Wayside Tea Seller, Crows and the Lessons on Unconditional Love

(Wayside tea seller - image for representational purpose only)

From a walk I come to this wayside tea stall. The stove is already lit and a kettle hisses on it. A husband and wife, unbeaten by the hardships of life, enthusiastically do their chores. I observe the paraphernalia of their business; a few aluminium vessels, tea making devices, a small wooden cupboard and a little cash box. A bench made out of several pieces of abandoned wood is kept by the side of the trolley on which these utensils are kept. It is has a canopy over it. Though the concept is of moving it to their living place once the day comes to an end, most of such trolley-based stalls are more or less permanent on the pavements of any city in India. They are moved only when the policemen ask their owners to do so. Cities, despite their harshness towards the economically deprived, have developed some sort of kindness to accommodate the poor sections. Perhaps, policemen take their weekly bribe from them, some pittance or a few rounds of free tea, a free shave, a free meal and a bunch of free fruits when money becomes too dear to be transacted. The city is on its wheels, always rolling, hardly resting. But these wheeled stalls on the pavement never moves; they witness the movement out there on the roads. Life passes by, in varying colours and paces. But these wayside survivors remain there, without changing the course of their lives much though they wish it to change proportionately with the changes happening before them. Then they slowly find happiness in their existence. That’s why unlike the rich and obscene, powerful and health conscious on the joggers’ park, these people do not talk much about money. This couple who runs this tea stall does not talk about money. My Bengali is very poor still I could gather their conversation and make sense out of it. They talk about computer education; they are talking about their son’s education.

Sitting on the wooden bench I look at the road with all intention to overhear the conversation of this couple. But they stop talking. I ask for a cup of tea. Surprisingly, nobody has come to the stall to have a cup of tea so far. Am I too early or too late, I ask myself. But the lady, who looks like the thinner version of a Laxma Goud character with a rustic sense of charm about carrying herself, takes an small earthen tumbler, which is called a ‘kullad’ in India and pours hot tea from the kettle. The smallness of the tumbler makes you to give and take it with some kind of a body language (perhaps, added by the hotness of the liquid which has been poured into it right then) that resembles reverence. I understand it as reverence only. You are filled with some sort of strange gratitude to anyone who gives you a cup of tea like this. I realise that in your hotel room, or in the restaurant or an upmarket coffee stall, you do not receive a cup of coffee or tea like that. You show your arrogance; you are paying a lot of money for showing off your self-importance. You can be absent minded when you open the packet of brown sugar and transfer its content to the shiny porcelain cup in front of you with a smile etched with cream by the unsmiling boy at the counter. You can look at your lap top screen and jab away digits and letters into it. You can read a magazine or newspaper. Or even you can have huge decisions in your life over a cup of coffee, with no reverence towards it. But in wayside stalls your body turns into an expression of gratitude. I realize it with a smile. I sit firmly on that wooden bench, which is a collage of refuses.

Silently I sip at the kullad. The feeling is intense. First, the dryness of baked clay touches your lips. Your lips are already dry. You feel earth, provided if you have ever felt earth in that fashion. If you have memories, you go into reveries where you see a lump of clay on a wheel, turning into a small cup, fingers of an unknown man, child or woman picking it up from the wheel while it is still circling, with trained fingers. They are coarse but still look at the dexterity with which they pick up the supple clay. He keeps it on his side. Someone picks it up with a lot of care and beat the bottom of it with a paddle. Someone else comes and takes it to the sunlight where thousands of such clay cups are drying. Then faceless people come, they pick the dried ones and stack it up elsewhere. When a huge number is ready in this fashion, a few people carry them to rustic kilns where they fire it. When the fire embraces the earth, water content in it goes out as vapours. From their earthy brown and grey, they turn into fiery red. Later the fire is killed. The cups are taken out. From the potters’ basti, they travel by different modes, carried off carefully and reverently by unknown people to various parts of the country, where unknown people like me sit at the way side and kiss them with reverence. Hot tea, then touches your lips. You could hear a silent hissing at the edges of the cup and at your lips. It gives a jolt in your brain. The tea does not taste like the teas that you have already tasted in your life. It is different because the tea maker is different. You are drinking a part of the tea maker’s life. The tea has his or her story in it. It is hot and it is different.

The man at the stall opens a fresh packet of bread with no brand name etched on the cover. He rips off the polythene cover, takes a plate crumbles the bread into more or less identical pieces and adds some curry to it from another vessel and mixes it with his fingers as he talks to his wife in a tone which oscillates between wailing and hope. I think about him eating the mix of bread and curry as his breakfast. But he walks past me and goes to the iron railings that part the pavement from the road. All the railings, road dividers, public walls and all possible surfaces that are owned by the public sector undertakings are painted in a faint blue and white. Kolkata is slowly turning into a city of blue and white stripes. Like the colour coded cities all over the world, Kolkata slowly assumes the colour of blue and white. You think about it. What could be the reason for such a government decision? In South I have seen most of the temple cities have brown/red/saffron and white stripes all over the places. That connotes the presence of religious establishments there. It is a great feel to see a temple pond reflecting the red and white stripes on the walls around it with the shiny gopurams inhabited by innumerable images of gods and goddesses. This reflection is the inverted sight of the world around. It puts the world in perspective; part real and part illusion. But in Kolkata you don’t see such reflected images of the world. The more I think about the logic of blue and white stripes the more I come to think of the white saree and the blue border of it worn by late Mother Theresa and her flock of sisters. Mother Theresa had adopted this city and alleviated many from their destitution. She wore white saree with blue borders. But my friend tells me another story. West Bengal whose capital is Kolkata is ruled by Trinamool Congress led by Mamta Banerjee, a strong leader who came up from the roots but turned into a corrupt autocrat. She too wears cotton sarees, to emphasis her humble origins. But the information given to me is a bit shocking. Someone from the ruling party runs a paint company and all the paint for turning the city into blue and white stripes come from his company. When the man goes to the railings with the plate of crumbled bread in hands, I think about the man who runs a paint company.

The tea stall man puts the bread crumbles there at the pavement and walks back to the stall. I ask for one more cup of tea and the woman pours it into the same kullad that I hold before her with some sort of unintentional reverence. I come back to the bench, rather a local constructivist collage (I cannot help mentioning it) and once again sip at the cup. This time memories do not flow. I have come to terms with the memories. But I watch the theatre of life unfolding before me. Tens of crows come down from the nearby trees. They have been sitting there all the time, which I have not noticed before. I had seen them, while walking at the lakeside, right in the middle of the lake, on a leafless tree with each branch filled up with crows as if they were black flames from a surreal lamp in the shape of a tree. These crows clean the place within a few minutes. They do not fight each other. They wait for their turn. These crows look healthy and they all have shiny black feathers. They do not make too many sounds. After having their breakfast they fly away. What surprises me is the attitude of both the crows and the man. They do not go to the man to say thanks. The man does not even look at the crows once, expecting some kind of gratitude. Perhaps, it is daily ritual. They are already bonded in an invisible thread of selfless love; unconditional love.

Love is a problematic word. I consider it as a linguistic problem. As there are not too many words to express the human bonding filled with kindness, care and gratitude, we all use the word love. From parental love to the love talk of spiritual gurus, from lovers bonding to city planners’ caring for the city, for anything and everything we have only this insufficient word, love. But it has become a powerful word of its own merits and rights. It is perhaps one word that has not lost its charm after all these ages of overuse and misuse. The adjective ‘unconditional’ makes it further problematic. Most of the people develop relationships with the others on conditions. When people get married they take vows of marriage; these vows are conditions. When attend spiritual sessions, we follow certain conditions. When we love our pets we expect certain returns from them; another set of conditions. We are full of conditions. We do something for the world because we expect certain things in return; name or fame or fortune. If we are not getting it, we leave it there. We carry conditions and norms along with us. The most ironic thing is that the more we talk about love the more we think about conditions and returns. People say that their love for god is unconditional. If it is unconditional why people carry offerings to the god and ask for so many things. It is not unconditional love. It is bribing and asking for favours. People say that god loves everyone unconditionally. As we do not know whether god is out there or not, we cannot believe in his/her unconditional love either. There are interesting stories about the unconditional love. For example, a man went to god and complained that when he was in his happy days, he could see two pairs of foot prints wherever he went; of his and the gods. But when he was lonely, tired and was in trouble, he could not see two pairs. Whatever he saw was one pair of foot prints. God smiled and told him; Look, in those days I was carrying you on my shoulders. It is good to listen to stories. But this footprint story is all about making you feel good.

