"...bhumaiva sukham." Part II

Love is related to what and who one values. If one asks oneself whether knowledge or creative work or spouse or family or friend or child or others or lover or Self or God is what is most valuable – then one also knows who and/or what one loves. It normally could be and is a combination. And along with love and the being-ness that comes with every human being (the being-ness being what a human being contains and is like and as s/he appears to us: what we normally like or dislike or love or are repulsed by, and sometimes on first sight) – there is the matter of doing. This, I believe, is set early on in life. Of what and who matter and of who and what make life meaningful and what sort of work can make life a joy. Or conversely, of what does not matter and what cannot make life meaningful in and of themselves. If one also feels strongly, early on in life that life must have a meaning and a purpose for being; that one’s life must make an absolute difference somehow to the world (by leaving a creation or an invention or a discovery in the widest sense) or to someone – otherwise one wouldn’t be here – then one keeps working and searching until one finds one’s reason.

For some, it might be one or the other - here relations can come and go and even one’s husband can die – but one’s work remains: Marie Curie was of this sort. For Joan, it was her work as a warrior and her inner voice. For some it is one’s God, no holds barred – as it was for Meera. For William, it was working and living and fighting and competing and laughing and jousting and loving and being with Phillipa; when Phillipa was gone – there was no life; ‘love was done’. For some it is a combination thereof. Other examples come to mind – but these will do for now.

Maybe some people are blessed to find their reason very early on and maybe many people are not. Sometimes, one is rather old before one gets to know (and especially if one has an awkwardness and contradictoriness about one’s character) what one can do in concrete terms. But if one persists in and with love, one can act on that knowing if one hasn’t become too senile or too deranged to act or think or be a human being and one then finds and is ‘given’ different ways (through what feel like miracles - and for those who might find that peculiar - well, there is something called serendipity no matter if some numbskulls find that stuff airy-fairy) such that a few of one’s deeply felt ‘desires [can be] coordinated in the light of knowledge’ (that’s another quote that’s been wandering around with me for awhile). One can’t go back in time to fix anything and one doesn’t become utterly fault free or even all-knowing and knows not much more than what one felt in the soul at 11, but as in terms of acting upon what one knows - one can indeed try with everything one has got.

If one lives life by one principle of what one can let go of and what doesn’t matter and what is inconsequential – and if death isn’t too keen on paying one a call and through time as one sees death in different ways - one is left with who and what one values and loves. This may not entail cutting off everything and everyone else certainly – it simply makes one very clearly and consciously and rather dispassionately make certain choices - and it doesn’t force anyone to live like a hermit, but it does entail a clear hierarchy in one’s mind and within. At some point in time, one finds oneself echoing Khshana, “naalpey sukhamasti, bhumaiva sukham.” And sometimes adds, to the universe, when one is being cross-questioned by one’s deepest friend - “but, but, and but - how can it now be otherwise?!”

**About the header quote and of what it means - and for those who don't know what it is about - this is what Suvro da had told me quite some time ago: the sage Khshana had been asked by the king, who was impressed by her wisdom, of what she would like as a gift. She answered with those lines: ‘naalpey sukhamasti, bhumaiva sukham.’ ‘Trifles don’t interest me – so let me be. Nothing barring the universe in entirety will make me happy.’ I don’t know whether Khshana indeed did get what she desired but I have the feeling that she must have. And different people would have different ideas as to what comprises of one’s universe and the matter of happiness, cheer, joy and suchlike. This post is connected to Einstein's words as well as Vivekananda's and more - but so much for this very long post which I split up in two.

"**...bhumaiva sukham" Part I

Said the ancient sage. It has been a part of a sentence that has stayed around and about for quite some time. No prizes for guessing who told me about the quote. The title of this post is connected to a question, which barring a few months of my life and very early years has stayed with me – ‘why is one not dead?’. Some weeks ago when I visited a dentist to get my teeth cleaned for the first time in my life, and the dentist was telling me that if I did not take care of my teeth – they would rot and fall out, I couldn’t help but say (while having funny memories of Florentino Ariza among some other images tickling me) that I was hoping not to be around for that long, and she shushed me. Back in my college days, I used to say that I didn’t know why I didn’t kick the bucket instead of kicking the stone on the road – and nobody much cared for that line.

