Living And Existing...

Living for oneself is such a waste of life. A moment of kindness, a glimpse of compassion or a small act of selflessness gives so much more meaning to our lives rather than the accumulation of things and stuff. It is in these moments of puritanical humanity, that we find a glimpse into goodness and into the art of living.

In all our other mundane activities that we associate with our routine, we simply touch a fraction of the surface of just existing. But in the warmth and immediate welling of love for another, we find the great mysteries of being present on this planet and experiencing the magnanimity of it's awesome wonder. Living and existing are two different things, and people who have never practiced selflessness in their lives do not know the meaning of living.

Death is perhaps a far better companion than a life that has lost its capacity for kindness. At least the silence isn’t capable of cruelty…

The Ant

The soft hymns of penmanship ring through the silence of the house,

As blue lines form sentences on the crude white vastness of paper

Magic occurring before my eyes; as words strung together begin to form ideas,

The birth of surreal order from the chasms of sweet chaos.

From the periphery of my vision – I sense a stirring, of

Instinctual repulsion; unreasonable and primitive.

An ant ambled by, and found that my piece of paper

Was inviting turf, for its ant-ish deeds.

As it squirmed its way here and there, its antennae

Were interpreting the world in a riot of activity

She slowed and stopped at one place, where I flicked her off the paper,

And onto the ground she landed – where she belonged.

And as soon as I flicked her away, a sharp pain rose within me,

For I knew I had wronged.

I had wronged for all the right reasons; so I had to right my wrongs,

Right away!

So, I searched for that little ant, rejected and hurt

Nursing its bruises from the fall, I thought

Yet there she was, on the ground, climbing again,

Up the table legs, with those sturdy legs and sturdier convictions

My lost compassion didn’t deter her, she gave me another chance

As she found herself being brought back to that sheet of paper

Whence she was once flung off, the edge of the world

And there she stood, her antennae bobbing in a flurry again

I brought my head down to the table, so that our eyes,

Met each other in a fleeting inter-species glance

And in that moment, I learnt that she was singing

Songs of silence; that made me a smile, just for a while.

And I was grateful for it all…

Who Speaks For Earth?

The normalcy of the day struck me as incredibly serene. Rewatched bits and pieces of that lovely movie, ‘Contact’ based on Carl Sagan’s book by the same name. Every time I read something written by Dr. Sagan or watch an interview of the man, I am struck by an aching silence within the depths of my existence. A person who has contributed so much to my world view, my beliefs, my knowledge of our resplendent universe – with his enigmatic presence and exceedingly calming voice made way into my heart and held my finger, and opened the window of my heart and mind to a greater ‘out-there’. He not only taught me why it's important to look at the world from a skeptical yet numinous world view, but also taught me how we ought to temper our rationale with compassion and empathy for our fellow human beings, and our organic cousins!

An alexithymic feeling of inexpressibility seizes me as I try to imagine what meeting him would’ve been like. Perhaps, I would’ve said to him ‘’You’re the biggest reason I have such a burning passion for scientific endeavours and why I look at the world, the way that I do’’ or I’d suggest to him, ‘’Make the next Cosmos series more enlightening and numinous than the last!’’ or maybe, I’d just want to express my gratitude with a simple ‘’Thank you.’’ Alas, I can do neither of those things for the man who returned the word ‘’spirituality’’ into my vocabulary once more by giving it a secular context, the man who taught me of the great men and women of Abdoura, Alexandria, and the Upanishads, the man who they call Carl Sagan… is no more. Carl Sagan once said, that if he possessed the means to travel backwards in time he would surely go and explore the bibliographical wonders of the ancient library of Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt. If I ever came across such a machination of wonder, I would take it back when Carl Sagan was producing the series ‘Cosmos’ and watch the master at work in complete rapture! Or perhaps watch him work his other work of wonder 'Contact' and ask him how he managed to write such a literary piece of genius? 

And then perhaps, we could go on our mighty adventures together! Dr. Sagan, me and the time machine! I suppose, this is quickly evolving into some wondrous work of fiction paralleling that brilliant show from across the Atlantic – Doctor Who. So, before I digress further, I want to say, thank you Carl Sagan. I do not believe in the after life and I do not believe you are reading or partaking in this experience in any way. Except perhaps, the molecules that reside in my body once passed through yours in their eternal yet ephemeral march; for after all you were the one that taught me that, we are all the children of the stars and connected in a physical and existential way to each other.

In the last episode of his defining work, 'Cosmos'' he famously asked,

''We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth?''

If there was one human being who could personify all that was wondrous and noble and decent and eloquent about our species and our planet, it would be Carl Sagan.

You speak for the Earth, Dr. Sagan!

The Great North

We were heading to Peterborough again. It’s a little town (more of a village, really) north of Toronto where a family friend resides with his wife and three lively children. He was actually a colleague of my fathers in India before he immigrated to Canada and we followed suit.

I was excited to leave because I hadn’t been to the place in months and the added news of the family leaving for the Middle-East sometime soon made me even more eager to meet them. I looked out the window and grey hulking masses were slumbering across the sky and oddly enough it made my heart jump with joy. The drive from the GTA to Peterborough, you see, is a gorgeous one filled with verdant meadows and farms with little barns and cattle/horses grazing in the pastures whilst the rain clouds rumbled in the distance. Now, when the rain accompanies you on such a drive, not only does it make the drive better but in some weird relativistic physics analogy, makes the distance seem shorter as well.