Unconditional love exists in rare areas of human relationship. Whether you accept it or not, the biggest and strongest form of unconditional love exists in self love. You cannot love anybody else unconditionally than yourself. The more you love your own self unconditionally the more you could love other unconditionally. How can you put conditions on your own self? How can you go to a gym and tell your right hand secretly that ‘look man, I am going to give you some extra pushes today because you are more useful than the left one.’ We do not do it. The supreme kind of unconditional love is there in self love. I am not talking about selfishness. Selfishness is conditional. You love yourself and use others and relationships for your means and ends; that is selfishness. Self love is all about taking care of yourself without expecting anything in return. How can you punish yourself because you are angry with your face or stomach? If people are doing it, they are all the victims of perverted thinking not only on an individual level but also on a collective and societal level. If you love yourself unconditionally and your being is so aware of that then you could love others also unconditionally. That’s why sports people who makes the greatest physical efforts to make themselves fit and competitive (not with life but with other sports people within the given competitive fields) generally do not hurt others. They know the pain that they have taken to perfect themselves. How can they ruin others? If someone does it, then they do not love themselves. They are driven by the passions of revenge and hatred. You cannot destroy anybody if you love yourself. Hatred comes from self hating. If you love yourself unconditionally, you will love everyone unconditionally. If you are not loving anything and anybody unconditionally, the inference is simple; you are not loving you unconditionally.

The only relationship in which people behave and love unconditionally is parental love. But let me tell you, this too is a false belief. Children are brought in this world by parents. So they take it up as their duty to love them unconditionally. But this unconditional love happens only within a given context. When things are good or threatening, parents love their children unconditionally. When parents themselves are troubled, they just do not love their children unconditionally. They, then deliver their duties. Think about parents who beat up their children ruthlessly. Why do they do that? Is it because of unconditional love? I do not think so. It comes from self hate. We give education to children thinking that they would bring us the returns. If we are just educating them to be full blown individuals we will not think about their future. We will think about their present and will be absolutely happy about it. But most of us think about the future of the children. When we do it, we are just investing in their as well as our future. They will have a secured life, which will automatically give us a secured and safe happy life in future. And we call it unconditional love. But fortunately, we do a lot of things towards unconditional love when it comes to our behaviour towards our children. We feed them before we feed ourselves. We try to give them the best clothes. We try to keep them happy. We try to do whatever they ask us to do. But remember, whenever we oblige our kids, we are actually showing love towards ourselves. When we pamper our kids we pamper the kids in us. We love ourselves so much and in our love for our children that love gets expressed.

I can tell you for sure that unconditional love stems only from self love. The more you love yourself the more you could love others. The more you care for yourself the more you care for others. The more you avoid rules and regulations for yourself the more you bring down the barricades that you have set up for others. Self loving is a way to deliverance and freedom. I am not talking about deliverance to moksha and such romantic things. I am talking deliverance in terms of happiness. Freedom brings you happiness and freedom comes when you love yourself unconditionally and love others unconditionally. Otherwise you will remain as a bonded slave to your selfishness and hatred. However we qualify our love for nature or kids or ideology or anything, if we are looking for returns it is conditional; it is not unconditional. The man who spreads out bread crumbs before the crows shows unconditional love for them. And for whatever reasons he does it, it comes from the love he has for himself. He knows hunger so he knows the hunger of the crows. He knows what quenches his thirst and hunger so he gives the same to the crows. Unconditional love happens when you are free. A way side tea seller is a better guide than a guru who misguides you for profit.

Praying and Meditation are Waste of Time

(If yoga and meditation could bring god then you may practice something like this too)

Do we know anything that we do not know? Do we realize something that is not already in us? Does this concept called ‘search’ reveal something other than already you have in you? How can you search for a pen, which you have misplaced in your study room, if you have never possessed that pen? What is this fuss all about searching for the unknown or god? If it is unknown then it remains unknown. How do you realize the unknown when it manifests as known if you do not have any idea about this unknown? You are a searcher. You have been searching for Shiva. You go to Mount Kailash, you go to Gangotri, Mansarovar, Rudraprayag and many places where you believe Shiva resides. But you look for a Shiva who looks like the one that you have seen either in calendars or temple idols, books or television serials. Shiva comes to you perhaps in the form of a tea stall boy. But you do not recognize him because you don’t have a Shiva in you in the form of a tea stall boy. That is why the wisest of the wise, Yudhishtira could not recognize Shiva when he came in the form of a Chandala before him. Even Yudhistira was expecting Shiva to be like the one in a calendar of his times. Simple thing, you don’t realize or recognize or learn or understand anything or anybody, if that is not already in you. I am not telling anything new because there is nothing new in this world. What I am telling you is what is already in me. I may be seeing in perspective because something might have helped me to see it in perspective. Interestingly, even that something is known to me.

Let me take a simple example. While going for a morning walk in a South Kolkata park, I happened to see a piece of poster that was stuck on a round pillar. From the place where I was currently standing or walking I could see only a shiny black patch and a faint pink that reminded me of the arm of a woman. But within the fraction of a second I recognized that it is the poster of the recently released movie, Dhoom 3. Why? I did not see Amir Khan, Katrina Kaif, Abhishek Bacchan or Uday Chopra in that piece of poster because it was not visible to me from where I was approaching. What I saw was simply a shiny black patch and something resembled the arm of a woman. The immediate recognition of it as a Dhoom 3 poster comes from my previous knowledge about it. I have seen this poster thousand times during last one or two months. I have been visually assaulted by the presence of these four figures with their comically burning pieces of body and clothing. This is knowledge is already in me. I was not searching for a poster in that street. But that piece of shiny black patch made me aware that it was a poster that I already knew. Suppose, if I did not know anything about Dhoom 3, what could I have noticed in that? Could I have even noticed that? Out of the many pieces of posters stuck on the pillar why only my eyes caught the sight of Dhoom 3? The answer is simple. I knew about it. The piece of poster was just a clue to make my own conclusions. We always read about Vivekananda becoming enlightened by the touch of Shri Ramakrishna’s thumb. This enlightenment of Vivekananda is all about the realization of all what he had already known. When he was working towards it, he did not know he had it in him. Ramakrishna’s touch was a clue, a shocking clue. Same is the case of Buddha or Jesus, or Jiddu Krishnamurty or U.G.Krishnamurty. Even this is the case of Ramana Maharshi. They all understood what they already knew.

Michael Angelo, the Renaissance artist, once said that he does not sculpt anything. He chipped away all the unwanted particles from a bloke of marble so that the embedded sculpture is revealed. As a gifted artist, Michael Angelo knew and even saw the sculpture in a marble bloke. He just chipped away the things that did not belong to the sculptural form. This is the case with anybody; artists or scientists or common man. We hear a lot of voices and noises. But we don’t understand the music in it. A musician understands it because that music is already in him. Otherwise how does a blind musician create a symphony on Autumn or Spring? How does a blind musician sing of the beauties of the world, more convincingly than a person who has eyes? How does a painter paint images that do not exist in the world, if those images are not in him already? Picasso makes a bull head out of a cycle saddle and a handle bar. If, as a Spaniard, he does not have any clue about bulls or bull fighting, the national sport of Spain, how could he make a combination out of two machine parts and make the impression of a bull? The bull is already in him. So is the gorilla mother and the goat made out of a bamboo basket. There is a famous story about the artist, Benode Behari Mukherjee, who turned blind towards the middle age of his life. He and his senior, Nandalal Bose did not share a cordial relationship. But when Benode Behari Mukherjee heard that even in his old age Nandalal was painting, he wanted to ‘see’ those painting. When Bose came to know about it, he was baffled. How could a blind man ‘see’ his paintings? Someone took Mukherjee to Bose’s studio where he asked someone to run his fingers through the contours of Bose’s painting. At some point Mukherjee said to Bose that he could have used a different colour there. Had Mukherjee not known painting in him or realized it in his mind already, how could he have made such a suggestion?

