THE CONDUCTOR OF SITUATIONS(A Story?)

Don’t get me wrong , I am pretty good at judging people, just take a look at that guy sitting all by himself in that corner seat, see the hard look on his handsome face, he has had a tiff with his wife and he is off to a bar in town. I am sure of that. How do I know that? It is all from experience my friend, years and years of being a conductor. Sure as hell, he just got off at the Lucio Bar. His very step looked determined and firm. He would probably be drunk like a lord by the time we return. I would have to help him off the bus and say to him:

“Cheettaa*, take care, don’t slip down, or you won’t stand up again in a hurry.”

You see, I have a soft heart. This used to worry my Appan*:

“Seaweed, listen, we Christians in this land can’t be soft, always remember that we are living among disbelievers and we have to make use of them.”

He was probably right. But how can I be anything else than I am? I have always been soft at heart. And didn’t the lord say, “Love thy neighbor like thyself”. Well I did not quote the bible to my Appan, that would have been improper wouldn’t it? At least he contributed a sperm in my cause, and that is nothing short of wonderful considering his general out look on life.

The fact was I did love my neighbor very much at that time. The neighbor was voluptuous, and you just had to love her whether you believed in the bible or not. You know, loving yourself all the time is not very healthy even when you are young. But Appan was not amused. He seems to have something against the words of our lord at all times, though he never missed a Sunday at the church. I think he was interested in her himself, it was probably envy and you know it is always understandable in a man, even if it is your own Appan.

As they say the “earth and hearth” are behind all the troubles in the world.

I often ask my mother the truth about my incarnation. I never could believe that I came out of something he had in him. Mother’s words are gospel in the matter. No DNA test would come anywhere near it.

“Ammachi* dear, don’t lie to me, am I really his?” Of course it was all in fun.

Mother would smile and would keep chastely silent. Normally I could make the sphinx talk; it would have found me irresistible. But before my mother my tricks never flourished. She had some tricks on me too. She is the only person who can still make cry.

She is cruelty personified on those rare moments.

-Oh you know the kind of words that stab and murder you; she has done some research on them!

When she clashes with my woman, it is a battle of titans; it normally shakes the world, at least my own personal world. I wisely make myself scarce on such occasions.
Two pit vipers might reconcile, but the two-titted variety, my god, never! I can say it from my experience.

Years of being a conductor in a rickety privet bus have not taken the softness away from me. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t think that conducting is a bad job at all, it isn’t. It actually is a wonderful job; you get to see people, meet interesting characters and will always be in the middle of interesting events in life.

Oh, I know, it is not like being a Subin Mehta*, but I am a conductor too. You see, I conduct life situations -on a scale of course! Mehta, he might carry the magic wand and I might be carrying a whistle. But nevertheless it is not a lesser job.

In fact, when you think of it, I deal with more ‘notes’ than he ever could have dealt with, you know what I mean. These are the notes that matter; these are the real music behind life. Mehta wouldn’t even lift his hand if these notes were not there to make him smile.

I am dead sure that you see my point.

Well I know there is no comparison between our jobs otherwise. He moves on a stage and makes weird gestures while waving his wand, his every gesture bringing out the best in his orchestra. I can’t emulate that of course. But I move within a vast society. And ‘within’ means truly within, at close quarters, closer than perhaps you and your partner get most of the time.

Have you ever been on a local bus in the rush hours? You have to squeeze through a tightly packed mass of humanity every minute of the time. As a matter of fact I haven’t been this close to my beloved for some time. After the proximity of so many tons of flesh I usually feel numb when I touch her at night.

She is not very pleased with that at all.

“Go on pawing the shameless hussies in your bus”, she says “I am not fresh enough for you now, am I? “

Well women are always like that, never feels anything for the man, never says a nice word, it is either one demand or the other. Why did the God create the species at all? Well ………Can’t really blame the God you know, for there are also the soft touches you feel in the bus, the naughty smiles, and the quick pinches on your hand when you hand over the small change. And the aroma that they have in the freshness of the morning!

As I said the mornings are always better, for all would have bathed, powdered, and scented. Even the guys are sufferable in the morning in the total melee. But the evenings bring out the worst in them. Invariably there would be soiled faces, sour looks, bags in plenty than ever before, frayed tempers, grunts and,

“You ass, you stepped on my toe’”s. There would not be any reply for that, only a contemptuous look. All would be in a hurry.

My bus incidentally is not the fastest on the road. Others would overtake it all the time and the passengers would usually let me know, and what is bad, even lovely girls does that some time.

“Ever blush seeing the others go past?”

Blush? Why should I blush for a ten year old bus with a miser as the owner? Friends I am only the guy who pulls the bell occasionally, I don’t own it, as long as the thing runs I get my bread, if it doesn’t I may have to go to the US, for I hear that people there have taken to the buses again.


Come to think of it, if I did ever blush in my life at all, that of course was before my wife! You know how it is; it just is not possible to be the man you are before your loved wife. They have some trick by which they make you smaller than you are. It is truly terrible. You wouldn’t believe the kind of life a man leads inside a house.


“Da*, be back in a sec.”

It was Akbar, my driver calling out to me. We are at the main City Stand now. And he is off to his favorite haunt for the next half hour till he has to warm up the bus for the return journey. I bade him goodbye and stretched on the back seat to rest my back and eyes. You know looking out in this glare gets your eyes pretty tired.

Then cleaner of the bus also came with some excuse.

“And, boss, got a tenner to spare?”

He was thinking of Panparag*, I instantly knew. Very harmful stuff, yet I gave him the money. Guys have to keep their spirits up you know. With the pittance that he gets he needs some boosting up.

Now I am alone in the bus. I again stretched out on the back. The top of the bus needs painting. My eyes came down and rested on the sign “Ladies only*” over the next seat. I reached out and felt the cushions. It felt still warm though no one has placed her butt on it for some time now. I caressed it fondly and slowly fell into a reverie and then began to doze.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
These may help you through the story:

*Cheettaa= elder brother, we call every one so nowadays in Kerala
* Appan= Father, mostly used by Christians in kerala.
* Ammachi= Mother, also among Christians.
* Subin Mehta= The world famous music conductor of Indian origin.
* Da= word used to address guys normally younger than you especially in
central Kerala. It denotes familiarity with and love for the person
addressed so.

* Pan Parag= It’s a dangerous mixture of several harmful substances
which people chew to get high. Recently it has been banned
in Kerala
* Ladies Only= We have such seats (reserved for the weaker sex) in
the buses. We normally reach emancipation through reservation
in this land, like always we have several things to teach the
world yet!

Evil in action

Why is sycophancy revered so much in the world, why do such deplorable specimens of humanity get the support of the system? There should be something very wrong with it altogether. It is unbelievable how these invertebrates manage to swindle us when every one is looking on. They are shameless; but are we not shameless too not to oppose it? No one seems bothered about it. It is as if it is not their money. It is as if they are living some where else. But that can’t be because they are bloody worried when the taxes are increased. They even go on strike when that happens.

But when these ruthless villains swindle public out of their money none seem bothered. It is the strangest of things in the world. Why is this? What magic is being used? It is wonderful how the same roads get repaired the year round; the same bridges mended the same govt buildings renovated. Why do people stay dumb like this? It is not even decent to do so. You see it is not very wise to let the thieves get away with their loot in broad day light.