The question that floats around or comes barging in sometimes is, “why is [one] not dead?”. It is connected to the question - “why, on earth…is one alive?”. Sometimes while walking and feeling strangely disconsolate and discombobulated – the same thought strums in “well you’re not dead – so, there's a reason.” Through the rushing of time and the dripping of time in the hourglass and the motionless of time, if one looks at life – one can see patterns if one is old enough (and feels much through sometimes faultless intuition when one is very young). One can observe patterns – no matter how impossible – and one can take note of many mundane and not-so-mundane incidents: people encountered, people remembered, off-beat experiences, a person remembered, career choices not made, relationships which suddenly caught spring showers and came alive, relationships which died sudden and sometimes slow deaths, professional awards, places seen, career setbacks, realizations which stayed, roads taken and not taken, risks taken and avoided, knowledge growing like a dream and meeting sometimes with realizations, fate tempted, fragrances forgotten which on their return shoot out jumbled (and sometimes maybe conjured memories), songs that send a pang, writings and stories which send a jolt through one’s being, poems re-read, waking and sleep dream-images remembered, coincidences repeated, love encountered... If one threads through and very insidiously and watches the pattern as best as one can while being a part of it and sometimes from a laughing and sometimes dispassionate distance, one can find an answer to why one isn’t dead as yet. One goes through a steady process of ‘not this, not this, not this…’ as one subconsciously and consciously and sometimes even rather desperately and in despair searches for reasons that one is not dead. It is in the eye of the storm that one sees what one needs to.

How one chances upon the ‘this…?’ this…?’ ‘Is it really this?’ ‘Can this be the reason?..’ ‘this has to be it’ - is probably a unique experience for different individuals – but I am convinced that most people can find out their reason/s for living  – whether by digging into the reason that they are not in the grave or by asking themselves: ‘what makes life worth living?’ ‘What makes overarching sense in life - no matter the pain and the heartache and the greyness and the loneliness and looniness and incomprehensibility that linger like a fog as one walks…?’ – One would have to make a list then. One would have to see what makes life feel like an almost completed jigsaw puzzle or like a steadily clearer one and what are mere flirtations or in fact silly distractions or simply choices that go only thus far and no further, no matter how one tries. One would have to make a list of all that makes life meaningful for one – indeed all that comprises Life. One would have to think of the sparks of joy that one feels and when that is ignited and why...

It could be a delusion. But if it is a delusion which cannot be knocked out no matter how hard one has tried and in spite of how hard one has resisted and doubted and despite all tradition and convention and established knowledge – even unconventional but established knowledge – it is not a delusion then. If in the deepest part of one’s Self there is an incessant call which is backed every now and then by an external knowing of what/who matters (and does not matter) and of what/who is important (and unimportant) or of what makes sense only in a particular context – it can’t be a delusion. It is a personal journey and it can be a terribly lonely journey too sometimes – when everything and almost everyone in the outer world says that one is wrong and deluded - and one cannot sometimes make sense of what is real or merely imagined or is a mix of both and one makes horrible errors but one can keep walking, knowing that for whatever one is –  one does indeed walk with one’s God within and for crystal clear bits of time in this world as well, and even if one does not know or understand all as how one would like to, one senses in an unshakeable way that there is a reason that one is walking along. When one stays close to one’s deepest and highest love/s – one knows that for better or worse and no matter how strange or unusual or lonely or dark or plain puzzling the going seems sometimes, one is walking the path that one is meant to…

Unusual ads about reading and writing, and odd memories

I have been seeing/hearing songs on youtube every now and then, and an advertisement came up. Normally I wait for the 'skip ad' button and click it immediately and yet I watched through two ads. They're on Neil Gaiman, made by Blackberry (!). I've never read anything written by him. Now I have. I read a very well-written short story, thanks to somebody who told me to 'go read the story'. which will stay inside. Here it is.

...the ads are a quiet delight for what he says about reading and about books and the way they've been made. I don't even know what the whole idea is about behind "A Calendar of Tales" and haven't found out as yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF7-15KQQS4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lc8TEZvMJFk

It got me thinking again of whether it is true that the longer one lives the more life becomes a matter of memories, the quiet ability to see the patterns and emerging connections in life and the matter of one's life showing a pattern - and a determined pattern at that even though one can't see ahead. Almost like this is how it could have been given some of the choices that one made early enough in life and yet without the matter of complete "knowledge" at hand, and so one waits...