I feel pity about people who are in search of the unknown as I understand that none realizes anything if it is not in him already. If it is not in you, it is not going to manifest. If it is in you, then you need not search at all. Whether you want it or not it is going to manifest in one or the other form the way the Dhoom 3 poster manifested before me. I was not searching for a Dhoom 3 poster in Kolkata. Perhaps, that would have been the remotest thing that I could do in a city like this where I have come for a different purpose. But as Dhoom 3 is in me, it manifests before me without my search. Same is the case with the so called God. He/she is already in you. If he is not there, let me tell you, you are not going to realize him/her. But is that a problem? That is not a problem at all. It is not necessary that people realize things. Why should we try to learn singing, when we do not have any talent in singing? However, you try you don’t become a singer because the ability to sing is not in you. You are wasting your time if you try to sing. If you are not a scientist, you cannot do what a scientist do. You may read a few scientific journals and try to grapple with the ideas expressed there. You may even think that you have understood and now you could be a scientist of your own right. But what is the use? Could you invent a radio or television which has already been invented? Could you bring out the traits of a creature behaviour which has already been explored? This is the same case with the so called spirituality. You are not going to realize anything if it is not in you. Sitting in various postures of meditation is a waste of time. It will give you physical inertia or exercise, it is not going to reveal you anything because you do not know.

What you could cherish in your life is silence. Perhaps, in silence, the way Michael Angelo had seen sculptures in marble blokes, in the marble bloke of your mind you may see things which you already know but fail to recognize. But you cannot be silent unless and until you have it in you. Give it a try is the worst kind of advice that anybody could give to anybody else. If you try you don’t get it. If you don’t try and if you have it already it will come out. What you have is like a flow. A flow cannot be barred. If it is barred it will come out somehow. You cannot create a flow because you do not have a stream in you. If you have a stream it is bound to flow. I am not asking you to become lethargic and non-doers. That does not help in anyway. All the biological organisms are bound to function within a pre-planned flow. We as biological beings actually do everything possible to prevent this pre-planned flow. After preventing it, we try to find out why it is not flowing. So what we need is a tremendous amount of de-conditioning. We need to destroy ourselves in order to realise the real potentials. The irony is even this destruction is natural. You don’t need to do anything. You just need to do you work with complete involvement, call it love or sincerity. When you do it, you flow. If your work is disturbing you, then understand, you are creating hurdles for your flow. If you are enjoying, then you are flowing. Things will happen to you. You just need to be. Do not do anything. Don’t ever think of praying or meditating. Nothing is going to come through praying or meditation. You just need to be in silence. Then silence starts speaking and that is the best form of conversation you can ever have in your life. And through this conversation you realize things in you. If you have it, you will have it and you don’t have it, please do not even try.

I will finish this self-conversation with one more reference to something that we all know; food. We all like to eat food. I have always felt that eating food for enjoyment is as good as eve teasing. You do it for the heck of it. You derive some pleasure. When you are hungry, you eat and it is not teasing. It is just quelling your hunger. But when you aestheticize your hunger and desire, you eat things for the sake of it. They titillate your taste buds and the sensations are conveyed to your brain and you realize that you are enjoying something. Many people say, while eating and after eating and perhaps, even after several months of that eating incident, that the food is so great. They make exclamatory noises and expressions like ‘vow’, ‘it is delicious’ and ‘yummy’ etc. People do this out of habit or peer pressure because they need to tell themselves that they are eating for enjoyment. However, I would say, compared to eve teasing, eating, if you could afford, is a harmless pleasure seeking. But even in that condition, do we eat something that we do not know already? People eat or choose eateries after discussing with their friends who have already experienced the tastes of a particular restaurant. So whatever you eat out of habit or suggestion is nothing new. You already know about it that is why you enjoy it or pretend to enjoy. In a buffet, you find a variety of food items. But you do not eat everything given. You choose and your choice is completely based on your pre-knowledge about it. You know it even if you are consuming it for the first time. You do not eat anything that you do not know. Then how can you consume a god that you don’t know?

In Kolkata streets, in the morning I see many people drinking a particular mix of liquid. I stood there and watched how the way side vendor made it. He takes a big steel tumbler and put so many ingredients in it from different packets and vessels arrayed before him. Then he adds water to it and it turns into a yellow liquid. Irrespective of age and gender, I watch, people drinking it with so much of relish. I know tea, I know neembu pani (lemon water), I know lassi, I know soft drinks, I know bottled water, I know jal jeera, I know ganne ka ras (sugar cane juice), I know fruit juices, I know so many other drinks sold at the wayside stalls. But this one drink that is made right in front of my eyes looks completely alien. I could drink it because people like me are drinking it and they are not dropping dead. They are drinking with such a flourish that one is reassured that it is harmless. But still I do not have the courage to drink it. Reason; I do not know this drink. In my acquired knowledge or mind, I do not have any reference about this drink. So I walk on wondering how it would taste. But I do not drink it because it is ‘not in’ me. Later I ask a friend in Kolkata about it and he informs me it as a ‘sattu’ which is a health drink that helps you to clear your bowels. Apparently unlike other laxatives sattu is tasty also. Now I have the knowledge about it. Still I do not dare to drink it. Why, because it is not in me. It is the same case with god and realizing the unknown. There are thousands of spiritual gurus and thousands of techniques in this world that you can read, practice and understand. But none of these would take you to god or realization of the unknown. It does not happen because it is not there in you. Like I understood sattu, it remains in the level of information. I can talk volumes about sattu with or without drinking it because for me it is just an information and it is extraneous to my being. If sattu is there in me, I need not talk about it at all. I can be silent on sattu. People who talk about God are those people who question god completely. Those people coax hoards of credulous and gullible people are just cheating them by showing some magical formulas.

So I tell you stop praying and meditating. If it is there in you, whatever you do is praying and meditation. If it is not in you, you are just wasting time.

About Money and Meditation

I am not a travel freak. But I travel as and when work calls. Travel freaks look forward to the challenges of travelling both chartered and unchartered while I cringe even at the thought of moving away from certain comfort zones. But, when you think about it more, there are no comfort zones for a person. What one considers as comfort zones are just spaces made familiar by habit. Navigation in such places becomes easier because in those places one need not feel the need to navigate at all. Like a person who drives a car while day dreaming, things happen automatically, pressing the clutch, changing the gears, speeding up or slowing down and negotiating a curve. We live in automated zones. Even most people who are known as travel freaks like to tread on the oft-beaten path not the off beaten path because in that path, with the knowledge about the curves and straight lines, one could travel without certain amount of alertness. Most of the people like me tread the off beaten path in day dreaming; another safe zone like martial art games played in a virtual video game. You are excited, your adrenaline flow is high, you are euphoric but at the same time you are away from injuries and worries.

When I travel, I prefer to take up unchartered paths. Morning walk in strange places, or in that case any kind of walk in a strange place, is exciting because even if you have not seen that place before, during the break of dawn it definitely look different. Sights and sounds are fresh, serene and at times dipped in the syrup of early morning dreams. Office goers are not yet on the roads but cleaners and rag pickers are already there at their work. Way side eateries and tea-stalls come alive slowly. Flower and talisman sellers haunt the traffic joints. Dogs use roads as if they own it. Strange smells of cooking waft in the air. Morning walkers like you hurry to their oft-beaten tracks. Paper boys move like lightning. Maid servants from their bastis rush to posh localities where they work not because they want to be there on time but because they do not want to hear the oft repeated words of chiding from the anxious women who tackle demanding husbands, kids refusing to get up from bed and so many other chores. Sounds are still clear; of birds and radio. You are an absolute stranger amidst all these sights and sounds. You can walk like a spirit without getting noticed by any. You could melt into your surroundings provided if you do not feel so much about yourself. You are not important, I am sure, when I look at these early morning activities of people in a different city. Nobody is important for a city to survive. Like a monster it feeds on itself. Auto cannibalism is a trait of all cities.

I was not planning to tell all these things. What I want to talk is about my morning walk in Kolkata, where I am today. Kolkata is no longer a strange city to me though I do not know many areas in the city. But Kolkata, like any other city, looks different during the early morning hours. I walk to the park, which is next to the Vivekananda Park in South Kolkata. There is a huge lake where young people practice rowing. I had been here before too. This time I feel that this park is meant for old people during morning hours and it is reserved for the young lovers during the evening hours. I have often felt that seeing a person eating alone is one of the most painful sights in the world. But today, I think that seeing people desperately walking or working out for regaining the lost health is a sad sight. I insist on the word ‘regaining’ because it is different from maintaining. Most of the people start morning walk and related physical exercise activities when health issues strike and doctors intervene in their private lives. I see frail people, obese people, people trying desperately to regain their youthfulness back and people who want their egos to be intact. I am here to walk, not because I want to regain my health but because it is a habit. During the morning walk I can think of thinking. Walking is a way to flow along with thinking without resisting. It is meditative. I do not like the word meditation because meditation is a forced thing. And they say, in meditation you can do away with thinking by resisting thoughts slowly and systematically. It is a sort of violence. I like to flow with the thoughts and may be you end up in losing all your thoughts. Sometimes you realize that you were not there while walking. Suddenly you realize that you were walking. What happened to you between the thoughts that you were thinking and the sudden realization of coming back to thinking? May be you were existing.