Do you want records? I shall furnish you with records. I am an insider. I can get hold of every record in connection with the activities of my department and publish it. Do you think that they can pin me down with official secrecy act? You can think again. I can get any one on the out side to file a RIT petition to get these documents released and to exhibit them in public. I can fucking make this blog a bloody display board. Even after their wicked deeds against me I haven’t yet done that. Not because I am afraid. But I have had other valid reasons.

My anger has always been against the dysfunctional system, I had always tried to make it impersonal as far as possible. I might have written on certain wicked specimens among the people too. That is within norm unlike some poor kids believed. They did not know what I have been through, their sweet and protected existence does not recognize the presence of evil in the world or is only aware of the brand they know and make use of. They are even unaware of the technology (technology ha, ha!) in use to torment the innocent even though it has been in existence for a long time. They can’t be blamed on this, for only those who have had the ill luck to go through it can vouch for their existence and only those who have had experienced it can accept that. To them it is a fantastical world.

One sweet kid thought that I was writing about the kid’s blog, poor kid, I have been through so many battles and is deeply scared from them. I don’t take it out on kids even if they hurt me. Their lives interest me in a benign way. Did she think that I had not it in me to do the same to others that do wrongly by me, I could not have lasted this long if I could not do that. I was like you (may be not as intelligent, you know) a very long time ago. Now I have become as bad as they are. Let me tell you they are evil in the real sense of the word.

You are the real failures (not the kids, but the scum that I was speaking about). But you would not know that would you? You would go on imagining that you are the most intelligent of all the existing criminals in the world, like the Revenue inspector of Gogol. You think the world revolves around you. You think that your intelligence is visible like a beacon. But learn that instead of shedding light it is darkening the world it is shutting off every ray of light. it is a fucking shame that people like you are born on the face of the earth. You are the real disease the world is suffering from. You have no morals. No conscience. You don’t have the least respect for life. You are after lucre. You think that money would solve all your problems. But you dream. Your problem is with the way you exist. You are not very intelligent to understand this but that is not the thing I am concerned about. Why are such poisonous creatures allowed in to the portals of power?

And we remain good spectators of the lively sport. Can there be a dumber people than us, who even laugh when the money is swindled before our very eyes. What in the hell is the matter with the general public. Is it as dumb as it is supposed to be? I am at a loss to say. But there are people all over the place complacently pilfering the govt money and we are watching, watching, watching. There has been bad people al along. Cicero is said to have taken bribes and spoken for those interests. But there have always been others who were willing to hold the light up in the pervading darkness. You can name hundreds of people who had suffered for the good things that they did.

I may not be as good as most of them, but I am not as bad as these invertebrates make me out to be.

These guys are ruining the world and they are unabashed about it. But that seems to be something they greatly enjoy doing. I travel by the road a lot. I get to see things that others in do not see normally. The roads are not built to last. They are built to spend the budget allocation for a year. This is unbelievable. Well it is a vicious circle. Every one wants a piece of the pie. What in the hell is happening. I often wonder how we manage to achieve things like sending space crafts up in this country. It means that there are some things which still functions in this land. Yes there are such things too. Otherwise I would not have been able to write the stuff that I am writing now.

But who knows that this would last. I have my doubts on it.

A HOUSE WHICH WAS ALIVE

Soon after finding a job I was placed at HQ and was invited to this house by my friends to be a lodger. It totally looked like a haunted house and there were whispers that the owner’s younger daughter had committed suicide in it. One of the rooms in the house remained always shut. Some times the bulb inside the room would come on suddenly.

The room had not been opened since 1940’s after it was rented out. Though I have stayed in it all alone on weekends when others left for their homes, I had never experienced anything weird in it. Some of the other tenants had related their strange experiences to me and one even saw the dead girl and was frightened shitless while I was there.

I wanted to post something on the subject and felt too tired to do that. So here is a fragment I wrote sometime back, absolutely worthless, but fills the space nicely. It might give you an idea of my reaction to the house. The name of the dead girl is in original.

A HOUSE WHICH WAS ALIVE


The house was very quite. Not dead quite. There were minor noises all right, noises which would be there in any house. The rustles the scratches the creaks, the whole spectrum…for, there is no absolute silence anywhere, is there?

“You are a poet!” Thelma said.

“Every one is, my dear, everyone is”

“But Vincent was not. And I am not.”

“You both were, are.”

Everything became silent again.

I was alone in the house. It was just now that Vinod went out with a lurid song on his lips. He seemed to be in the best of spirits. He didn’t even bother to say good bye.

A loud thud signified his departure. There was a clang of iron latch falling in place. Then there was again silence. I liked the silence.

“Do you not Thelma?”

“Do I what?”

“Like silence?”

“Yes- if something could still the voices in my mind……….”

I heard. Then there was a pause.

“You know, I dream -of a quite moment.”

I felt sorry for her. Mind can be a terrible master. It never lets up. It hunts us down with its lethal instruments of torture.

If it is a god, it is the demon god.

“Do you still pine for the past? It is long gone, is it not? Why not let go, why not move on?”

She laughed. It was a light whisper of a laugh. It moved over the house in silence, scattering its sensitive rodent population. It lingered in the air, refusing to disperse. I tuned my inner ears to the sweet half muted sound, following it through its course over the house. It brought warmth to the body: and a faint sense of apprehension too.

“Was it a silly question?”

“You are silly otherwise too”

Now the laughter broadened and became much more verbal. It was not accusatory at all .May be there were traces of indefinable compassion in it. Or was it just my imagination? She, like her lot, is fixated on the past, nothing new flourishing on the inside.

For there are moments in life which remains etched in the mind forever. To some they are the crux on which everything else hinges. It is the defining moment of their lives. It is the reference point with which the rest of the life is examined.

It either nourishes or extinguishes the will to live.

This house has seen a lot. It is a storehouse of incidents. It had gone through the course, surviving generations. The strange architectural structure had captivated me from the first. It had weird projections on the rear, which was rare in the nieghbourhood. Those were seen as ominous by some in the land.

Why, I am not sure.

I was looking for a place to stay and Karthik had brought me here.

“Looks rundown does it not?”

Karthik had said, continuing,

“Might last for another century too.”

I laughed. “There is that of course”

He didn’t like that.

“All right, are you interested or not? There are others lining up you know!”

That probably was a lie, considering the huge mess fee.

He waited for my reaction and threw in the last dice.

“The mess is unbelievable I promise you!”

And that was a something I could not do without. Having a sensitive stomach has its disadvantages. It curtails choices. It tenses up the being while it’s on the move. It diminishes perception.

“I am moving in tonight.”

He was pleased.

And that was how I came in to the house.

The mess of course was grand. So that many could not afford it. It robed one of ones savings!

I had settled in it within a few days. Other than the complications with the common bathroom, nothing else was amiss in the house. The rest of the lodgers were also nice, that is, to the extent people can be nice in this world.

Most of the other tenants have an early time schedule to keep to during the day, so they usually leave the house early, deserting the house to me for an hour or so in the morning. This has no special significance. Yet, I also returned early in the evenings. Hence, in effect I was spending more time in it than any body else.