Not to get too absorbed in memories but the two ads reminded me with a low exclamation of a very odd bit about "missed careers" again. No regrets but it is somewhat amusing to think that by the time I was in high school I was fairly sure that I could work in the ad world unless I became, maybe, a psychologist... I was probably one of the few nuts who used to wait for commercials. This was long before the day of cable TV in India. I waited for good ads, made notes in my head about them and used to keep a track of them the way I used to make written notes about "movies to watch" or which had been watched when in school (with books I was more flexible - I tried to read whatever looked good and what came as recommendations). And then came cable TV a long time later. I think the ads of Shell (yep - the oil company with beautiful music playing in the background; I think it was Dire Straits' "Local Hero"), Nescafe and Titan watches (which made that piece by Mozart something that anybody could hum) came with cable TV. And yet there had been Gold Spot and Mazaa and Amul and also some ad on a soft drink with George Benson's song ("Nothing's gonna change my love for you"...Jesus, it's been a long time) playing in the background before the explosion of cable TV. I was hooked on to ads because they felt like mini movies with a story-line, conversations and/or music. I even kept a note of nasty and stupid ads, and as a child I had embarrassed a whole room of people, who were watching a movie and talking during the commercial breaks, by yelling out why the ad didn't tell us what the specific product was all about.

And then came college. And I was still sure that I could work in the ad world and make little movies. There was a TV program called "The Dream Merchants" and I watched it with as much enthusiasm as I watched docs on Discovery and "The X files" and "Picket Fences" and "Chicago Hope". I was studying Sociology on the side, of course, but thinking more about Sociology than actually studying it. And I can't remember any longer when the slow wave of realization hit: that normal and regular ads always sold a product. No, more than that. Ads sold a particular brand of a particular product. I didn't see that before. The purpose of ads and what they were designed to do. It felt most peculiar to realize that those sometimes lovely, charming, beautiful, breathless, naughty, mischievous, and even risqué little movies were actually all geared to make us into loyal consumers of a particular brand. And with brand names becoming some sort of a status symbol (it was the same way by the time I was in college but not quite as bad) and a very market-driven idea or at least a very gross and superficial idea of what matters in life and that happiness can be purchased at some price or with a product (no matter if it's a glorious ad like some of the ads that Coca-Cola came up with or funny ads that Pepsi came up with during the cricket season or the Visa ad) - I couldn't imagine that I had missed this central bit about advertisements earlier.

Quite some years ago, there was a qualitative sociologist who gave an open lecture in the university and quite a few of us had tramped over to hear him speak. There was free food too. The expert went into a long account of how sociologists could bring about happiness by working in the corporate world and with the media and in the advertising world too and how sociologists had the great power to bring about good and positive change. One of his examples rankled terribly: about a little child in India smiling after using a particular brand of toothpaste. I'm not kidding. I waited for him to finish his long lecture and there was the applause and then the usual "any questions". I shot out questions and gave him a sound drubbing. There were no follow-up questions. The then Head of the Sociology and Anthropology department later on admitted to me in private that somebody had to tell the guest speaker that he had gone-over-the-top and he was glad that it was me, and he asked me what my field was in anthropology. I had looked at him and grinned and said that I was in the Sociology department actually.

The story doesn't end there. Later on a friend and I got into an argument. She didn't think there was anything wrong about ads or that a sociologist or any social scientist was any better than somebody working in the ad world. Her piece was that education was the same as the world of advertisements. That teachers, educators, professors, researchers were "sellers" or at the best, were trying to sell whatever they wanted to and therefore were in the same league as advertisers; that teachers and professors were no better than admen and adwomen - not even in the ideal type. The ugly argument - and the first one with that particular friend - from so many years ago still stays. So much for that. Yes, of course, teaching and being a teacher in the ideal sense are just the same as being an advertiser selling some brand in the market and brainwashing people into believing that "things" and "brands" can buy happiness. Right. I wonder at odd intervals whether when she is teaching and researching and winning many academic accolades whether she remembers what she said that evening so many years ago or whether she even believed in what she had said or was simply arguing with an in-fashion cynicism or whether the fact that she herself had worked with the ad world and the corporate world for a few years made her see things without much discrimination or whether it is faintly possible that she was merely tired with the way average academicians are. Who knows. I never found out because the discussion became an argument that got out-of-hand. I knew I was right then and I know I was right all along: no teacher, worth his name, is an adman.

Anyhow, the two ads that I linked - and they did turn up as ads seem and sound to be ads with a difference, and I liked them.
P.S: Here's another ad I remembered - from a few years ago. It's one I used to show in class every semester once I chanced upon it from the worldchanging website, which I used to visit from Suvro da's blog.

Damascus Nights

Sometimes I carefully choose books and pieces or conversations to read or re-read and sometimes I don’t know what exactly I want to read and sometimes I know exactly what I would love to read but know I can’t right then, and sometimes I cannot read much because the head doesn’t really follow written words the way a head normally does. Sometimes when a book or a piece of writing comes with a recommendation  or a reminder – I find myself unable to resist the call, and so run out to the library or try to wait for the book to turn up (sometimes it does) or click on a button to place an order or simply read the piece if it is readily available. 