As a writer, I have this brutal habit of overhearing things. It is not deliberate. But I hear what people talk. Today, I hear most of the people talking about money. As in Kolkata, ninety nine out of the hundred words that I heard today were either ‘taka’ (money), money, amount, paisa, rupees and everything related to money. I realize that all the people while walking to regain their health are still thinking or talking about money. They do not realize the fact that it was this very same thought that had ruined their lives so far. When I say this, please do not misinterpret me as a nihilist who hates money. I do not hate money, on the contrary I love it. But when you love something or somebody, it is not necessary that you need to think about it or speak about it all the time. If you do, then it is not love, it is obsession. Obsession leads to a sort of possessiveness, which is fatal and detrimental to health and happy living. When you are speaking about money even during your morning, which for many, is meant to be a meditative exercise, you neither walking nor meditating. You are simply obsessing yourself with the thoughts of money. Whether you are reading Gita aloud or any other scriptures aloud as a part of focusing on positive energy, at the end of it if you are still talking about money, then you are not working towards positive living. Money cannot be the sole aim of life though it is a necessary tool to live a good life. Let me explain.

 Living is a form of economics, in my view. Whether you are rich or poor, if you are living, then you are within an economic structure. Generally we say that business people are out there to make money and live a good life. They are greedy and so on. But what about others? They too are there to make money in order to live. For businessmen, money is a by product of their activities. They put their capital and entrepreneurial energy as investment and reap profits out of it. Other people invest their personal talents as executives, software engineers or accountants or menial workers to name a few job profiles, and make profit out of it. That is the way the world functions. Avarice is one of the seven deadly sins, scriptures say. But this avarice is not about money. It is about the desires and the desire to fulfil these desires. To fulfil these desires in the material world one needs money. So money is just a tool. In the Buddhist lines one could say that desire is the root cause of all worries. But I would say, having desire for anything is a beautiful thing. You need to have certain amount of desire to live life fully and killing the desire cannot a monk out of you, but a frustrated soul could definitely be the outcome of it. Understanding the desire and setting benchmarks for fulfilling that desire is the intelligent way to handle worries in the world. If you are constantly thinking about bettering your life, there are hundred ways of doing it without the medium of money. But if you are obsessing about money, then you are not trying to bettering your life, instead you are still thinking about the medium of bettering it. When you are obsessed with a medium, your life remains abandoned. However, you jog or walk your health is not going to come back because for the happy return of health one has to stop thinking about the medium. Medicine is taken to kill the illness but if the patient is obsessed with medicine, the illness remains and the pharmaceutical companies make profit.

I am not here to pontificate against/about money. But what I think is that if anybody wants to be happy in the life, he or she has to do the work that is supposed to be done by him or her. This may sound apparently quite classicist. That means a rich can further become rich and the poor should remain poor. In that case, our basic premise itself is wrong. People are differently abled and different talented and differently gifted. A painter can become a property dealer or a musician could become a businessman. There is no problem with that. But the question then is, what will happen to the painter’s painting when the painter becomes a property dealer and starts making a lot of money? What will happen to the music of a musician when he becomes a businessman? We can always accept that if a painter gets a lot of money by selling his painting or a musician gets a lot of money by selling his music. These are not unheard of things. These things happen. But the money thus comes is not used by painter to turn into a builder only because there is more money in building business than making paintings. If somebody abandons painting for becoming a property dealer, then his life as a painter ends there. Property dealing and business are not bad things in themselves. They are good so long as they are handled by people who are good at it. If so what does a common man, who goes for morning walk and obsesses about money, do?

I say, he would end up in misery. The more he thinks about money the more he misses the point in his life. He may be an executive, drawing a good salary and even might have invested in various avenues to make sure that his and his family’s life is secured today and in future. But still he is thinking about money. He forgets the fact that even if he thinks a lot about money his salary is not going to increase or his investments bring him great dividends. The more he thinks about it the more are the chances of getting him corrupted. What about a labourer who thinks about money and does not go for morning walk? They generally do not think about money the way the morning walkers think about it. They are here to survive. They think about the money that would help them to scrape through the life. But both the parties are committing the same error because a wage labourer does not have the tools or talents to increase his money making power. If he had it he would have branched himself out into more profitable ways of investing his labour. As he does not have the tools or talents, his overt obsession money could bring only misery to him. This is not different from the misery of an already comfortably rich man obsessing with money.

I want to reiterate the fact that I am not against money. But as I am not obsessed with it, money which is good enough to lead a good life comes to me because I do my work the way I am supposed to do. There was a time I used to obsess a lot about money. I always used to think that what will happen to me next if I do not have enough money. This obsession with money had put me to great misery. One day I stopped thinking about money. I started focusing on my work. I realized that if I did my work well money for my life appears through the channels that the work had opened up. It was a great realization. If you do your work well, use your talents in the right direction, help in terms of money including, follows. But one has to control the desires. One has to set a bench mark for the desirable desires. Do not kill it but understand the desire. My understanding about myself is simple; I do not earn a salary. I am a freelancer. And people approach me for doing their work; a quality addition kind of work through writing. And when I do that work they pay me for that. It is not arrogance. It is the way things happen in the world. A bus driver who earns a salary, unless he involves in various other activities is not able to more money than the salary. But still we consider him as a needy person who is suffering from financial troubles. But the trouble is not in his earning capacity; the trouble lies in his desires or the collective desire or trouble of his family or people related to him. This is a chain reaction and there is no end to it.

I have learnt to understand my desires. The greatest learning came from the fact that I can ask for help without thinking too much about myself or keeping my ego at the forefront and suffering from it. Asking for help is not about borrowing money. Asking for help is a great way of sharing your lacks with those people who are sympathetic to your life, who care for you and like you as a person. It is not necessary that you need to know the people from who you ask for help. I have learnt a great lesson from Paulo Coelho who otherwise writes spiritual soothsaying kind of books (for an Indian like me those are primers to fake spirituality). He in his autobiography talks about how he could stand like a beggar in the road and could ask for nothing. When you do not ask for nothing and only share things, which could be even your troubles, you gain happiness. You gain material and soul comfort. But for that one should shed ego. One should empty oneself and become a nothing and nobody. When you are nothing and nobody, you can ask for help. No part of yours gets hurt. After learning this lesson, I practiced it. When I travel without a laptop, I could ask someone to let me use theirs. They do not say no. When I am hungry, if I do not have any money, I can ask someone to provide me a meal. I have never been denied a meal. But if have money and freeloading becomes your tactics to save money, then you stand to lose, a meal and a kind hand.

I learnt to understand my desires too. I am a person with minimum desires. Nothing excites me; that is the first rule that I have found in myself. Nothing makes me feel awe. That does not mean that don’t wonder at things. But my wondering at a tight rope walker is different from my wondering at a sunrise or sunset. I stand wondering at the movements of ants, birds and clouds. But I do not stand wondering at some so called great personality or celebrity. I am not excited at the prospect of eating good food, going for a movie or a vacation. I take it very calmly. As the sense of excitement is not there and a sense of wonder is under control or operative in me differently, my needs to get excited and wonder are always kept at minimum. What I think about myself is that nothing defines me other than my work. If I am not writing, then I am like any other biological being, who eats, shits, sleeps, wakes up and does things for surviving. But my writing does not become great if I wear a good shirt, an expensive watch, a few gold rings or eat a good meal. I do not say that these things help people to enhance their image and self confidence. They do. But for me, my existence as an intelligent and creative human being is not defined by anything extraneous to my creative efforts. The rest is useless additions that only help other people to admire me. If I am not admiring anyone or anything, it would hypocrisy is I am letting others to admire me.

