On a night like this..

From among the leaves, shiny and wet, thickly meshed over glistening girth of wood, the yellowish light from a lamp-post erect with an aura of eeriness manages to show itself as a tiny blot as I look through my window. The rain is banging the ground hard and the music is driving my senses crazy. This is life, I say. The immobile life is in a state of trance. The essence of motion is pouring down from above. And from among the immobile life, a man, robed totally in synthetic balloon-jacket, heads down and dry under a hood, walks by the yellowish haze, with a suggestion of a supernatural gait. A march of life. A celebration of life. The darkness of the hour hides in its arms the mundaneness, and something from the heaven comes down to cleanse the world under, unleashing the beauty and mysteriousness that the light of the day keeps us from seeing. This is life, I say. It's time for rain to play, let it play. Nature alone and no human intervention. Let nature sing for itself and I shall listen. Your song is beautiful, I say. And from among the immobile life, a lean man with his lungi wrapped up around his knees, head covered in an umbrella, walks slowly down the road, with a suggestion of a natural gait. A hint of scarcity? Blessed is the man of scarcity who can walk down the street with an umbrella on a night like this. Beauty lies in the eyes of scarcity. It rains for the sake of scarcity on Earth. This is life, I say.

I gaze through my window to see more.

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Ideas

This is a small essay that I had written during the third semester for a friend of mine to be linked to on his webpage. When I Googled for "Muralidhar Dasar", I found this article among the top search results. On reading it again,it kind of gave me the motivation I was looking for. Something that was really missing these days. And...this is how it goes:

Ideas:


Powerful ideas come from powerful minds. And powerful ideas often have enough potential to prove themselves on ground. All that we are today and all that we see around today is the material manifestation of great ideas by great men, most of whom are themselves lost in the darkness of an infinite past but their ideas dictate the present. Ideas are the stuff the world is made of, ladies and gentlemen. Ideas have been the primary driving forces of civilizations and they continue to drive the world today with unchanged vigor.

Ideas are the solid bricks that mankind has long been laying to elevate his presence to higher levels. This is a process that started with the first man and will only stop with humanity getting effaced off the face of this planet. This is a continuous process and we cannot hope to stop it. The only question that needs an answer is what idea you have up your sleeves to contribute to this world. And if your idea is strong enough for the rest of humanity to follow, then you lead people to a new direction, show them newer avenues and most importantly explore your limits and push your horizon further. Ideas become immortal, running through the bloodstream of the generations to follow.

You must have heard of the tiger and the goat story – a tiger growing up in the company of goats and failing to see the strength hidden inside. This precisely applies to a majority of the human mass. “Why have great ideas?” is an appropriate question to ask. The answer simply is “Why not?” It is completely up to us to decide what horde of Spirits we wish to belong to – the innovators or the mere followers. Being innovators is about realizing the tiger within our minds. It is about bringing a smile on the face of our fellow beings. It is about inspiring men and eventually being closer to God by being closer to ourselves. Anyone on this planet can lead a lazy life. How good is it to lazily move through days, like an insect moving through flowers, failing to see the nectar?

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Free(doom) ?

His 136th birth anniversary. I remember singing 'Gandhian' songs in school on this occasion of Gandhi Jayanthi.
Vaishnav Janato...
Raghupati raghav raja ram...
It used to be a two hour function with all our teachers and a few students present for the occasion. The function would be led by our good old music teacher and a few kids training under her would be on the tabla and the harmonium, the rest would simply join the vocalist.
Brings good memories.

It fascinates me thinking of the 'khadi' days and thinking of Gandhi, his followers, his nationalistic movements, his fellow champions and a nation they loved so dearly. Freedom. They fought for it. They died for it. We have all read about it in our history text-books, listened to so many lectures, seen so many documentaries, seen movies. But to understand the essence of freedom, I believe, is something that will never happen to us.

The word freedom brings to my memory a few spellbinding lines of poetry, which also happen to be the lines of the title song of a popular kannada TV serial. It is so much hard for me to relate to the 'freedom' that Gandhi stood for. The lines go something like this:

"Mogge inda sere odeda gandha, hoovindha doora doora,
Elluntu aache teera?"



When translated literally, it means:
The fragrance of a flower that is in chains inside a bud liberates itself into the eternity of space, moves away and away from the flower.... but where lies the other end to this liberation?

This very much is the story of freedom. Very much the story of a freedom that the nation celebrates. Freedom leaves us directionless in an eternity of possibilities. And every generation tries to render freedom a direction. The direction of progress, industrialization, 8% GDP growth is what we consider should be the direction of our attained freedom today. The direction might change tomorrow with climatic concerns overtaking the dollar concern. Or when we succeed in making sufficent dollars, but still find ourselves starving, we may choose to take the direction of spirituality, religion. Freedom throws us open into an infinitude of possiblilities. But where lies the other end to this freedom?