Sometimes a book or a piece jumps on me and tells me that I’m supposed  to read it. This happens every now and then – and especially when I badly want to read something but not much is pervading my reading consciousness, and I think sadly that there is nothing that I will pick out because I won’t be able to read it anyway. 

I finished reading a book late the night before last. Only it already seems such a painfully long time ago. Damascus Nights by Rafik Schami. I had some quiet moments just sitting on top of the heat vent with a blanket on my legs thinking about the book and not thinking that I needed to write about it and feeling sadly that I’d probably even forget I read the book some months down the line or not be able to remember the book anyway. The book had practically jumped out of the book-shelf at me and I didn’t know the writer nor had heard about the book but the title and something about the blurb which I suddenly had no problems understanding made me pick it out and it seemed to be a tiny enough book, which could be read and finished within a space of an evening or two at the most – no matter what other tasks one needed to finish. The tiny tale had me transfixed and the best way to put it in is to say that the book had me enchanted as I sat for a bit late in the night wondering about life and the matter of life being a matter of places, people and of stories involving places and people... There’s a quoted line in an essay I’ve read often, ‘The universe is not made of atoms – it is made of stories.’ And recently and very often a line from the first Hindi movie I watched – a line by Amitabh about ‘unfinished stories’ makes me feel not only wistful but terribly sad, and yet makes me feel equally sure that for some stories one must simply walk and wait to see where they go. Some stories from books and some stories within the space of life simply cannot be predicted the whole way through and one has to simply turn the pages. I didn’t think I’d be writing about this book today, and I won’t digress any more but I resisted the feeling of having to write about the book saying I had a few things that simply have to be finished and can’t write about books too well anyway – but there is the nagging prod to write about the book, and so I shall save time and write some.

I’ll try not to give away the tale – and the odd thing is that one cannot really give away the tale anyway. For the tiny book must be read to be savoured. It is done in the style of the classic 1001 Nights, in a way – maybe that’s why I picked the book when it jumped on me instead of putting it back firmly in its place on the shelf. The book has tales running through it and nestling within and some of the stories have to do with the life of the main characters and some of them are simply narrated tales living within narrated tales ensconced within the main tale about the unlikely hero – a very old and odd coachman who decided to be a coachman in Syria and traveled far and wide (but not that far and wide really) because he couldn’t stand the idea of being anything else and even though being a coachman in Syria was not safe nor the most respectable profession to join (people used to avoid it if they could) – he didn’t give two hoots about it. The coachman is the teller of tales, and he realizes at one point that that is what keeps his travelers hooked to his coach. This is but one tale and the book unfurls in a peculiar way for it is about friendship and how seven of his friends who gather together and every evening – seven odd and old friends who are clear characters in the book too, from the genial but poor barber who sells songbirds and is known as a miser but isn’t really one but who cannot help counting every head of hair and bushy beard as money for his family and he too has stories to tell and stories to hear which make his clients come back to him for their next haircut or shave in spite of the nicks received sometimes….to the coachman’s best friend who simply cannot tell a tale when it comes down to him to narrate one and so he brings his wife to tell a tale among the gathering of old men…and so the book takes the reader through a strange collection of characters and stories wrapped in stories with the number seven occupying some significance - and the most beautiful tale within another springs in the middle of the book: of a red star following a silver white one and the young man Shafak who lives partly in a dream world and the real world and yet tosses a pearl back into the sky and disappears, and one is convinced that he finds everlasting happiness – for that is what he was searching for. 

The book is placed in real socio-historical and political time in Syria between 1959-1963, and the political disturbances and the dark horrors and the shuffle in dictators, of neighbouring states, of the secret spies and the young boys who disappear and families which are left to be, pensions which are not received, soldiers and policemen who wait to overhear suspicious sounding words, poor orphans who are given a  home and treated as family, noisy and nosy neighbours, unpleasant people too…all fill the tiny book too and yet with such a laughing and easy grace and sometimes naughty and mischievous humour that one simply runs with the flow and the dark shadows aren’t allowed to hover over one’s shoulder – it’s almost like the book and one’s mind and watchful thoughts pursuing the tale carefully don’t allow one to sit and brood. The old men are cantankerous, querulous, sometimes even suspicious, and they argue a whole lot, and they are unpredictable, not always likeable and not all of them equally and yet they are friends of the coachman and they want – more than anything else in the world - him to be back in his old form as the teller of tales, and there is a camaraderie and love that simply cannot be defined in words. They are not rich at all nor are they all so poor that they cannot laugh or commiserate or love beauty and they come with their eccentricities and their obstinacies and yet all of them love the coachman and they are human beings and one cannot help liking them as they argue and quarrel and show their genuine concern and drink their cups of coffee or tea and cogitate and meditate on their water pipes. 