I believe, as an intelligent and creative human being like many of you, that money and any such desire is important only up to certain practical planes. Having a lot of money does not make me a good writer or a good curator. I can buy name with the money but the problem is that the moment my buying capacity diminishes my name too wanes. Let me use the analogy of food. Life is a buffet, beautifully arranged and rich in varieties. You are allowed to eat as much as you can. But you can eat only as much as you could. If you take one morsel more, you are going to throw up. When I travel on my job, I am allowed to eat anything that I want because the companies or persons who have employed me for the job are going to pay for it. But only because it is free how much am I going to eat? I cannot eat things that would eventually make me sick and render me useless. Same is applicable in the case of general life. You cannot enjoy the buffet called life; you have to choose carefully and fill in your plate as much as you want and enjoy every bit of it. But let me tell you, life is absolutely free; it does not come with a price tag. Only assurance in life is physical death. All what comes with a price tag is a product that enhances desire. If you understand your desire, the way you understand your hunger, your money problem is taken care of. It does not need any meditative practice or yoga session.

While walking along the lake side today morning, I saw a woman sitting in meditative posture. I saw a mobile phone and clutch kept next to her. Two thoughts came to my mind when I saw her; one, she is pretending to be meditative. Two, if she is really meditating, she cannot keep her phone and wallet like that. A person who goes to meditate cannot take valuable things along with them. A person who has left every valuable behind only could be really meditative. The very thought of losing a wallet and a phone could prevent her from getting lost in the meditation. What I felt at that moment was to call out and say that, hey someone is taking your phone away. She would have jumped up and run. But I did not do that. Instead, I thought of a Mulla Naseeruddin story. A person was sitting and wailing and saying that he was a fakir who has left the worldly possessions. He also was wailing that he does not need anything but just food. Mulla saw a small bundle of coins under the beggar’s feet. He picked it up and started running. The fakir left his pious demeanour and started running behind Mulla demanding his coins. Most of the meditating people are like that. Tell them there is a thief is around there meditation will stop. In real meditation you do not have anything to lose but yourself. 

The Unbreakable: Reading Mary Kom, the Million Rupees Mom

(Mary Kom's Autobiography cover)

“Sitting in the Rashtrapati Bhavan, with all those renowned people around me, I felt my spirit and my commitment to my country’s sporting glory renewed. I dedicated the award to my sons who were still too young to understand why their mother kept leaving them and going away. I hoped they would understand one day.” – M.C. Mary Kom (in her autobiography, Unbreakable).

Once again my belief that the airport bookstalls provide one with some interesting reading stuff to the book hunters in reiterated today. On my way to Kolkata, at the Delhi airport, after having a plain dosa from the series of eateries while wondering how the plain looking Indians could hog the KFC big meals (fried chicken and soda) and coming to conclusion that compared to the price of the food available inside the flight this could be much cheaper, and also after puffing a cigarette inside the smoking lounge sans an exhaust fan, fairly awakened with a heady concoction of nicotine and sambar, I ventured into the bookstall luckily reinstated by the authorities after a prolonged phase of renovation of the old terminal, and amongst many ‘picks of the month’ found something which I had been looking for quite some time; the autobiography of the sporting/boxing legend Mary Kom.

Mary Kom had shot up to fame, in a larger sense with her silver medal in women’s boxing, which was newly introduced to the Olympics events held in London in 2012. When she boxed way to the victory stand, people back in India stood up in ovation. The mainlanders in India generally think that the North Eastern people are good at sturdy sports; sports that demand stamina and enduring capacity from the player. This clichéd stereotyping has been there for quite some time. From Baichung Butia to Sunil Chettri and from Kunjarani to Mary Kom, stereotyped faces have the North Eastern looks. When Mary Kom was travelling with the Indian contingency of sportspeople, team members from other South Eastern countries used to ask about her nationality. When she said that she is from India, they told her that why she looked like ‘them’ and the other people in the Indian team looked different. Mary Kom knows why and what this distinction is all about; in Manipur and the other North Eastern states, people considers them as Manipuris or Assamese or Nagas or things like that and all the mainlanders, at least for the Manipuri’s are ‘Non-Manipuris’. When I read this, from Mary Kom’s own words, I remember the two girls who come from Manipur to join the Indian National Hockey Team, in the renowned film, Chak De India. They confront the person who questions their nationality and tell him that it is very painful to be a ‘guest’ in your own home.

(Mary Kom with Sushmita Sen at the book launch)

We have some fixation with medals; may be, it is with the silver medals. When P.T.Usha got her silver medal in Olympics in early 1980s, she was given the same treatment by the Indian media. Luckily, in those days we had only newspapers, radio and the state owned Doordarshan. Still she got a demi-goddess status. There were only very few people in this country who could get a letter addressed like ‘name and India’. Rabindranath Tagore was one, and so was Mahatma Gandhi. Those were the pre-mediatized days. But in 1980s too, India still struggling inside the national(ist) economy, P.T.Usha became another person who could get a letter addressed to her like ‘P.T.Usha, India’. It is interesting that we reward our sports people, when they really make the country proud with their victories, we make them police officers. P.T.Usha, Shainy Wilson, M.D.Valsamma and so many athletes had become police officers. Mary Kom too became a sub-inspector initially as she refused to accept a constable’s job after her World Championship victory almost ten years back. She was later offered a sub-inspector’s post which she accepted. Today, she is the Superintendent of Police (rank-sports) in Manipur. Mary Kom writes how she has been initially refused the Rajiv Khel Ratna Award as one of the jury members, the one and only Milkha Singh showed his ignorance by saying that he did not know what this Kom woman played in the field of sports. The intervention of the then sports minister, M.S.Gill finally assured her the deserving award.

Mary Kom’s story is fascinating. Born in 1982 to a landless farmer, whose forefathers were once the kings of the particular landholding where he worked as a labourer, Mary Kom had a very tough childhood. But the toughest of education, the lessons of developing stamina and endurance that nature provided her was zen like. She ran a few kilometres to the school every day, she went to cut trees in the nearby woods, she carried heavy weights from the farm to home. And when she put these daily labours together it became her exercise even without knowing she was preparing herself for a big challenge. Initially she did not know which sports genre she should consider as her specialisation. She was good at athletics; she hoped that one day she would get a job in sports quota and she would provide her parents with a good life. They were toiling day and night to make her dream come true. Going to Imphal to train at the Sport Authority of India was her first introduction to the larger world of sports. Kind hearted boxers who once represented India in many events helped her to learn the techniques. She realized the politics of the game and the game of politics while at SAI. She honed up her skills and started appearing in the state level tournaments and then national level tournaments.

One may find a faint similarity between the story of the character portrayed by Hilary Swank in Clint Eastwood’s ‘Million Dollar Baby’ and that of Mary Kom. Perhaps the story of the underdogs is similar anywhere in the world; it could be Rocky, Hurricane Porter or a Raging Bull. It could be even the story of Evander Hollyfield and Mike Tyson or further back, that of Mohammed Ali. Boxers come from tough backgrounds; initially they fight with nature then with their ring time opponents. In fact, they do not fight with nature. They learn the lessons from nature. Had they been fighting nature they would have become just police constables. They flow with nature and realize the inner and outer strength of their lives and then they achieve what they want to achieve in their lives. Some get trapped. Mary Kom survived the traps by playing her game; she refused to take even the basic medicines for cough and cold out of the fear that she might get tested positive in narcotic tests. She was careful and she knew the traps of being in a competitive sport. Mary Kom’s life as a sports person was not smooth sailing. She had to face all the odds, even the jealous of her ring mates. But she survived because she had to survive for her parents, for her Kom community that had stood with her all the time, for her Manipur and above all for her India.

Marriages are made in heaven and human beings make it hell. The adage is beautiful. But for many sports people, especially for women, marriage is a death knell to their career. In Chak De India, you must remember how the forward player Preeti Sabarwal who is in love with one of the top cricket players in the Indian squad, decides to break up her engagement with him only because he wants her to be homebound after their marriage. In one of the most memorable moments in the movie, Chautala passes a ball to Sabarwal and tells her, ‘Dikhao woh launde ko’ (Show that guy (what you have)) and Sabarwal hits the goal. It is not just a goal, but an assertion of her individuality. Mary Kom found the right guy in Onler. He is a Kom who was a student in Delhi pursuing law studies and was looking after the welfare of Manipuri students. He happened to be a passport carrier for Mary Kom while she was training in Hisar, Haryana. Their friendship grew and finally they got married. The story has the material to be another ‘Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge’ (that is why Mary Kom’s life is going to be a bio-pic soon, with a perfect miscast in Priyanka Chopra). She delivered a twins through Caesarean section in 2006. After two years, she got her form back with severe training and won a few medals both in national and international events. Post Olympics victory, she delivered one more child. But she has not yet hung her gloves. She is preparing for the next Olympics. In the meanwhile, she with the help of her husband, who has stood with her throughout by almost becoming a ‘house husband’, has started a boxing academy in Imphal where she trains kids from underprivileged sections of the society to become world boxing champions. Besides, she even walks the ramps in fashion shows and attends start events, which adds to her income to run the boxing academy. A girl once used to look at herself as if she were an ugly duckling today shares photo ops with super stars. Once Onler commented, if they spend these many hours on make-up, anybody could look beautiful. But he said it with a great pride.

