From the Sublime to the Ridiculous

Composed, consciously shutting out the latent snobbery of my non-believer's heart, I step into the grand ancient interiors of the Meenakshi temple.

Two rock doves flutter above me to land on the monolithic buttress supporting the entrance. A tiny salamander slithers across the path. People dressed in silk, forehead smeared with ash and sandalwood paste, eyes filled with jasmine scent and fervor file past. I touch the stone-carved pillars, dating back to the 6th century CE, wondering if I were to reach the closest star at this very moment, would I really be watching dinosaurs rollicking around the earth? Their damp coolness feels soothing against the sun-soaked granite floors where we walk bare-footed on this hot summer day. 

A cat basks in  the snug embrace of one of the sculpted gods. Its proximity to such divine company hasn't spurred it to lose touch with its wilder instincts for in-house adventure. My eyes follow its maverick movements as it sidles up and down around the pillars, finally finding its way towards a hidden window and quietly disappearing therein. No doubt, in search of something new...or maybe merely seeking some privacy away from the bemused expressions of the devout.

Many temple guides are eager to woo us and show us around. They speak several languages and understand different psyches. Their locution and interpretation varies depending on whether the individual is local or a foreigner. But, it's getting harder and harder for us to walk on the parched grounds. We do not have the same stamina as these thousands of devotees who have thronged here from various parts of India. 

Mere observers, our little group of four is full of oohs and aahs and wows, captivated by the sheer magnanimity of such a project taken some 1700 years ago. The fervent beauty and the flowing rhythms of sculptures draw us into the very soul of rapturous harmonies. The painted murals too are immersed in the perpetual light of earthly colors. Marching down aisles after aisles, under the beatific gaze of thousands of gods, goddesses, twelve-hooded serpents, ferocious demons with dragon faces, elephants, bulls and The Great Rattus itself, a sense of awe gives way to a sudden surge of catharsis.  'Free me from myself so I can aspire to be Thee: Joyous, calm, filled with light in all thy myriad manfestations', I pray.

Back on streets outside the temple, it is business as usual. Vendors from rows after rows of small shops call out irresistible deals to attract customers. An out-of-place showroom seems to be truly cashing in on the spirit of the place with the following caption on its storefront sign: "Your Search For the Incredible Ends Here..". The store is dedicated to American brands like Levi Strauss, Ralph Lauren, and Route 66.

I want to buy something local for my mom as a souvenir from this holy place. The sun is relentless and the dry heat is beginning to rise in swirls. The cool dark interiors of small shops seem inviting. I walk into a non-descript hand-woven silk emporium looking for a saree. Within minutes my aspiration to emulate the great gods has ludicrously rolled off my being. I am human again as I dive into some petty haggling with the shopkeeper -- the adrenaline rush coursing through my bloodstream is wickedly palpable.

Our Grandma's Trunk

An object gets reduced to junk when it outlives its usefulness. Today, on Earth Day, I rescued our grandmother's trunk from such a dire fate by reclaiming it from  the mafiosic violence of an overloaded and chaotic storeroom. And, by the patient process of sandpapering the rusted exterior, and applying a new coat of paint, this 60 year old 2'x1'x0.75' hunk of metal was finally accorded a new lease of life. I chose to depict a glamorous kingfisher on the lid because of the bird's pre-dawn waking habit, a routine which our grandmother too observed rigorously until the very end.

This trunk accompanied our grandma wherever she went, be it to visit one of her seven sisters, or her own grown kids. In the case of the latter, it was mainly to help them manage a newborn baby and organize the many festivities which revolve around a birth. In fact, any occasion which demanded her diligent presence, she was there. One would hardly notice her as she moved around unobtrusively like a slow, stealthy shadow, attending to a thousand and one chores.

The trunk contained all she had: a few white cotton sarees, neatly folded, some blouses, a woolen shawl for winter, and a paltry sum of money which she would have liked to invest in the stock market. Black and quite ordinary, it was a heavy little thing and it seemed almost laughable that its content should have been so lean and simple. Just the way she was.