At first, the house seemed like any other of its kind- Old, dilapidated, unkempt, with all the traces of being used by the single male representatives of the society. Certain rooms were kept clean by its users and others were shabby and ill used. The house soon caught hold of me encompassing me in its caress. It had a secret lushness, not observable but which was tangible to the senses. When you are alone in it, it begins to breathe into you unobtrusively, telling you things, barely audible at first but becoming insistent progressively.

I was not mindful of this strange nature of the house in the beginning. I had other things on my mind. Having spent most of my life in a village, the town seemed dirty and unclean to me. The strange and overpowering scents emanating from the bowels of the town disgusted me. People had an easy and artificial manner of behavior. It was too hypocritical for my taste. Every day I regretted of having decided to come here. However, that decision was not in my control at all. Even so I daily rued over it.

One other tenant shared my room. It was ……. He probably enjoyed life better than any body else. However, the effect of it was on others. He chewed pan for one thing and spewed it on the windowsill. However, that was the least of it. He smoked both bidi and unfiltered cigarettes, spilling ash everywhere, and to top it all he was always drunk and had the habit of taking pinch. He went all the way and was probably into women too, it was believed.

I had pictured a large man with cruel demeanor when first I heard of him. But he turned out to be a harmless dreamer. One who, by his own admission, takes everything out on himself. He was an under sized, pale complexioned character who was interested in everything good in life but had not the guts to go after them. Instead, he coiled into his own self, not complaining to any body, but punishing himself by way of entertainment.

He was a sentimental character, always remembering his woes and while doing so often bursting into tears. He was very sincere too when he was sober, and would go out of the way to prove his friendship. These pluses did not do his minuses any harm at all!

However, he was rarely in the room, left early in the morning and returned late at night usually swaying on his feet. The reek from his body and his socks was insufferable. I had to put up with it, like most things in life.

Though when he was around he did not fail to upset me, he mostly left me alone, engaged in his own affairs during his waking hours. I had the room to myself most of the time.

It was then I began to take note of something very strange, I never felt alone in the house. It was as though the house had other occupants, invisible to everyone. I felt thoughts entering my mind from the surroundings in legible diction; it was as if someone was talking to me directly.

Could a house talk? Well, it can, if you are willing to listen. It will tell you tales, which would make you, cry, shiver and despair and laugh. Any house can tell a story. Nevertheless, you need to have sensitive ears to hear it. You need to empathize with its poor heart, to feel for the experiences it went through in its life.

A house is not a mere structure made out of concrete and wood. It is a living and breathing entity. It carries the imaginations of its makers with it. It does not matter whether those are incomplete or different from each other or are belonging to different times. All that is added and deleted becomes the part of its subtle life, defining its individuality that is tangible. Its inhabitants add colour and vibrancy to its psychic life filling it with emotional content that stays with it for the rest of its life.

Any house is so. My old house in the village, containing only three people was so loud and clamorous that it never felt empty even when one was alone in it. Its loudness was its natural character absorbed from innumerable instances of such nature. All my relatives were people with great lungpower and probably uttered their thoughts at high voltages too. Living in it was like walking among dozens of excited people on the street. You are constantly bustled and shoved and pummeled from all sides. Such was the vibrancy of the house.

This house was so different from that of my own that I was bewildered by its strange quietness. I felt it disliked me. It was something like the disinterest shown by a city girl towards a rustic. From the first I felt its femininity of character. It was soft breezy and voluptuous. There was something highbrowed in its attitude towards me.

Naturally as any young man with the fire of youth in him I felt angered at this disapproval. I thought if she does not like me to hell with her. Annoyed at her disinterest I turned my ears off to her muteness.

However, this might have naturally intrigued her, as would any girl. Suddenly she began to show an interest in me. She began to intrude into my presence in subtle ways. It was un obtrusive at first. By way of smell and touch, she proved her nearness to my person. I used to stumble on things I did not see. Forms that were not there would suddenly appear out of nowhere. Strange colours would float around me.

I was suddenly frightened. It was no more a game. I feared that my imagination was finally catching up with me. Was I loosing it, or, is it some sickness I had caught? In my anxiety, I approached my fellow tenants with the problem. They laughed at me.

“You are home sick, that is what” they said. Yet that was not the answer I was looking for. I wanted to make sure whether there was anything the matter with the house, whether it was haunted……. However, no one said anything. They all took it lightly.

Nevertheless, my mind was in fermentation. I was even afraid to sleep. Dreams took on a strange quality too. Bizarre shapes began to flit through my mind during sleep. These were incessant. There was no respite. This was strange for me. Was it because I was extremely sensitive? Or was it because of some unseen forces that were at work to bewitch me. I was sorry that I chose to ignore the house altogether.

I said loudly. “I did not mean it.” The house was silent. I repeated it several times yet that did not bring any responses. A house is inanimate, is it not? I reasoned to myself. How could it do such things, and what can be the purpose behind it? Well I seemed to be the only one having such experiences. Considering other advantages it would not be a good thing to leave the house and stay somewhere else. I had to continue there whatever the outcome.

And that decided the issue.

My brush with the demonic force.

After reading a lot of silly things about the power called Kundalini on the net I began to think about my experience with the force. When I started on Yoga I was inexperienced enough to think that awakening this demonic force would be good for inner growth. Nothing could have been farther from truth than that. This force, or force’s to be exact, as there are innumerable such powers’ in your body and in the nature, is the residual energy contained in things. It is this force which gets released when we achieve fission inside an atom. It is much better left alone than explored for it floods you with a fake awareness of reality and draws you away from your real self.

My attempts to awaken this power were through pranayama. The actual practice I adopted was easy enough. While doing pranayama I mentally directed the flow of energy towards the base of my spine and visualized it rising through the sushumna to the bindu which is just a little over your head. (Giving a mental slap to the snake at the base would be helpful.) Some knowledge of the etheric, astral, and mental bodies can also be useful in your visualization. On the return journey I tried to spread the energy all through the body to avoid the force getting fixed at some nerve centers which are called chakras. This could have been an error too, arising out of the little knowledge that I then had on the subject. If it is fixed at some centers it could lead to awakening the properties related to that level of awareness to a morbid extent.

Well this was the practice that I used to do at that time. It is little more detailed than given in the above description but as it is not relevant here we will skip those.

I had stumbled on the system in my youth and was not at all well informed on the subject then. Not that I am now, other than I have done some reading on it since and have had some personal experience on the subject.

My grandfather was a true Tantrik and was the last disciple of one of the great Tantrik’s of his time. Though I was an atheist at that time, I believed that we can’t dismiss any system of belief unless we have at least personally tried them out. I was out of collage and was yet unemployed. I had a lot of spare time and no girl friend to worry about for you don’t have such opportunities in a village in our land. I had enormous amount of libido and no regular outlet for it. So I ventured into Yoga with the help of his brief notes on the subject and certain other books he had including Shad Chakra Nirupana, a wonderful little treatise on Chakra’s.

The only guru I had then was my mother, who was given Mantra Diksha (Mantra initiation) by her father and was otherwise quite innocent of all the practices of yoga and was absolutely incapable of giving me any guidance in the matter. She had initiated me into the mantra yoga in the manner she was taught by her father and from then onwards I considered him my Guru and went on with my personal mystic adventures till I found some one else.