Unbreakable is a book designed for a special purpose, I believe. This book is inspirational and self-help at the same time. Besides being the autobiography of Mary Kom, this book also prepares the readers to see the forthcoming bio-pic in perspective and context, though the book carefully avoids any mention about the impending movie. Mary Kom writes about her life and also writes about her future plans. She tells her students that if she could then they also could. She indirectly tells the readers, if she could then the readers also could. But one has to have a vision, a mission and enough conviction to pursue it. Also, achieving something is not everything. The show must go one and the role of the victor does not end with a victory. The fruits of it have to be distributed. One has to give it back to society; if possible selflessly. Mary Kom’s life tells us this story and it is a great reading material. That’s why, in a flight delayed by an hour, I could finish reading all those 155 pages. Thank you Mary Kom.

Three Boys from Uttar Pradesh: Kumar Vishwas, Raju Shrivastava and Amitabh Bacchan

(Kumar Vishwas, poet and AAP Leader)

When I was a young boy in Kerala, during the days of Doordarshan, while Manoj Prabhakar played one day matches, I used to think about his handsome features. I thought, it was his handsome looks that had got him a chance to play cricket. Those were the days I preferred to look more at Kamal Haasan than Rajni Kant, and Kapil Dev than Ravi Shastri. Each juncture of growth any individual develops certain kinds of physical attraction towards rich and famous people. Today when my son idolizes Dhoni or Virat Kohli or Shikhar Dhawan, I do not feel any wonder. But when I ventured out of Kerala during my early twenties, especially in North India, I could see so many Manoj Prabhakars in the streets. Same was the case with my youth idols, Amitabh Bacchan and Mithun Chakravarty. Today when I see young men from Uttar Pradesh, especially if they are coming from the Rai clan, I see a submerged Amitabh Bacchan in them. So is the case when I travel in Kolkata. Several middle aged people look like Mithun Chakravarty and the die-hard fans amongst then sport even Mithun’s hairstyle, simply heralding an anachronistic fashion statement. A few years back, when North India got hooked to the Great Indian Laughter Challenge, I noticed a striking similarity between the stand-up comedian Raju Shrivastava and the famous star, Amitabh Bacchan. Mukesh Khanna, the Bhishma of Mahabharata serial had come to the scene emulating Bacchan. Singer Sudesh Bhosale had made his mark by giving voice to many of Amitabh Bacchan songs. But out of them Raju Shrivastava caught my imagination by storm.

Today, I remember Raju Shrivastava for a different reason. One of the leaders of Aam Aadmi Party, Kumar Vishwas, reminds you of Raju Shrivastava, not only by looks, but also in intonation of voice, presentation style and even in public performance. If you morph Kumar Vishwas image with Raju Shrivastava it would gel perfectly. If you further morph this already morphed image with that of Amitabh Bacchan it would gel again. The simple reason for this is their locality of origin; they all come from UP and they share more or less the same cultural ethos of UP, of poetry, literature and great histrionic skills. Raju Shrivastava does not shy away from the fact that he had gone to Mumbai in order to become an actor because he idolized Amitabh Bacchan. One could easily see, or imagine that a younger Raju Shrivastava might have looked more like a younger Amitabh Bacchan. Or rather, a younger Amitabh Bacchan’s image has a lot to do with an older Raju Shrivastava’s image. In many interviews, after his television success as a stand-up comedian, Raju Shrivastava has accepted that his ideal is Amitabh Bacchan, though his shifted his forte from serious acting to stand-up comedy when he realized that he could not get heavy roles like Bacchan in Bollywood. I was not surprised to see Shrivastava as a middle aged person, as the years of struggle are still etched on his happy countenance. But his optimism helped him to wade through the turbulent waters of survival and until he could write his own name in the history of stand-up comedy in India.

Something intrigued me when I saw Kumar Vishwas for the first time in television. He was attending one of the debates pertaining to the Aam Aadmi Party’s declared stance on the ending of the VIP culture in Delhi. While other seasoned politicians in the debate vehemently reiterated the fact that having a red beacon is thing of distinction and it is an unavoidable necessity, Kumar Vishwas in a very calm and composed way replied that it was not so. His arguments were not vociferous. Perhaps, for the first time in the history of Indian television, I could see English News Channels inviting a non-English speaker like Kumar Vishwas just because he and his party are convincing enough even in the use of Hindi. I do not know, whether the use of Hindi by is a reclamation of national idealism of the yester years or it is a deliberate choice of the AAP to play to the galleries, whatever it may be, today the fact is that the English speaking News Anchors also have to come down a few steps in order to accommodate the Hindi speaking politicians to their English citadels. Kumar Vishwas spoke in Hindi and the other answered in English. To their English arguments, he replied in a kind of Hindi which is pure enough to be dignified and mixed enough to be pedestrian. It was poetic and rhyming.

 (Raju Shrivastava, stand up comedian)

I saw some kind of depth in Kumar Vishwas eyes. At that moment, I did not know that Kumar Vishwas had already become a darling or the Delhi’s middle and lower middle class masses. Even I did not know that he had already been a darling of the BJP even before he joined the AAP. What I liked in his eyes was not just the depth but the enigma that denies a complete penetration into his personality. His eyes showed composure but they glowed with some sort of determination and angst. Then I just remembered the smiling face and deep eyes of Raju Shrivastava and the benign eyes of Amitabh Bacchan. Their eyes are big, dreamy and a bit slanting. Their hairs are straight which naturally parts in the middle. There are a lot of similarities between them. But the dissimilar factor is the difference in their voice modulation. Amitabh Bacchan has a baritone voice. Raju Shrivastava has a voice that could go upto baritone and shrillness and go down to rustic intonations. Kumar Vishwas’ voice stands in between; it is neither baritone nor pedestrian. While these three personalities could articulate poetry efficiently, Amitabh for the academic and classic, Raju for the ones who want to be entertained and Kumar for the masses who yell and scream for effect, their rootedness is expressed in some sense of sophistication in their articulation.

Kumar Vishwas belongs to my generation. He is born in 1970 in Uttar Pradesh. He studied Hindi literature, took a doctorate and became a college lecturer. But his calling was for poetry. His website says that he is a romantic poet. As a South Indian, for me it is very difficult to understand the nuances of Hindi poetry, however my interest in gazals and the general interest in the poetry of Galib have helped me to catch a little bit of Hindi romantic poetry. As per the certain revelations, it is said that the couplets of Kumar Vishwas have become so famous that many ‘pappus’ (as in the poet’s own admission) use it as their ring tones. Here I cannot help thinking about the popular singer, Altaf Raja who had shot into fame when he sang the bus boys’ and lorry drivers’ all time favorite song, ‘tum toh thehre pardeshi, saath kya nibhaogey’. Kumar Vishwas says, in one of his speeches that he left his academic career to become a ‘shayir’ (poet). He travels all over the world (every year he goes to the US, according to him) and he writes a lot of poems for the jawans, Bharat Mata and the love-lone couples. His website also says that he is one poet who could perform without any paraphernalia other than a microphone. He could reach out to people through his poems and he has been hailed as a contemporary poet who brought romantic poetry once again to the masses.

(Amitabh Bacchan, younger days)

I thought that the resemblance between Raju Shrivastava (Bacchan upto an extent) and Kumar Vishwas was just facial. But while reading his website introduction, I chanced upon a line which made my thinking quite clear; he is hailed as someone who could excel any poet, theatre person, actor, academic and a ‘stand up comedian’. That means, Kumar Vishwas simply knows and accepts the fact that his personality has been developed by looking at the mannerisms not only of Amitabh Bacchan but also of Raju Shrivastava. Some people might have even mentioned it to him. Interestingly, like any popular poet or populist poet, Kumar Vishwas also has written a lot about Kargil war. He celebrates the sacrifice of the jawans who are killed in the war. These poems had made him a darling of the BJP and even of the RSS. They did not know that one day the same poet was going to be one of their biggest rivals. Perhaps, politics always attracts poets or the other way round. In every political party one could see a few poets. Jawaharlal Nehru himself was a poet of prose. In BJP we have/had Atal Bihari Vajpayee. V.P.Singh was a poet and a painter. Even Kapil Sibal writes poetry. Forget the IAS people. Every IAS man/woman is either a poet or a painter, if not a stand up comedian.