Beyond a smile and a quick, 'Namaste Maaji', I don't think we ever indulged in any kind of  significant conversation. I can conjure up a couple of reasons which might have given way to such reticence. Firstly, I didn't understand the dialect she spoke, and secondly speech was not her forte. 

Overwrought and bent at ninety degrees, she moved around the house straightening things up, or mending a torn dress, fixing a button, hemming a skirt...folding the laundry in a way that it wouldn't need ironing...she always found something to keep herself busy. In an era where televisions did not boom across one's living room and the radio was a means to set the time on one's watch and listen to the news on AIR (All India Radio), we never found her marooned on the island of boredom, wondering what to do with all those hours of a day. She had a bag full of unshelled watermelon and cantaloupe seeds which she had collected, cleaned and sun-dried over the long summer. If nothing else, she would sit down with a pair of tweezers, gently squeezing on the seeds, popping them open, extracting the kernel inside and storing it in bottles, to be later roasted with salt, or to be used as garnish for festival sweets.

In 1930s, in the big haveli built by our grandparents, where our father and his three siblings were born and brought up, our grandmother's day began with grinding the daily quota of wheat flour in a quern-stone and weaving cloth on a spinning wheel, two disciplines which she, along with several women of her generation, had adopted, overtly as an expression of self-reliance, and covertly as a way to revolt against the British colonialism. And, this was only the wee beginning of a long day, which, for her, usually kicked off at 4 in the morning. Waking up early meant being able to sweep the house, mop the central courtyard, start the fire in the kitchen and dive into her usual set of daily tasks before the rest of the household slowly yawned and stretched itself awake from its nocturnal rêverie. 

Relentless in her pursuit of perfection, she went through the day tirelessly, yet never did she thrust any expectations on anybody. She was the epitome of a Karmayogi. Karmayoga is one of the four classical spiritual paths in Hinduism, based on the 'yoga of action/work'. To a Karmayogi, work is a form of prayer. 

Eyes sunken looking into an ever-changing timelessness, skin dark brown and wrinkled like a wise old tree, she gracefully defied the seventh stage of man as described by William Shakespeare:

"Last scene of all

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere        oblivion;

Sans eyes, sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything"

For until she breathed her last, not only did she have all her senses together, but much much more. On this Earth Day I remember her as someone who treaded so softly upon the ground that we didn't hear her pass, nor when she passed away in her sleep...yet a small trunkful of quiet memories remain in a remote corner of the mind, lingering. 

My Journey into an Epic

The Reader's Digest's A - Z dictionary with rich red binding was our prized possession. Not only it looked royal and terribly important adorning our father's beautiful rosewood study table, but for us kids, it was a gratifying reminder that English held a prestigious status in our home. This was oddly ironic since in those days, besides our father none of us was conversant in the lingua franca. 

Sharing the space with this treasure was a rather innocuous looking book, light orange, equally thick and commanding, called 'Savitri' by the great Indian philosopher and poet Sri Aurobindo. For someone like myself, mortally afraid of the English language, and convinced of its utter incongruity, the fact that our father could read and understand this magna opus, made him superhuman in the eyes of my ignorant eight-year-old self. How could anyone read, let alone understand a book of such proportion, was beyond the orbit of my comprehension. Merely lifting it equated to a workout. Yet, everytime I was asked to fetch it, my heart swelled up with pride. To be entrusted with such a hallowed and herculean task, was no mean achievement.

I still remember the deep sonorous voice of our father reading the epic poem aloud, filling the house with its long, unending verses, pausing so often to let them roll gently and settle into the pores of our consciousness. According to him, its mantric value sufficed to bring the Great Change. I would just sit there, listening, not understanding a word; my face aglow with daughterly devotion.

Little did I know that in later years, this is what I would inherit from my father: his love of Savitri. As we traveled around the world, Savitri stayed my constant companion and guiding star. I referred to it whenever I felt lost and whenever I found myself in the din of my own confusion.
Written in iambic pentameter, and consisting of 24,000 lines, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, based on the legend from the Mahabharata is a symbol of the spiritual journey and transcendence of the human soul.