-I have to mention that as far as the serpent power is concerned Pranayama is not the only method to release the energy, but it seems the most pedestrian of all practices. Any one can attempt it provided there is someone who has gone through the grind before to help them when it is needed. As I have explained before in my posts, pranayama alone releases energies which might cause harm if they are not utilized properly. If you couple it with this wicked force the harm could often be irreparable.

I did not have any immediate awakening of the force during this practice. Some authors like W.C. Leadbeater of the Theosophical Society have claimed to have awakened it within 40 days. I do not know if that is possible. He has stated that it was the result of intense practice with the assistance of a great master. Anyway I did not practice that hard and was even doubtful whether it would awaken at all. But I went on doing it day in and day out. This little visualization trick, while doing pranayama, soon became a habit only with me and I slowly began to drift towards other practices which interested me then. I would be doing this thing in morning and in evening and then would forget about it.

After a period of time I began to notice subtle changes inside myself. I became intensely conscious of what was going on around me. But it always had a weird aspect to it. I could sense the feelings of others, but unfortunately it always came from their bad side. It was as if none around me had a good thought in them. This began to trouble me a greatly. My level of concentration had become heightened and I would feel a shock if a minor noise was heard. Every sense was alert, touch, smell, taste, sight, sound all came to me in purely digital quality as we say now. I was compelled to adopt certain postures while lying down or sitting though I have never even cared for them in the first place. In fact I only learned the names and the nature of those while reading up on them subsequently.

While meditating I would become suddenly conscious that I am doing the Moolabandh and Uddiyan bandh and Jalandhara bandh unconsciously. The breath would suddenly cease or become very thin and I would be sitting in that posture sometimes for a long while without being conscious of it. All this, while I was only doing Vichara Dhyana which is in the Jnana Yoga tradition and quite distinct from the Hatha Yoga or Raja Yoga practice. In it you think of your inner self and try to raise your consciousness through thought discarding everything other than your awareness of yourself or the “I”. I had never thought much of the Hatha Yoga practices other than Pranayama and my interest was limited to mostly Nadi Shudhi pranayama. I was only extending Nadi Shudhi pranayama even while trying to raise Kundalini. Other and more vigorous sorts of Pranayama never interested me much.

As the feeling heightened I became deeply worried, for I could not stand the sight of my friends, family members and people in general. It was as if whenever any one who came into my presence brought the whole of evil with them. I was never conscious of evil in that sense before. My intuition developed and with it my trouble increased, for I would start seeing something in my mind all of a sudden and that would happen in the immediate future, mostly bad. I had to wage an intense battle within me. All the demonic forces in the universe was rising up against me, I would feel bestial urges and desires and they would take hold of me completely, I would be completely buffeted with all sort of sensual promptings ceaselessly.

Yet there was no visible sign of the force awakening inside me. No one I knew then could have helped me in my predicament. I became a recluse, barely venturing out because all the damned badness inside the mind would be triggered the moment I set eyes on anything. As no one could be found to help I resorted to reciting my given mantra incessantly to keep out of the clutches of the vileness I found in myself. I would be reciting it even in my sleep. Would wake up like that and would continue like that all through the day. What a change from a true atheist!

Before venturing in to the practice of this stupid yoga I was just like any youth of that period. If not an extrovert I enjoyed company and going out. I was not a bad athlete and had represented my colleges in Cricket. I was fanatical about working out everyday. Enjoyed all kinds of board games, including card, caroms, chess and had also some talent little for writing.

I never missed a local festival in the neighborhood, took pleasure in reading and had some intellectual friends (me being the least learned among them) and we discussed Plato to Sartre, roshomon to seventh seal, Sophocles to Brecht, Karl Marx to Mahatma Gandhi.( all in chaste Malayalam of course) I could stand my drink and even had smoked pot occasionally (very spurious kind, none of us had any money to go for anything better. It rarely got us into a mood; we did it for the thrill of breaking rules rather than anything else)

I had even directed a drama at that time. As my father used to say, I must have been the Jack of all trades, their cessation and my withdrawal into myself was sudden and surprising for every one.

My habits were also beginning to change. I was not fond of vegetarian food much. But I suddenly found myself more inclined towards lighter food stuff. In fact I could not use spices in my diet at all. I became thin and would eat less and less. I did not get much sleep at night, and while sleeping would be at strangest of places in the world.

And then one day this happens.

I was lying on a wooden cot at night trying to fix my mind on the ajna chakra, I went into a stupor then, the next thing I knew was this unbelievable noise inside me. It was as if hundreds of oceans were roaring within me. My entire frame began to shake as a giant force seemed to be travelling upward through my spine. I could watch it ascending, ripping the centers within and rising further up. By then I had become certain that if it got fixed at some point at the navel (the swadhishtana for example considering my base urges at that time) I would be a goner as far as the world is concerned.

I tried to fix it at the Ajna chakra for what I was worth. The commotion was tremendous. If I was a little braver I would have followed its course through to sahasrara, but I was more concerned about getting out of the state than doing anything with it then. I must have cried out to my grand father to help me, the force rose and wrung my chest and then went further up filling the whole of head with a terrible din. Then my sacral chakra seems to have opened up and it began to pour out, it lasted for some considerable time. I thought it would never stop. Then I went out completely. I would never know whether it returned or ebbed out of me fully.

When I became conscious again my mother was standing besides me and she seemed to be in some sort of trance. She would not answer any of my questions and soon went off to her room. The time was past midnight and usually she would be sound asleep by then.

I had aches all over my body for some days afterwards. I felt curiously relieved after the incident. Although I stopped the practice altogether after this, I still haven’t recovered fully from its impact.

That which happened to me might have been the release of a minor portion of the coiled up energy in me. I have never seen it described exactly like this by any one. Most of the practitioners goes with the force, ascending with it and is said to have experienced ecstasy. One yogi has somewhere stated that a case like mine could happen when the emotional part of the force rises. May be he is right.

Emotional or not I did not feel any better for it. I became much worse perhaps. I firmly believe that it is truly a destructive force as far as inner realization is concerned. My experience tells me that it is absolutely unnecessary in seeking truth. Kundalini is this world, it is Maya, you can’t achieve true knowledge with this force. It would make you smug, make you look down upon the rest, you might even obtain ashta siddis with it, but that would only count within the world. That is why the great Buddha never spoke of this though it was known to all in India from the time immemorial.

Not for nothing did Christ decline the offer of Satan of the kingdom of this world, and it is not for nothing that Satan is depicted as the serpent.

Every people knew of this power and its destructive quality. It is much better to let it alone. The yogis of the middle ages in India rediscovered it because they were cowardly. They should have never done that. Political subjugation can not be overcome by psychical feats. If that was the case the world would have been a better place long ago.

“What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation”

Henry David Thoreau.

I know some of you have read Walden, some others may haven’t, for they would be living a fast life and wouldn’t care much for the thoughts of a ‘weird’ guy who left everything to live in a forest all alone for years on end. If that is so, it is a great loss. His words are always fresh and totally artless. They might not attract you at first because they are mostly turned inwards, but if you persist, they would take you in, and make your life richer.