In Kumar Vishwas, one could see today’s poet transforming into tomorrow’s politician. He has already shows the symptoms of becoming a belligerent politician. His public speeches are pepped up with poetry and direct challenges to the opposition parties. Like both BJP and Congress, he too evokes nationalism and national idealism, he also yells Bharat Mata ki jai. And for a change, like the Communists he also calls out ‘Inquilab Zindabad.’ Growing in stature, Kumar Vishwas’ composure, when he is out of the television studios, is giving way to aggressive political speech. So far he has challenged both Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi in the coming general elections slated to take place in May 2014. He, like a populist politician who is riding on idealism and people’s support has openly challenged Rahul Gandhi declaring that he would fight his even in his home constituency, Amethi. Moreover, he has invited Narendra Modi to come and contest from the same constituency. This is an open challenge for a triangular fight. Perhaps, only a poet can give out such challenges (stand up comedians too can but they meekly surrender to the macho of the heroes). But Kumar Vishwas looks real and more shrewd a politician than Arvind Kejriwal. Kumar, Raju and Amitabh plays well when it comes to giving speeches. Raju has not yet contested any elections. Amitabh has and Kumar is going to be. It is time for watch out this politician. 

The Idea of Good Living and State of the Art Marriages

(Image for representational purpose only)

In his path breaking novel, ‘Brave New World’, Aldous Huxley speaks of a world where everyone is for everyone else and nobody has a particular individuality or identity. People are categorized and conditioned from the very time of artificial their conception and they are brought up to become what they are supposed to become; planners, operators, workers and so on. In this peculiar caste system (which is not identified as caste system or social hierarchy because none is aware of a possibility of their existence in other conditions or planes of life) everything runs so smoothly that none even thinks of changing their given identity. If at all they are depressed for some strange reasons (which is not expected to happen), they are given a daily ration of ‘soma’ tablets that send them to a sense of euphoria. There is no marriage and no private property. In this world, words like ‘mother’, ‘conception’, ‘love’, ‘father’ etc are considered obscene. As everyone belongs to everyone else, as this society and its constituent individuals are conditioned in this fashion, sex is not a taboo and adequate precautions are always taken to avoid ‘pregnancy’ (another obscene word). None fights for women, property and money. There is no war. Everything is conditioned and everything is conditioned in this world.

Thinking of it, we may find that living in such world would be really fantastic. But, as we belong to a different world, with ample amount of strife, war, and public and private problems we have a different parameter in assessing the rosy picture painted by Huxley in ‘Brave New World’. Huxley’s intention is not to celebrate such a controlled society, on the contrary he narrates, through this fable, how offensive and horrible it would be for a normal man to exist in such gentrified, categorized and conditioned world. While his emphasis is on the authoritarian regimes that iron out differences and make people absolute observers of orders without any sense of rebellion, he also suggests that solving the world problems through homogenization of human traits and effective ways of socio-cultural and political conditioning will not take the human race to any progressive heights. Seen against this context, it is pertinent ask how individuality could be retained, cherished and nourished in a world that has been increasingly become homogenized during the evolution of history. Today, with the free flow of capital across the boundaries of nations, people all over the world have become addicted to certain ways of living, which is termed as ‘good living’ in the general parlance.

For maintaining a good living, first and foremost, one has to surrender all kinds of demands that individuality makes on the individual. Individuality stems from free thinking, a certain amount of analytical intelligence and the will to execute individualistic inferences. But good living will become, according to the prevailing conditions, bad living when an individual tries to exercise his/her free will. The idea of good living creates an atmosphere, rather a charged environment, in which the individual is expected to yield to the suggestibility of this environment. This ‘locale’ is created out of goods and ideas pertaining to these goods. These ideas and the creators of these ideas think for the individual and help him to choose the life that they would want him to lead. Buying a new iphone or a new dress, or even a refrigerator or washing machine is not related to its use value or peer pressure anymore. It has a lot to do with the decimation of free willing and yielding to the suggestibility of the ideas of good living. It becomes pertinent to have a particular consumer item with us for satisfying the demand for a good living irrespective of its use in the individual life. Seeing a program in a normal television channel is a normal thing. But seeing it in a high definition television with a plasma screen or a three dimensional television screen is a different thing. While the idea of good living tells us about the aesthetical experience that we would derive from such screens, it does not tell us why this aesthetical experience is different from the normal television experience. While picture quality and surrounding sonic ambience add to this aesthetical experience, the fundamentals of visuals remain the same, but the idea of good living very skillfully hides it from the consumer.

Goaded by this idea of good living, people slowly shed their individuality and distinction of their lives from that of others. Even seen out of the consumerist heaven of today, all other social practices are meant to create this homogeneity amongst the people in order to maintain the so called social structure, law and values. These structures, laws and values have been developed over a period of time, by making additions and corrections so that a larger number of people get benefit out of it by becoming a part of these homogenizing societies. Take for example the way we choose our religions and related rituals. In a society where we take birth, we are not given freedom to choose our religion or caste. We are born to a society which has already made the caste and religion of our parents fixed, notified and regulated. We are bound to follow that. While language is a ‘natural’ choice, religion and caste are not natural choices. As language is the mimicry of communicatory devices using sounds and gestures, religions are artificially made cultural contexts which are expected to be perpetuated by us without our consent. There are people who change their religions as they grow up through conversions or philosophical allegiance, and there are even people opt out of religion and practice something like ‘a-religion’ as in the case of the agnostics and atheists who in turn become addicted to those religions. Compared to the former, latter moves may sound better. But in both the cases we are left with no option to practice out of our religious ethos.

Religion is a very strong tool, like a name (that is closely connected to religion in most of the cases) that society employs to keep the individual under check. Such checking, though we see the kind of sanitized and liberal existence of Brave New World quite repulsive and too regimented, is as strong as its counterpart in the socio-cultural fables. Marriage is one such institution that makes us tied up with the social structure and structuring and severing all possibilities of exercising individuality and free will. Compared to the eastern societies, the western societies in the matter of marriage are considered to be a bit more liberal. However, when marriage is a reality, whether it is in the eastern or western countries, the same kind of norms for social structuring and homogenization come into practice. In a general sense, once you are married, you are expected to live a good life, irrespective of your economic status. What the idea of good life tells you is to adopt a life style that makes all the married couples look alike. Religion plays a very strong role in solemnizing marriages; so do the courts. Once a couple is legally and religiously wedded, they are expected to perpetuate the idea of social structure and good living by becoming a part of the established social norms, either by producing kids, giving them good living conditions, good educations, getting them good job, sending them off in marriage and handling all what comes in between these or by behaving like well to do couples, who look like many other well to do couples.

Exercising of free will is one of the biggest hurdles that marriage as an establishment and as an integral part of the social structure faces. While an individual enters into the pact of conjugality, he or she is almost ready to accept the ideas of social structuring and good living. It is the same case with the rebellious couple who decided to enter in a live in relationship. That is not so radical as it seems as it too replicate the same power relations and hierarchies of the society in due course of its progress. One thing what makes the living in relationship different from a religion approved or court approved marriage is the easiness of its solvability. While the former could be ended on a mutual agreement, as this mutual agreement is the basis of all living in relationships, the latter is held together, despite all its problems by the law of religions and courts. Couples, once they have produced a couple of children find it extremely difficult to end the marriage or go out of it and exercise free will mainly because in most of the societies the responsibility of the kids is directly on to the parents. The state does not take any direct responsibility in the upkeep of children. Hence, most of the couples live inside a marriage that is not so interesting as the idea of good living suggests.

A man or a woman, generally, gets married in their twenties. There is a saying that most of happy families are happy in different ways but most of the unhappy families are unhappy in the same way. There is no happy ending in a marriage. Marriage is a beginning of a series of comedies and tragedies. There are so many happy couples in this world who really respect and appreciate their partners’ contributions to their lives. But most of the couples live in a sour relationship. The reason should be sought in the idea of good living. They get married at certain age and subconsciously they become addicted to the idea of good living. Setting up a home is the first step and each couple has a different way of setting up their homes. But this difference is just skin deep because their idea of setting up of a happy home comes from the same idea of good living. Once a happy home is set up, they bring kids into it. Once the kids come, the parents become more responsible than before; this responsibility, though apparently looks like, is towards the kids, in fact it is more towards the structured society and the idea of good living. They want to bring up the kids according to the demands set on to them by the society and the idea of good living. They are to be taught in good schools and they are to taken for vacations and they are to be given everything that the market promoters say, is good for their growth.