As an amateur reader of the epic, and a zealous summoner of the Muse, I recently invented an exercise in which while keeping my eyes shut, I randomly open  up a page of Savitri and let my index finger lead me to a word. Whichever word it is, I endeavor to pen down a free-verse with an 'automatic writing' kind of approach. 

1.

Word: Smiting

smiting desires
into minute bits,
stone-carved and
tumultuous,
she walked on
into the world
making an offering
of every step. she
became a shadow
of all her dreams

2.

Word : labours

life labours on
seeking meaning
in the daily chore
of mere existence;
dust settles, weighing
upon the ticking of 
the clock...slowly
suffocating its
sound, drowning its
meaningless zeal,
arresting the cadaverous
mechanicalness of its
hands -- returning life 
to its foetal silences

3.

Word: Impassive

crossing man's troubled
world with heaven's dreams
the impassive sky weaves
itself into Life's nomadic light

4.

Word: questionable

questionable all that was
felt with piercing intensity,
questionable the elation of 
a slow discovery; the gnarled 
misery of unfulfilled
yearnings sweeping across
the being with typhoonic
might and hurtling me 
beyond the vistas of my 
'self'...questionable everything
and yet it flung my soul out
of its ascetic heights
to be trampled upon by
careless feet of  love

5.

Word: turbulent

barred now by a wall of dull logic
the great wave that had inundated
my being with turbulent whirls of
strange and luciferen longings 

6.

Word: pause

while the moment flies, a
dim uncertain pause
latches on to the
leaf that falls and to the shadow
climbing  stealthily up 
towards the light

7.

Word: exultant

serene and exultant
in the inkling of
a distant love
intimate like the
sweet sound of 
koïl on this sweltering
summer day: wrenchingly 
beautiful, and seductively
treacherous...

8.

Word: anguish

all he sees is
anguish and defeat
hanging like Damocles' 
sword above his beautiful
young head; the faint call of
a kite skying up into the
unfathomable heights slips
his sight, as do the 
unwrinkling of the tender
leaves when the morning
sun scatters over them its
column of amber light...
the gentle twirling of spring 
air brushes his cheek as
the butterfly flies past

ideas and their causes sets
his mind abuzz, and he
wakes up wondering why

9. 

Word: smouldering

slow and languorous,  yet
another dawn lingers over
smouldering stones and rocks,
clambers over muted hills, and
skims across brackish oceans
to kiss the world awake and 
fill it with the flutter of
expectation and delight 

10.

flaming mouth

a flaming mouth
sweeping up celestial
verses from the etheric
gold of a hesitant 
dawn, lolling them 
around its cavernous
deep and spurting
them out into the
sputtering fire
of a raging pyre

11.

Word: ungrasped

it is the unseen our

eyes search; the unheard

our ears strive in vain to

listen, and the ungrasped

that the soul seeks 

in its aeonic meanderings

12.

Word: memory

in the haze

of memory

you and i

were made eternal;

our unspoken-ness

finding words

in the ellipsis of

Orion's belt

A terrace, and a takeoff...

 My eager feet scampered up the steps and onto the terrace...ears perked up at the lazy call of a jungle crow. Cloaked in humidity, it sounded muffled, yet somehow louder. A cluster of cumulus clouds was stilled into a bolted forward position, feigning the promise of coolness to the hot start of the day. My eyes took in the vast expanse of horizon, limned with coconut and palm trees. Everything was breathing: a nurtured, deliberate indolence kept Nature alive. 

Since an unwarranted cacophony of birds accompany the brahminy kites, this mid morning quietness should have translated into their absence. But no. There they were, beyond the lengthening and shutting off of shadows. The two of them, slowly circling around each other, in and out of the squinty summer haze. I watched them... Every widening circle brought them closer to the little shard of sky above my territory. I waved, overcome by a surge of spontaneous camaraderie. All of a sudden, the kite which was trailing behind until now, took the lead. And as the distance between the two narrowed, the tip of their wings touched. A blinding spark cleaved the air. High and heraldic, detached from their immediate surrounding, they were the world...the universe. Nothing else existed. It was the most sublime aerial dance, so wholly in sync with the blazing symphony of inner scapes.