If you have time and patience I suggest that you go through it once in your life. It will teach you many things, telling your thing in the most natural style is not the least of it.

To me, that is what poetry is all about- Speaking truth and getting it clearly across. Look at the quoted words again; they explode at the core of your being even when considered out of their context.

Meditate on them, a whole new world would become revealed to you. Not that others haven’t said similar words, they have, but those words lack the certainty of deep experience.

He is wonderful when he says things like this:

“The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”

There are times when we wondered so ourselves haven’t we? “What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?” At least I have, this goodness that you find within you is not the result of thought, it is spoon fed from your childhood. We don’t stop to reflect on it. I know it is useful to have automatic responses; it frees us up for other things. But when a reaction becomes a habit we often follow it unthinkingly, even where the situation demands other responses. It is a sad day when you know that you have made a mistake, blindly following something within you, and that you can not reverse it whatever you do.

In our fast times to stop and deliberate is so out of tune with life that the rest would look at you as if you are totally wacky if you do it. Everything now is oriented on instilling a fast reaction time within the individual that he/she wouldn’t lose out in the rat race to the top. But really, where is this place that people are running to? I have questioned the intelligent and the ordinary and they both seem stunned by the question. They think that the answer is obvious, but is it?

Have we any idea where we are going, why we are popping up pills to get us into high gear in the morning and to sleep at night? Why are we always on the run? What are we trying to amass? Don’t deride the question as metaphysical, for it is not, unless you are some sort of a pre-determinist you can’t accept the way you live. Do you think that you are predestined to be what you are, a physician, engineer, a lawyer, an executive in a multinational company, a porter, singer, and athlete? If not why do you work so hard at them?

Don’t tell me that you are preparing the world for future generations, it is great to hear it, but it is not entirely true is it. The holy truth seems to be that we are all running away from death and are getting nearer it as we struggle harder and harder.

That is why Thoreau’s words appeal to me:

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.”

This hunger for truth is not metaphysical as some suppose it to be. It is something basic we all share. Labeling something would not make it go away. Some think that truth is something that we elicit when we ask bluntly “how is your sex life?” to some one and they go immediately red in the face. There is also such a substratum to life and he did not deny its existence. Hear his own words:

“I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.”

Well most of the wonderful people that I meet daily are so pure that the gods would tremble before them! I often wonder how they could look at their own reflections without squirming. Why go on playing such a sham? Why dress yourself up and parade before others as if you are the first wonder in the world while all the time the hollowness of your mind drones away in the background. At least could you not do something about it? Even owing up to some of the lesser elements in your nature might go a long way in purifying you.

Oh I know, these are harsh words and I am not better than any of you. But that doesn’t alter anything; we don’t have it in us to seek what we desire the most like Thoreau did, that which would give us peace of mind. Instead we dissemble and project a worthless profile for all the world to believe in, I am as guilty of this as the rest is. Thoreau subtly saw through this and was quite firm on the point,
even discarding his preference for the first person while stating these lines.

“I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subject
— I care not how obscene my words are — but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity. We discourse freely without shame of one form of sensuality, and are silent about another. We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human nature.”

Of course he was speaking on the Hindu practice of taking every aspect of life into consideration and prescribing methods to do them, but the words go much further than that. Actually seeking truth need not denigrate other aspects of our physical life, but we all would like to be “shitless” entities, without blemish without even remotely thinking about them and we carry this forward to our emotional adventures as well.

The fact is that we are living in a fantastical world, a truly romantic one without any reference to reality. We forget that we have erected our temples on something baser than we care to admit. We still go on meekly hoping that Thanatology would save us or genetical engineering would make us immortal. We are not metaphysical are we? We are thoroughly practical and pragmatic and we would prefer the virtual reality to reality to boot!

I know I have quoted extensively from Walden considering the length of this post, but when a sage speaks you don’t have anything to add to it. Certain lovely souls might call me a parasite in this respect, but I do not mind, for unfortunately I did not come to this world knowing everything before hand.

Read Walden and become enlightened.

Why in the bloody hell not do that?

It always amuses me the way my self proclaimed foes depict me to those they want to be in the know. I have been called all the names in the book and out of the book, I am even called by the names of certain of my enemies, every thing about me has been broad cast. There are even posts intending to defame me in a round about way. I know for sure that they have been able to involve certain seedy elements in the law enforcement and from political careerists in it and thus have the backing of the lower level establishment at present.

And they have even sought the help of criminals and extreme leftist elements to instill fear in me.

I enjoy such stuff because they are totally fucked up by the fact that I do not take them seriously. They are still playing school boyish and college boyish games with me. Every time I step up the level the poor bastards are hard put to react. Because they go by the book and cant think out of the hat. They have to put their heads together and think hard and they dislike that intensely. I once threatened to begin a blog in Malayalam to lay everything bare and they brought the whole establishment to make me back off. Not that it would have deterred me in the least, but then, that was my entire move for that period, to make them scared and shit blood. If a threat alone can achieve that why go any further?

I have them where I want. And they are learning to be wise slowly.

Now even the lowest minion in the establishment is hard at work learning English (Can’t accuse them you know, I too am learning it as I go along), they just are not sure what I am going to cook up about them on the morrow! Of course there is no need to cook up anything at all. The facts alone would make hilarious reading. They are mere run of the mill types and would go red in the face if some one just winks at them. Imagine the terrible lose of prestige if they are caricatured in English for the entire world to see!

They have great respect for my artistic talents it seems, they believe that I could make a pen really bend, and bend dangerously too. Probably they are thanking their stars that I haven’t started a blog in Malayalam. Some of them have even started teaching me English now, very diligent students, all of them. Of course the effort is intended to cast doubts in my mind regarding my ability to write anything at all. They could have spared themselves the trouble, for I would have written anyway, completely disregarding every percept of language if I wanted to get my ideas into the open, with grammar, idiom, sentence structure or without.

All this when I am totally clean of any misdeeds in my life and have not done anything other than come out in the open against certain corrupt people in the establishment. When the whole system is corrupt the damn thing will react with terrifying force on you. I am not going to paint myself white here. I have my faults, if any one expects a pure angel they may have to look elsewhere than towards me. You don’t have such purity among men yet.

But my self-declared enemies would perhaps do better than me in this case, they are whiter than the white roses they nurture in their gardens with the bribes they take and the money they nonchalantly swindle out of government accounts.

Would you believe it, they even financed an extreme leftist faction once with it which later declared an armed revolution against the state! It was brutally curbed by the police. The main think tank of the faction would regularly visit the office then and would covertly threaten me with a trial at “people’s court “supposedly for my incompetence and anti people stance! This is an old technique used to silence and discredit those opposing them in their endeavor to destabilize the very system which supports them.

But what the fuck, I still can not be bribed and bought( it is some kind of a congenital disease with me, truly incurable and honestly I am not at all happy with it, it would have been much better for me if I was corrupt, I would not have to fight like this and lose everything in the bargain!), I may or may not have done some mischievous things when I was still a blundering youth, probably in the mildest of forms. These guys have invested a lot into them, and are broadcasting them with wonderful and weird colors injected into those incidents. They have not a shred of evidence to go by other than that manufactured by their fantastically fertile brains.