The lush green foliage and the tapering roofs spilling all their water in gentle abundance is a treat for eyes that sorely miss the Himalayan monsoons. But the rain is delicious everywhere and so I wasn’t complaining. We journeyed across the Ontarian countryside and I took it all in as the verdant green of everything around me, was evoking that same feeling I felt when I was ambling through the fields of Ladakh.

I miss those fields and I miss those mountains, but home, here in Ontario, Canada isn’t so bad either. A different beauty greets me here. One that is tempered with diversity that reminds me of why I sprouted my wings of adulthood in a broad expanse of intellectual splendour and was able to become who I am today. I owe my liberality, a large share of my values and my habit of tolerance mostly to the vast fortitudes of the great north. 

Vive La Révolution

When you see maddening injustice and a flood of sickening oppression,

And choose to shout out ‘’We’re human beings, dammit!’’ and struggle against it

You are my comrade!

When you see the exploitation of people, by putrid members of their own species

And choose to become a scourge against these fucking vultures,

You are my comrade!

When you see disunity amongst the ranks of the well-meaning few,

And want to unite them under one sweeping crimson banner in the winds of strife,

You are my comrade!

When you see corporate power and governments trample the weak,

And you choose to rip out their stenchful hearts into your bloodied hands,

You are my comrade!

When you see the people wallowing in a rancid pool of complacency and self-pity,

And wish to shake them out of their disgusting apathy and cowardly servitude,

You are my comrade!

When you see the voiceless billions, who writhe in suspended agony,

And wish to become the voice of the countless lives of quiet desperation,

You are my comrade!

Together, we become the revolution!

And then fingers, form a fist,

The rivers form an ocean,

And in this tumult of clichés

Of a united front of humanity…

We hear those ancient calls,

That propel us; that push us forward

Towards the doom of our times

Where the fate of this fragile blue planet

Hangs on a thread of human ingenuity and resolve

We make our stand here…

Black

As I was watching a Hindi cinema (Who the hell says cinema!? Apparently, I do!) called 'Black', two sentences caught my attention. In the movie, a teacher of a deaf, mute and blind girl is struggling to empower the girl. He, despite the girl’s fortuitous hard work, is stumbling on that path. Yet there are moments of inspiring success that dot their path as they continue towards their goal. So they decide to celebrate – with ice-cream! And he says, ‘’Life is an ice-cream Mrs. McNally. Enjoy it before it melts.’’

And that resonates with something sincerely simple and true within the very fabric of our reality, that you’re bound to smile at it with a certain pyrrhic sadness. Its truth lies in the impermanence of all things – whether it be the witnessing of an ice-cream slowly melting away in the soft warmth of a summer’s evening; or the withering of a human body that is slowly marching towards its inevitable demise.

So, if you ever wonder why someone marches to their certain death with an aura of peace and contentment, it is because a realization has dawned upon the person that all death is certain. And that is the essence of all enlightenment.

The Insanity Within

The snow softly piled on, layer upon layer, as the day waned into the evening and my thoughts turned to the past. Out of the ruminations of the mind, the past brought up a bunch of memories that rarely come to me. One such memory was of the instance when we went to a Buddhist temple in Dadar, Mumbai when I was about 7-8 years old. Our entire family, including the cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents (the whole lot!) went together and us children were enjoying a game of indulging in plain silliness (what that was I can’t seem to recollect) which might have been observed by some of the monks there. When we were about to leave, we went to get blessings from the monks and dropped some money into the donation box. That is when one of the monks inquired my father, ‘’Is your son not sound of mind!?” My father, trying to smother his spurt of laughter, simply said ‘’No’’. I looked at the monk with a snide glance full of malice and hatred, as even then I understood the man implied I perhaps was residing somewhere on the autistic spectrum. I hated him more because he implied that autism was ‘’madness’’ and not a mental disability, rather than hating him for calling me a mad child. But, now I understand why he might have thought so.

Maybe, I do have a certain ‘’madness’’ within me that I like to think of something inherently wild that can never be subdued by the inane and mundane mediocrity of life. At the danger of sounding incredibly pretentious, perhaps the monk was terrified that he could never obtain that sense of madness. Some of the best things in life are rippling with a madness that makes us realize the true depths and serene wonders of the universe. Our species’ mightiest thinkers, scientists, leaders, both men and women, have possessed this madness for life that perhaps pervaded them and made them extraordinary. The madness of taking risks, the madness of not caring what others think or conforming to society’s absurd standards. Isn’t that a madness too, that makes the ‘’them’’ separate from the ‘’us’’. Isn’t that what we resort to everyday to find that wall of security where life is all wondrously boring and calm. Shunning that madness that fills you everyday is the way we die slowly, until the breath escapes our bodies and the thumping of the heart stops. I revel in my madness, for I contain this spark and wish to walk upon the road to greatness and perhaps … empathy and kindness. For there is no magic and there is no madness as great as kindness.

I want to revel in it all…

Fellow 'madman', although of another calibre of genius altogether!