How many like myself out there were privy to this ecstatic moment, I wondered. Brimming with gratitude, certain in the knowledge that I was amongst the few allowed to witness this mystical bonding between two beings, not just because of some supreme synchronicity, but because they had wished me to be there. I was Fire, one who hosts...and I was also  the Raven, who had dared to  steal the Fire from the immortals. Yet at that moment, more than anything, I yearned to be Icarus: thirsting for attainable light, wanting to graft wings on my mortal crawl... And maybe touch the stars.

The Hero the World Needs?

 Spanning three seasons, translating into 51 episodes and lasting for four years, from 2015 - 2018, Servant of the People, a political satire not only kicked Volodymyr Zelenskyy's career as a comedian/actor up a notch or two, but also provided the basis for his campaign manifesto a year later when he decided to contest the election for the office of the President of Ukraine. As one of its producers and the main protagonist, Zelenskyy, through this popular show, had openly ridiculed the dysfunctional remnants of Soviet era propagandist machinary, promising  instead a simpler, efficient, and corruption-free system.

The plot of the show, Servant of the People revolved around a young high-school teacher whose spontaneous outburst against oligarchy, fossilized social and political structures and rampant red tapism, is caught on a phone camera and released on youtube. This candid paroxysm becomes an instant hit, throwing the young professor into national arena and eventually to Hrushevsky Street, Kyiv, as the youngest President of Ukraine. Through this charming series, by formulating and mouthing the struggles as well as aspirations of the common man, Zelenskyy had already succeeded in amassing a loyal audience. 

On March 31, 2018, he started his own  political party naming it Servants of the People. While the series' hopeful message helped serve as the party's rescript of election promises, Zelenskyy's long association with showbiz also came in handy, aiding him to build an intimate rapport with his target-audience and command their attention.

The show, either consciously or inadvertently, became a precursor to reality, as Zelenskyy went on to win the elections with an overwhelming majority in 2019. His charisma and youthfulness, like that of Barack Obama, played in his favor in a world which so far had been largely dominated by ex-stalwarts of the Soviet communist era.

Interestingly, after his explosive foray into politics which found him at centre-stage, he soon began to follow the authoritarian footsteps of his predecessors. The candidate who had won by a 70 per cent majority, had sunk to low of 25 per cent in a popularity poll in 2021.

The recent Russia-Ukraine war however, has provided the President an opportunity not only to return to his legendary showmanship, but also steal the limelight at global level. In a world plagued by disillusionment and long suffering from the lacuna of visionary leadership, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has become a household name. Here is a man at last: a man of courage and principles, refusing to relinquish his  nation's sovereignty to the brutish force of its tyrant superpower neighbor.

At 44, it makes him 35 years younger than his American counterpart. Moreover, his rugged appeal may put him at an advantage over other politicians, contributing further to the new Zelenskyy cult. Add to his stardom looks the raw material for fanning fantasies and winning him admirers the world over. Want cuddly Zelenskyy? Look up his voiceover for the Paddington Bear film. Patriotic Zelenskyy? Listen to his defiant wartime speeches. Hip-shaking Zelenskyy? Check out his swanky moves on the Ukrainian version of Dancing with the Stars. And oh, if you have the hots for him, there’s even a bare-chested Zelenskyy getting the vaccine. 

He may not be your Gandhi, Mandela, Sadat or Kennedy, but he sure is a showman with a well-oiled PR machine behind him. His famous "I need ammunition, not a ride" has become one of the most quotable quotes of the month. Garment industry can't churn out enough Zelenskyy t-shirts to cope with the rising sale. And despite much resistance on its part, Netflix is forced to bring back Servant of the People, by popular demand from its consumer base in U.S.- with English subtitles, of course.

Everyday one is now confronted with heartbreaking live footage of a country at war; shelled buildings, supermarkets sporting empty shelves, frightened families hiding in the basement, more than 2 million people rendered refugees, now scrambling to cross over to neighbouring countries. But the 'show' must go on. 