They thought that it would cow me, but unfortunately I was made of dumber stuff, and so they have recently started threatening me with my life to get the point across. Some of them would come and describe accurate details of certain bike accidents they have witnessed without any introduction or preliminary conversation whatsoever. The poor biker always dies in those imaginary accidents. I have to admit that It would be easy for them if they take that course; I ride a bike to the office and back and it is some twenty KM’s each way on a highway which has no separate lines for traffic plying in both directions. There have been numerous such incidents before this- an ordinary looking accident; you know a truck losing control and the like would do the trick for them.

Now to tell you the truth, I have never cared whether I live on to be a nonagenarian or not, ( I shudder at the thought of living in such a debilitating state of existence, and I have barely completed half of the journey now. The fact is that I am terrified by the thought that I would slowly lose every single property I have now and would be reduced into the state of a functioning vegetable.) I could die at this moment fully satisfied and with a feeling that I have done everything possibly I could in this life.

For, I was definitely established well within myself even before I started on a career in Govt service and do not require any further illumination. Yes I know, from a purely theoretical point of view, good and evil are the same and both are detrimental to the growth of the inner self. But when considered from the worldly angle, good is imperative in the sense that it provides scope to look into yourself, while evil makes you look out of yourself. If my elders were not comparatively good and the system not functional I would not have had the opportunity to look inside and find something there, to me that is the value of good and we have to stand up for it .

The case is that I am not totally a bad civil servant at all even in this blessed land of opportunists.

Sometime back I handled a government section dealing directly with applications of the public, ( there were thousands of live files and no one to assist me) I cleared every file and made the fucking section up to date cleaning up a back log of some five years. There was not a single complaint from the public when I was there. I had to do ten men’s work to achieve that. Not even my hottest detractors would dare to deny it.

And what did I get in return, there is a series of pending cases in the High court seeking to curb my further advancement in the service on some purely technical cooked up bulshit( credit for the expression goes to a sweet friend ( or foe) of mine), the progress of which is personally supervised and financed by the stalwarts in my own department. There are several non-plan schemes to swindle the money out and pay the advocate. There is no mechanism to look into the mode of spending. It is a free for all. This is how we modernize and globalize in this land.

One case would start the moment the earlier one is dismissed, Not that I mind. If I waned to I could have been in better jobs by now.

It is a fucking charade really. The government has to argue my case in court and the taxpayer’s money is being defrauded out to argue against it too. These guys suppress evidence supporting my claims when representing the government in their official capacity and would furnish every scrap favoring the opposition to them to beef up the cases!

You can come over and watch the same section in action now. It is back into its old state, but none are worried, for you can’t catch fish without muddying up the pool, can you? I must have denied them truck loads of money with my poor efforts to clear backlogs- See how enmity grows. Can they ever forgive me!

Every Indian, reading this, would have had such experiences in this country, both from the law and the civil authorities. Don’t deny it and deny the truth. I work at such an establishment and I regularly hear people speak out about us and the way we work. The fact I wasn’t like that does not alter a single thing. Now I too have become discouraged. I don’t care any more. What the fuck, who is helping whom, the public doesn’t care, the intelligentsia doesn’t care, the politicians do not care, the judiciary doesn’t care, the executive doesn’t care and probably my enemies are in the right, this is a system where the only voice worth listening to is the voice of money.

Then why does the goddamned system teach something else at schools? Teach cutting the throat of the person next to you, teach pilfering public funds, teach looting and arson, teach murder and larceny and teach adultery and adulteration instead.

Why not? Why the hell not? Why in the bloody hell not do that?

Dilute it but don’t replace it with something else

I had the ill luck to make the greatest blunder of my life recently-thought some one could make the grade in something. It ended up in a great farce. I never should have made such an error at all, always prided myself in such cases. But this time I think I was totally in the wrong-The efforts I had to make to extricate myself and the a few highly impressionable kids from a terrible situation which was developing!

They could have been my children if I had married early. They even taught me manners and netiquette on the sly. I had to meekly swallow their wise words, for I was in error, and that was unpardonable on my part.

Though I had unfortunately involved them in the game in a moment of abstraction they had nothing to do with it. They and their friends may believe in their superior intellect and expertise in every thing they took the pain to learn. But that would not get them anywhere in this particular pastime. This is a gory entertainment. This game is played for the highest of stakes. It can not be played unless you can stake your life in it. I can’t involve some inexperienced kids in such a sport. Their assistance might have already been roped in by the mercenaries who have taken the contract to finish me off.

I was not afraid for myself as they thought. I can handle even death the way I handle my life, for I have never set such a great store on life as that. Every one has to die, I would also die sometime, and it does not matter to me even if it happens at this moment as I am writing this. What I am worried about is whether I am tiring in my fight. That would have been worse than death for me. I can’t fail, even against the whole corrupt establishment, because in my heart I believe that my fight is important in a little way. It might only achieve my own fall, but the fight is important in the sense that it serves to highlight certain things people forget about human decency.

If everything is corrupt, it is much better to kill yourself rather than go on living, for what would be there to believe in? -Your mother’s milk? Well how many of you have even tasted that? And what are the chances that it too is not corrupted and infused with poison? I am not trying to paint a bleak picture of the world and NO, I am not an out and out moralist, but that doesn’t go as far as prostituting myself before anything I don’t believe in. When I buy a glass of milk I want it to be milk even if it is diluted into a thin and watery fluid. I don’t want it be some fucking chemical beverage, looking and tasting and behaving like milk. I expect only the minimum decency from others. But that much I truly demand, not request. I must have it.

Well I am not out to corrupt or inject poison into the young. They might later become worse than me or my enemies. They probably already think that they have become worldly wise. But they are wrong; they don’t yet know the hell of disillusionment. It would come, but that would be in the later stages of their lives, not now. Let them be as enthusiastic and hopeful of life as they can be now. I do not mind the infamy, which I already have, thanks to my lovable enemies. They are the absolute masters of the “rumor mill enterprises” and have wonderful facilities to make use of.

The poor kids were terribly unaware of the real situation and the danger they were getting into. Deep and destructive corruption at the core was acting through certain individuals. They have been trying to hunt me down for the last several years- When an individual is declared a public enemy for no reason other than certain people having something to hide that is not a very healthy thing. Several hundred thousands of bucks have been spent both officially and unofficially to get me off their back by their own admission. Probably they would do me in if all else fails. It all started by a chance incident of witnessing an exchange of money by certain high ranking officials and the “honorable” public long, long ago. I was comparatively young then. I spoke out publicly against it. None in the business of making money on the sly took to it nicely.

These people were shrewd. They were in power and were able to offer many things in return for acting against me. Just show some ‘wise idiot’ in our most esteemed public some sort of an official document and order them around. They would absolutely give evidence against their own mother and would feel infinitely proud about the “honest” deed they have done.

If some one comes up and says to a model citizen, showing either fake or real Govt badges and assures him that he would accept all responsibility even in the worst case scenario, that of death to the “ subject”, that paragon of the civil rights would do the most heinous of crimes to hurt, maim, destroy the social life and even kill the hapless individual concerned. All this have been conclusively proved by several such experiments done at various periods in the last century. I wouldn’t want to quote from those records as I have already done that in some of my previous posts and as it is a well known fact. Be it a retard or be it an Einstein this statement holds.

