen noises in the vessels.
We thought deep-set irony was all-present
A smirk, a delicious wink, long strides
In green spaces towards empty buildings
As though it was all settled.
That was not. Even their irony lacked.
Absence did not matter. Nor being.
We smacked lips for nothing.

Kurt Vonnegut

“…his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, ”If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

This is what I keep telling my wife and son.When there is something going on nice,why not be conscious of it and verbalize the awareness .It is by being articulate about the good things of life happening to you that you experience the goodness of the thing.An obvious thing I see then is a plain simple reaction : what could be so good as to warrant appreciation ? Was it lots of riches or miracle solutions to life’s problems that have remained intractable all these years ? Miracles do not happen except the small little ones like everything is going on fine when something wrong is in the air or there is a gentle breeze which touches the skin unexpectedly or even a simple thing is the wondrous mix of different hues of filtered light in your drawing room on a summer afternoon.

Orcha was essentially a visual experience.The river and the rocks ,the trees on the riverside, men and women connected with the river scene and the vast emptiness of the cenotaphs -all provided a rich experience ideal for a visual representation.The camera did not cooperate for mechanical reasons and all I got was blurred shots which left me in a state of disappointment and despondency. I did get a few good shots which I treasured -like the old man in the river,the people on the bridge, the woman who sun -worshipped , archetypal representations like men and river , women and river, father-and-son etc.

Visit to Orcha : A visual exploration

River and tree look on morning town
And on the bridge and men and women
With loads of firewood from the forest
A bare-bodied man has sun on face.
Off the bridge a wizened old man
With saffron cloth drying on river rocks
Bends exquisitely with age and beauty.
A woman in red bathes on the river bed.
In the far-line is the bank , history’s spires
On the steps a woman pours water in river
From a steel pot in oblation, to the sun.
As the sun glistens on the shaken river
River beats rocks in soft steady rhythm.
Men stand on the river frozen in time
Joyful women hide on the river’s rim
Waiting to burst forth in celebration.
A holy man stands tall on the rocks
Drying a red loin cloth, his hair mat loose
A boy silhouette crouches near the man.
On the tall mound sits another holy man
Against the brilliant morning sun, waiting
To be captured on somebody’s digital lens.

Communists die unsung ,they say. Not entirely. Communists have comrades who sing for them when they die.Slow mournful dirges with a sprinkling of inspirational slogans.They carry red flags in white kurta pyjamas.They don’t cry but only sing rousing songs.A week ago when our communist relative died ,none of this happened because he was a decent and friendly communist .He had carried on his relentless struggle against the bourgeoisie over a series of hot cups of coffee and cigarettes.In his personal life his son was his Achille’s heel and even communists have their Achille’s heels .

Just then a certain communist saw red
And vanished from the scene promptly.
His ashes will now be spread in rivers
Just like India’s first Prime Minister’s
In whirring defense helicopters for fame.
The fame was of course the doting son’s-
It was his purple need from a hot brain
Fevered and full of fertile stories, stories
That made heroes in history-addled brains,
Stories that had sultry spies from enemies
Who indulged in highest skullduggery
And made hapless victims of patriotic Indians
Working closely with defense ministers.
When our father dies our country is with us
We go out briefly to receive condolences
On our cell phones in somber mood.

We have heard of communists dying unsung.Of course ,there is the infamous Pol Pot whose life had meant death to so many in order to make life for so many .There is confusion in Pol Pot’s existence and death .Who is supposed to live and who will die ? May be , it is in the numbers.Some sons of guns will die so that other sons of guns will live.The smaller number will die so that the bigger number will live. Confusing . When Pol Pot finally called it a life,he must have thought of this .We have no news of those who were supposed to live happily ever after ,now that all those people obstructing their happiness have died :

The skull pot

I sit here on the precipice
With my feet dangling
In the abyss of time
On the far-line I espy
A pile of stacked skulls
Of large circular eyes
With the mountain air
Hissing through them.
These skulls had thoughts,
When their holes were eyes,
That wished no brains in them.
What did the old man think,
When , lying on a string cot,
He saw the smile of death
Where the banyan met the sky.

I have been trying to hit the nail on the head -to arrive at a precise assessment of what life is like.This doesn’t seem to work somehow. Has Rilke done it -the mischievous grin I see in his literary face,so to speak,seems to suggest it. It looks like he has upstaged it somehow. He cannot have been far wrong.Of course ,would it really matter to him in his present state of unbeing ? Why would he want to be one up on life?

“The Future” by Rilke

Translated by A. Poulin

“Time’s excuse to frighten us ” – an image reminiscent of John Donne or Andrew Marvell. But the next image“Too vast a project” sounds more ‘modern’ ,conveying a conscious plan to mould future activities to the achievement of a pre-decided objective.The next image draws from the sensory experience of taste-”too large a morsel for the heart’s mouth”-a very graphic image.

But the most fascinating image is “it suffices you to deepen the absence that we are” .Just think about it : as future grows ,the past deepens and with it our absence.

At three in today morning ,when I could no longer sleep I concentrated on the persistent cries of the cricket which pierced the nightly silence as though it was the only sound that made up the world.The invisible creature made such a ruckus far disproportionate to its physical proportions that I began to think that the cricket was blowing itself up in the cosmic scheme of things so as to really matter and and wrest a place on par with my own place in the scheme. The creature somehow seemed to matter and stood eyeball to eyeball to me.We looked at each other recognizing each other’s presence.