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look at my Works ye Mighty, and despair"

 

A War, a Movie and a Muskrat

My head hurt. The air, heavy with incongruity, was wired with tensions and fears, hopes and prayers. Television channels alternated between frenzied coverage of the ongoing war in our not so distant neighborhood and the blaze of communal antagonism and revenge sweeping  the homefront. 

I watched the birds diving and soaring against the infinite canvas of fizzy clouds, abundant in their expression of unsuppressed freedom. A jersey cow, visibly pregnant  chose my meagre classic syngonium plant peeking out of the railing, to feast upon over the plethora of wild and indigenous flora strewn across her wayward path. The sun set, gloriously round and primeval.

A Dream: I am drowned  now in a pall of muddled subconscious world, in which terror-stricken by some ongoing war, we are coerced into living underwater. Living is an overstatement; surviving should have been the word. "Just like a muskrat", I think to myself. Wind in the Willows comes to mind, and scoots out immediately, chased by the loud music bounding off from the temple a kilometer away. Traveling down the night-infested road, it has managed to incite my eardrums to vibrate. It seems so close, I can almost touch it, gauge its musty thickness. 

As my conscious mind takes the front seat, I realise it is the muezzin summoning the faithful to the adhan from a mosque situated 3 kms from where I am...who at this unholy hour could be tempted into seeking salvation?

Again, whirls of sleep take over. World goes on. The wars, the parliaments, The Kashmir File, sloganeering...I keep sinking and yet something inside me attempts to stay afloat, pretending to be a muskrat.

The War Machine

As a regular blogger, I feel weighed down by a moral obligation to write something about the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine...The images of surgical strikes, of an enormous tanker mowing down a car, of hungry students in bunkers, of backpackers hoping to cross over to the neighbouring countries should have made me indignant of the superpower's browbeating approach. It should have been an inner compulsion, and a natural revulsion against such a tyrannical act of this magnitude which should have prompted me to pen something incisive. But I have been numbed over the years by the plethora of causeless wars fought mainly for personal gains of some civilized nations and mega multinationals. Skeptical of the unwarranted haste with which U.S. invaded Iraq, brutally ending the lives of more than a million civilians, and of the war in Afghanistan which raged over four decades, the Vietnam fiasco and its meaninglessness, Bosnia tragedy and the Syrian seize, a never ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and an ongoing civil unrest in Yemen, I  have reached the conclusion that  wars are increasingly being used as booster shots for world economy. It is an effective means to mobilize an immense machinery being manipulated by several invisible forces across the globe. Weapon deals get struck in billions. Defense contractors too bag their fair share of business, and so do the intelligence and surveillance divisions of several tech companies. And certainly it's a field day for oil and gas corporations as well.  Stock markets turn bullish, and all's well with the world. People go on with their lives, trying to cope with rising inflation, because of a war they were dragged into. Wikipedia and history books get upgraded.  

While in its present form, the shape of the current war is being determined through confusing statistics, only future will reveal the real story. Right now, what we have is live coverage of explosions, of people fleeing to the borders, some scrambling to leave Ukraine, some returning to partake in the war, empty shelves in the supermarket and traffic jams, as well as plenty of forged news and virtual war footage directly picked from popular video games circulating the whatsapp circles, accompanied  by frenzied commentary by self-proclaimed anchors. In India, PM Modi is being portrayed not only as the ultimate saviour of 20000 some students stuck in Ukraine, but also as an epitome of wisdom to guide the world out of this unparalleled crisis. Here are some headlines from local media:

"Both Russia and Ukraine request PM Modi to intervene"

"On PM Modi's request to give a safe passage to Indian students stuck in Ukraine, Russia orders ceasefire"

"PM Modi World's only hope to charter a peace treaty between the warring nations"...

Not surprisingly, for the ruling party in India the war might turn into yet another opportunity to gain political mileage. Period. 

Yet, all things considered, one can't overlook the fact that it is the first time since World War 1 that a country has invaded another, not feigning any ideological ground, but simply to deter western forces from entering their buffer zone at the pretext of Liberty and Freedom for all.