[It was Einstein who voluntarily requested the American Govt to produce the atom bomb because of his fear of the Nazi’s. He was so terribly divided inside and had caused the worst catastrophe in human history and he was all for developing the unified field theory. You think that science don’t have to consider ethical questions, don’t you, you are all for science even if it means that your children would be used as laboratory animals as is done in some prestigious hospitals in India.

I knew him for what he was, as gullible as anybody else, before his fears and misconceptions. You don’t just grieve after causing the Atom bomb to be made and used on innocent people- You eliminate yourself, you kill yourself, and you become done with everything, genius or no genius.]

You need some amount of guts to fight against a corrupt system. They will put everything you have ever done in your life under a microscope and use it against you, you will be isolated, every move that you make will be anticipated, and they will drive you away from your friends, each and every word that you speak will be distorted and would be quoted out of context, every look that you make will be interpreted wrongly, the simplest things that you take for granted will become insurmountable obstacles, You will be called a traitor , a pervert, ingrate, indecent, incompetent, disreputable , and every thing heinous. They will turn your whole life into a living hell. They will involve every organization, government or non government, church, religious bodies, local bodies, merchant associations in their move against you. The lies these moralist organizations are fed would be ingenious and would have the backing of the “authority”. If everything fails they will go for your life.

The sorry thing is, if you decide to fight you will have to be like them, devious, cunning and unrelenting, slowly your good qualities would desert you, you will become as bad as them, If you gain upper hand most of the time, you will have to be prepared for the worst. They will do you in good and proper.

My younger brother learns the art of swimming.

The last time I spoke with my younger brother he seemed morose over something. He is presently in a Gulf country and is in charge of some 100 or so technicians. He does not have much spare time now and often has to work till the middle of the night. I usually catch him at his office late at night. Life has hardened him somewhat. He normally used to be a simple soul, preferring to act rather than think unnecessarily.

Somehow his thought has brought back memories of our child hood. And the amusing incident in which he learned swimming.

Ever seen a country pool, which is mostly naturally formed and fashioned into a bathing pool by some little effort by people?

The pool is a little ecosystem in itself. You could find hundreds of frogs and the local assortment of fish in it at all times. All kind of insects would be constantly flitting over the still waters. Plants and shrubs would be growing on every side of the pool. There would be creepers and water lilies. Some of the pools have lotuses in them. That means the pool is not very deep and has a thick layer of sticky mud at the bottom. This is dangerous for those who like to dive into the pool.

The sides of the pool would be riddled with holes of different size. Every one of them would be holding water snakes of various lengths. Slimy creatures, never liked them very much. The pool it self would not be very large and the snakes would look more numerous to your eyes. They are fast and as you watch would slide past you when you are in the water.

In the summer the water would have sunken very low and as you descend the steps you would feel an eerie effect. The sounds from outside would be muffled, the three walls of the pool other than that which hold the steps would rise in all their dirtiness as if rising directly in front of your eyes. And you would feel as if you are sinking into the womb of the earth.

The open sky would be the only visible sign of something pleasent other than the old and terrifying presence of things unknown, once you reach the water level. Though I was very fond of swimming I was never able to suppress a shudder whenever I had to go into the pool alone. We had a pool at our compound in the village. But you need to go a mile down to get to the water in the summer. The visibility would be very dim once you reach the primordial depths. So I normally prefer bathing and swimming at a pool at a nearby homestead which is much more spacious and a little less gloomy.

I think I was around fourteen at that time. My brother was four years younger. He had not learned art of swimming and was not even fond of the activity. He preferred solid objects to liquids which to him always looked more dependable! It was my duty to teach him swimming. So I used to take him to this pool and would propel him towards a submerged rock in the middle of the pool and would deposit him there and swim back to the steps. No amount of coaxing would make him budge from the rock once he was installed there.

So on my way back I would again pick him up and bring him back to the steps. This would repeat endlessly with the same effect. On that day I think it was my forth or fifth journey to the rock. I deposited him on the rock and was swimming back. Suddenly a frog jumped over me. The next thing I knew was a searing pain at the edge of my right palm which had just gone under water. It became heavy and would not move. I had to swim with my other hand to safety. Once at the steps I pulled the hand out of the water and sure as hell, there was the snake writhing and hanging by its fangs on to my palm.

Water snakes are not dangerous. They are also not venomous. So I was not frightened. But they bite like hell and would not let go once they have sunk in their teeth on to something. I called to my brother to show him the snake as I was trying to shake the snake loose. He took just one look at the snake and then there were some giant splashes in the pool, he was across like a champion swimmer and was on his way to home without even looking back!

He is not a bad swimmer now, may be he won’t cross the English Channel at a stretch, but would manage to float around till help arrives!

The un philosophical question of the origin of everything

This tale comes from the hoary past of this land.

Once a sage sent his son to study under the famous scholars of the time, the son returned home after twelve years of intense study.

The sage asked him kindly.

“Well, did you learn all?”

The son was a good scholar:

“Yes my lord, I learned everything they taught me”

The sage was not satisfied:

“But child, did they teach you of that, by knowing which everything else becomes known?”

The son mused. “I don’t think so father!”

“Then you have not learned all.”

The sage then went on to instruct his son about that part of knowledge which he had not learned.

In the next few unforgettable verses the Vedic text does the impossible- makes it possible for anyone to be God. We will not go on to them at present.

This was what Thales and Democritus of Greece were after too, that very thing from which everything else can be derived. Thales decided upon water as the substance, while Democritus found two such substances which were behind the scenes. These are not the only definitions of the primary matter in philosophy.

Both Thales and Democritus were pleasantly materialistic in their approaches. They were not interested in finding some supreme being behind everything.

Yet all through the human history, there has always been a lingering suspicion about someone who is said to have gone and created the world all by himself or by herself if you are an incorrigible feminist.
Some call it God. Why I can’t say! Why not call it the devil instead? From what we see around us now he would have been a more suitable candidate for the deed. Nonetheless as the God is credited with the feat let us trace the conception of God and try to learn something from it.

Anthropologists (or is it some other apologists?) believe that we invented God in the pre historical times because of our fear of nature’s forces; this belief is only possible if we believe in the theory of evolution of Darwin. There are other theories of the inception of the world as well. For instance Arch Bishop Usher was confident that the world was created sometime in 6004 BC. Well, God being all powerful may have made provisions to derive Darwin’s theory from his world too!
Darwin’s theory is linked to the modern cosmological concepts and is taught in schools.

So it follows that the world was formed on the day of the big bang bringing forth several bodies like our Sun, and eons later the Sun blasted and scattered its fragments around it. These fragments began to cool, the farthest cooling the most. Because of the cooling the air around globe condensed and water was formed. It poured down on earth for millions of years till the surface of the globe were filled with oceans and other water bodies.

Life was formed in those water bodies, or particularly in the ocean. Evolution took place. Simple life forms evolved into complex life structures. Amphibians evolved, then those who lived entirely of the earth. Dinosaurs came and went. Birds finally evolved into monkeys and primates developed into us

(Birds! Indeed! He places birds just before primates, can you believe it!