But in reality, what are the things happen in that happy home? When he/she gets into a marriage, they are not full blown/grown people. Marriage is one step towards that growth. As they grown in that marriage, they grow up biologically, intellectually and spiritually. Though there are couples who grow up together to look like twins, though there are couples who read into the minds of the partner out of habit and practice, they remain two different people aspiring to grow in a different trajectory. However, the idea of good living tells such couple who grow to curb all the reasons and passions for such growth and pursue the path of good living. The realization of one’s own trajectory, which is often radically different from the idea of good living is the first reason for the entry of discordance in a ‘happily’ married couple’s life. The moment this idea of self-growth occurs and the partner decides to pursue that trajectory, if the partner is not so sympathetic about it and he wants to go by the rules of the good living or his own trajectory, there will be conflicts. When unsympathetic partners live under one roof, that marriage turns out to be a living hell. I do not mean to say that there are no happy couple who are absolutely sympathetic to each other and support each other, care for each other’s spiritual as well as physical well being.  Such couples are however rare and even if they are found you could see either one of the partners is an active member in the relationship and the other one is passive, or both the parties agrees to be a part of the pursuance of good living or different from it. But when they both pursue their trajectories in different ways, or when one tries to bring the other to his/her trajectory trajectories are bound to happen.

The idea of good living has made our lives living hells. We in the name of good life and happy life have been sacrificing, suffocating and annihilating individualities for ages. The history of human race perhaps has more stories about war and pestilence but compared to the domestic wars and discordance such large scale wars fought out between powers out there in the public domain look quite lackluster and lacking in severity. Whichever marriage has become successful and has a happy ending in a cinematic way, I should say, they are all the marriages of gory sacrifices and inexplicable adjustments. I do not think that such marriages should be hailed or made as models to be emulated. Whether it is the marriage of a genius and super rich or a poverty stricken lay man/woman, such marriages of adjustments are not good for the free flowering of our society. All the problems of our societies are caused by such marriages. Marriages are not solemnized over fire and they are not affirmed by seven rounds around fire, they are solemnized over future aggressions and hidden knives. It is high time that we think about such marriages that curb the growth of both the partners and the general growth of the children. People say that divorce is one way out of it; but there should be more beautiful ways of living together or living separately allowing each other adequate space for their personal growth. If the welfare of the children is a question, the parents in a bad marriage should make amendments to support the children from their respective spheres.

It is not my intention to nullify all the marriages as bad or write off the concept of marriage as humbug. My intention here is to say that so long as one is in pursuit of the idea of good life, which is absolutely imaginary and non-existent, based on myths and fables, the marriages are not going to work; they may be successful in perpetuating the idea of living hell than the celebration of the idea of good life. 

Alladins of Our Times

(Old Shop Keeper. Image for illustration purpose only. Photo courtesy: PA)

Mall culture kills the neighborhood shops. Old kirana dookans lose out to the varieties of goods offered by the shopping malls. Period. Social scientists and planners have discussed the cultural and economic implications of this transition in taste and consumer behaviors in several volumes. I cherish local stores as well as malls. Today one cannot be a fundamentalist taste; one cannot impose personal agendas to others. If people are comfortable in shopping in malls, let them do so. Perhaps, malls are the new age interactive spaces, where hygiene and impersonal contacts rule. Malls are the preferred hang outs of families and young people. However, you cannot expect the same people hanging out at the same time in the same mall as it used to be the case with the local shops, village squares, tailoring shops and saloons. Even if you see some of them quite regularly as you are a regular there, as impersonal contact is the norm none cares to connect through exchanging of smiles, niceties or the general display of familiarity. In the temperature conditions interiors of mall foyers, multiplex theatres, restaurants and shop interiors, you are a planet of your own that moves in the cosmos of strangeness. In this new environment, strangeness is a sort of insularity; a safe recluse.

Though this is the situation today, one cannot say that the old world charm has died out completely. There are some places or shops where you still feel a sense of familiarity without the usual threats on your privacy. These are the shops from where you get anything and everything under the sun. They are not necessarily the shops in malls, regimented and sanitized with exclusivity as their guiding principles. They could be located in an upmarket area, or even they could be some non-descript shop in a crowded street, but you could get anything that you want from there. Such shops are still in the neighborhood, if you have an eye to see them and a purpose to experience them. If your kids are still in the school, I am sure the local stationary shop in your neighborhood is a place of all wonders. School teachers send notes in your kids’ diaries asking for things that you do not regularly use at home. ‘Three plastic spoons, one prism, a bundle of jute threads and a packet of sequins’ to be sent tomorrow itself’. But you need not worry, these things are available under one roof; your local stationary shop. The person who runs the shop disappears into the innards of the small shop and comes up with all what you have asked for, as if he were a genie. Yes, he is a genie. Forget the market forces and demands that control the demand and supply chain. You may wonder at the ability of this man to stock all kinds of weird demands made by the school teachers on your kids.

Nobel laureate Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, in his novel, ‘The Black Book’ writes about a shop at the Nisantasi Square, a neighborhood where he lives. Pamuk calls it Alladin’s shop. The person who runs the shop is Alladin. His name could be something else. But he is like Alladin in the Arabian Nights who could perform wonders with the help of a genie and wonder carpet. You get anything and everything from Alladin’s shop. You ask for a particular issue of a superman comic that you had read in your childhood. He will disappear into the darkness of the shop and come out with the number. He knows your demands; but the interesting thing is that he even knows the demands of the future. He intuits that a child would cry for a particular kind of candy one day. And he stocks it for that one child. He remembers people, their demands, needs, desires, their vagaries, their eccentricities and their aspirations. Alladin is a man who is made of dreams. There is an Alladin shop in everywhere, whether you wish it away or not, it remains there, for you always. You may have stopped going there ages before. But one day you would go back to that shop for a packet of naphtha balls, a needle, a particular kind of button and what not. My friend and ace photography artist, Deepak John Mathew takes me to a small shop one day in Ahmedabad and he asks for something very peculiar and the shop owner gets it for him, again from the darkness of that shop. Deepak, without knowing my familiarity with Alladin’s shops tells me that this is an Alladin’s shop.

I have a reason to write about Alladin’s shop. In Delhi there is a book store, Midlands, at the Aurobindo Market. I am a regular visitor there. Three generations of people run there, a father, son and grandson. The shop displays the pictures of famous writers who have visited or visit there with the owner. Newspapers have written about this book shop and the people run it. It is not a huge book stall like Landmark or Crosswords. It has a reception area which is less than ten feet long and eight feet wide and at the billing counter one person could hardly stand. Crossing this area there is a bigger room stacked with books and there is an attic space where also book are displayed. That makes the Midland book store. I am told that it has another branch in Delhi but I have never visited this. I have visited most of the book stores in Delhi but this one became a regular haunt for me because if I ask for any book, without consulting the computer or anything they tell me whether it is available or not. If it is available, out of the thousands of books stacked up there (mostly without much of labeling like history, biography, new arrivals, sports, self help etc etc) they pick it up and hand over it to me. It is really magical. It is not just about the titles and authors that they know by heart, as seasoned book sellers, they know even the contents of the books. I have seen so many scholars from reputed universities and journalists thronging there and asking for advice about certain new arrivals. It is not coming out of practice or real home work; it comes from the passion with which they handle their profession. They love it and they feel it.

A sense of nostalgia and longing became so intense for this book stall when I recently visited one of the famous book store chains in a mall in Mumbai. I was looking for a particular book. As I could not see it in its designated section I went to the counter and asked for it. There were at least ten uniformed boys and girls to help the book lovers to select and find their books. As the corporate norms tell them, they went to check the name of the book in the computer and found that there were two copies available in the stock. Then they came out with me to check it in the shelves. Almost for one hour they checked the whole book stall to find out the book. But unfortunately they could not locate one. They did not have even any clue about the author or the book. Then I asked for another book and a girl in charge told me that it should be in one particular section. I told her that I had already checked there and could not find, she came with me to only to offer me another book written by another author, almost sounding like the one that I demanded. ‘Will it do?’ she asked me.  I gave her a very good smile and walked out of the book stall.  While walking out, I was just remembering the Alladins in Delhi and their art of selling books.