One gets to read about ‘hakawatis’ who are the narrators of tales and who frequented the cafes of Damascus and who tempted the clients by the old ruse of leaving a hanging tale so that the listeners would come back the following evening. One reads about a woman, Leila  – who nobody could keep tied to a place, not the prince who loved her and nor her husband who loved her because she wanted to roam the world and tell stories – and she stays in Damascus only to give birth to and bring up her daughter and then leaves without saying too much once the daughter is 18 and is married. The old coachman’s wife who visits him in a vivid sleep dream in a blue velvet dress after he falls asleep in a full-bellied fuzzy state and in a mosque after an interesting but curious day right after he receives his pension suddenly (I started feeling a bit like the old coachman through his day long wandering around his town). His wife tells him that she didn’t have a choice but to die first because she couldn’t stand being without him for she got bored without him and had never been able to stand being bored; and she goes on to say when he is looking hurt that yes-yes she knew that he had always been so much in love with her all along but for her, life with him had been worrisome yes, tension-ridden yes – but boring – never, and so she had loved life with him…, and his wife in her fine way reminds him in a hilarious scene that the oh-so-beautiful-platter that he just about bought is ‘errr – missing?’ and so he shoots awake – the old man. Being scolded by his beautiful muse in another dream because he has the tendency to ramble and forget when he’s rambling. The little boy who loves the coachman and hears the thoughts of the coachman because the old coachman shares even his thoughts with this little boy (who is the official narrator, I guess of the whole tale) even when the coachman is not speaking with anybody else…. Oh, how does one begin to write about a rambling, spinning book like this or even say much about it.

The book charmed me and at so many levels and in so many places and just when I needed it and was ready for it. It enchants for it makes the reader see and yet again just why one loves companionship and also through stories and tales even though they feel like such personal and ‘non-useful’ deep delights, and loves to both hear and tell stories and tales and share stuff by the fireside and through the changing seasons. The book talks about the power of the imagination to seduce when one is least expecting it or believes one is far too old (if not wise) to be seduced and its power to run through and chase through life – life, which could come across as nothing but dreary and being a drudgery and a drag and a bore unless it feels and is frightening and somehow meaningless and in its chaotic flux or stupor – as it slips in to take us higher in its magic, just so as to make a couple of dreams or more come real, and the book blurs the line between dreams and reality, and very gently and very easily and sometimes sharply and suddenly and yet so divinely and therefore naturally. It speaks about the power of different kinds of love, and also of easy and unconditional love which both demands nothing and demands more than one knows but one senses, and precisely because it becomes unconditional – the ‘why’ is a matter which never stops perplexing one. One keeps guessing about more things than I can write and till the last page and never really stops guessing but even that is part of the joy which fills one soul and the trusty friend in the mind seems to get even sprightlier while egging one on to laugh without feeling bad or sad and keeps saying, “See how a tale develops? That’s how one needs to weave a tale…”…and so one sees the tale yet again in little movie clips: the old, laughing and somewhat mysterious coachman who is a teller of tales and who stops speaking altogether, and his friends…, the old coachman who had another incomparable gift – of healing sparrows and making them fly again, the tale within tales of fables and myths and magic, and a couple of shared dreams that might just become real within the given space of now and the sand left in the hourglass...

I’m not sure sometimes about life and sometimes I get panic stricken while life keeps running at a maddening pace through the hour-glass and yet sometimes I am told to look at it from a distance and in its meaning and sense evoking moments which are sharp and clarified and it would seem then that one simply must play as well and hard and with whatever gifts and goofs that God and one’s creator and one’s pilot has armed one with and take some moments to be a human being and then walk with renewed faith that life connected is a mix of darkness, reality, light and winking magic and certainly a few mysterious miracles even though one knows one errr...is a crank and even a sinner but no saint – not by a long shot.

Words again

Language still confuses me and words too, and sometimes I utterly fail to understand human language when my senses are terribly woolly or heightened in a peculiar way. I muddle over using the right words and use wrong words and especially when feelings are evoked through a particular word. I use words and interpret them in the way I see a word. "Law" for instance. It can mean the law laid down by an individual man in the world, by a community, law as ordained by the courts, the law of the sun and the moon and the stars and planetary motion, and the law of the universe, and even beyond - of the endless and the infinite - by the laws of Truth, Goodness, Beauty, and Love which individuals feel keenly like a divine law and irrespective of what the laws of a land might say. I will pursue the post possibly while pondering upon other words too. So much for now.