Well in that case let me humbly admit that,

I am not an authority on Darwin as some of my young detractors are, so I can’t tell whether birds are the real ancestors of the primates, I still feel for Lamarck and for that matter Laplace and wonder if they have consulted their visual thesaurus on it. Laplace could be some kind of place like NASA for example. Or could it be NSA? Some of my sweet mutants are so full of themselves that they often take lesser mortals like us to be non existent.)

We descended on the surface of the earth from trees and began to walk entirely on our hind legs.

The world was still very wild while all this was happening. The first men/women who looked around could not have been happy. The earth constantly shook under their timorous feet with giant and unseen seismic activity. Rain was incessant, every now and then the skies lighted up with a blinding glare, thunder brutally ripped open the sky and mammoth trees were reduced into glowing embers by the unimaginable force of lightening, whole forests got on fire driving them out into barren segments of land infested with lethal animals. It was an inhospitable world and they were mortally afraid. They were also learning all the time for they were observant (the audacity of the guy! Observant my foot!). They had an inkling what would happen if they did certain things. When they threw the first stone it produced an effect. They were learning very fast that every cause has an effect.

But who is wielding these giant forces of nature? Something, some one has to be behind it. This thing was so powerful and they were living in mortal terror; they were totally helpless and were at its mercy, better have this thing on their side than against them. What could they do to placate this thing so that it won’t destroy them? In the absence of any information on what would please it they tried to offer those that are dear to them to the thing. Some times it relented at other times it ignored their offerings.

They developed whole systems of thought on this subject of grace of god; it gave birth to Science, Theology and Philosophy.

“The question”

Voltaire can be quite uproarious. He often comes up with a delectable little piece of info out of the blue. Here is one such: -Jews never speak about torture in their books!

He has always been one of my favorites, not merely because of his wit or the vitriolic style he possessed. I like him more for his untiring effort to put down tyranny of all kind in his time. Once he was really fired up he would never stop till he achieved his aims. That is stellar quality in a man, or at least I believe so. He stood up against the Church in all its forms and fought and won epic battles against it.

Some would not dare even to speak of the church in these liberated times, going by he experience of the “true” left government that we have in my state. They visit the “Lordships” at their palaces and partake of the enjoyment that is on offer there. Well, one can’t but applaud the true communist spirit of the great leaders that we have.

They are purely suffering the indignity for the people you know!

I would have liked to quote Voltaire’s next few lines from his Philosophical Dictionary. But that does not seem possible now, for, there is such thing called living off a host, or so some say.

So I give up my terrible urge to copy his wonderful words.

Those of you who have heard of the work can get a copy of it and go through it. If you find pleasure in it you are human, and if not, you are a member of a much more advanced species- you belong to the species called the inhuman.

Voltaire traces the history of torture from the first highway men/robbers to inquisition and forward in a manner that he only can do. He was clear sighted enough to understand that torture is not about getting information out of the tortured. It is the first stage in a drama called murder.

The fate of the tortured would already be decided before the torture begins.
The criminals in authority naturally think of it as a very good pastime. You have to make human life richer somehow, you know, blood and spilled guts (preferably of other people) do enrich the effect of an ebbing life as you can imagine! It can be a very rewarding experience too, for you are sometimes dimly reminded of your own death at a distance. Only at an unseen distance, for the hardened villains never believe that they would ever die.

For that matter, who does?

At any rate Vultures term “The question” is a cute way to express torture.
It is all about ‘the question’ isn’t it, whether or not people have a right to decide the fate of an individual?

It reminds me of Myshkin’s arguments in the “Idiot”. He firmly believed that even a toughened criminal hope of a reprieve till such time that he is finally condemned to be executed and even later till his appeal against the sentence is rejected.

His description of the execution was terribly moving.

-Hope is what life is all about. We are all romantics in that sense, we hope and hope, that this would pass, something better would turn up, something marvelous to save us……..

Often there would be nothing other than the familiar and misshapen life you ever had. Still we hope on……

Oh let us fight and let us………… hope on!

A problem for sweet delinquents

Oh my poor dears, you never thought that there would be a nice problem once you condemn an animal to its death, by placing it on a lovely chair and injecting lethal doses of subtle satire into its innards. You even thought that I followed such nonsense.

Not many are as brilliant as you are my dear! Even placing the one man in the whole human evolutionary chain who would have smiled at the irreparable torture were not enough for you and your staunch supporters. You had to proceed with the ‘sentence’s you uttered before hand. The vanity of the human soul! It would not be pacified with honesty even.

Now where would you dispose the body off? All sweet delinquents have to contend with this one problem my dearest. They have to hide the remains.

But of course you can take it to the lab and dissect it with the help of your friends and then can even incinerate it, provided that there is an incinerator at your haunt.

You can have a thandoori chicken afterwards. The world would look beautiful yet, all glitter and glamour.

The problem is the shell is not the same as the animal which generated it. Can you tell me when did it come in to existence? Before it died or at the time of its death? Is it the same as the animal it succeeded?

Am I laughing? I wouldn’t want to, that too at your wonderfully young heart. Should I go into more details?

It is just like a poor system to have such terrible pitfalls. They have to produce a carcass where there is none! What does it matter whether some one sits in a chair or not, whether any one is thinking or not, whence come these two entities and a corpse to boot.

It is all imagination my dear. There is nothing really other than yourself, let me tell you, you wonderful little child, you are that thing that I am, there is naught concealed, there have never been anything concealed, all was made crystal clear. Only that you did not see it.

You wonder whether I am competent to tell it to you. Who else is capable dear? If those who know do not say so with conviction who else would dare say it? The true would always discern truth in its subtlety, for what else have we something called the self?

Don’t be drawn in to all the nonsense which is especially cooked for you, to get you off track. It is what is called the veil; would you not prove it to me that you can see behind that, and that you have it in you to step beyond, and be as I AM.

Words and mind can only go that much far. In fact let me say it in reverse, the words can reach very, very far and mind can go on spreading. That is not what we are inquiring into, is it? We are searching for something very primary.

We are searching for something we forgot somewhere.

It is within ourselves.

Did some sweet delinquents find it yet?

God is taking a nap

It was a hell of a day! Whenever I put on the breaks, my bike would stall would not budge an inch from that spot again, the brakes were bloody jammed, I would be standing stupid in the middle of the traffic, gaping at others. The only thing saving my life was the condition of the highway-It was not really a bloody road; it was a fucking hole. After a glaring completion with the rest I would push the stupid thing with my legs to one side and kick at the breaks till they straighten.

Then it would happen again. I would go through the procedure once more. The poor bike can not be blamed, it is on its last legs, no, it is not that old, five years is not that old in this land. But I haven’t done any maintenance on the thing for the last three years. Surprised, well I am that sort of a guy, I believe in miracles, I think that the bike would obey me and run on its own whenever I want it to. And as hell would have it, it does. Why I don’t know.

I was damn pleased with the thing, for it had never failed me till this day. This was the first great hiccup. I was sorry for it. Yet it was still running smoothly, its engine was in good condition. The poor thing, I thought it looked at me in a rather abashed manner. I saw girls whiz past me at great speeds on their smart Kinetic Hondas. But I steeled myself to the ridicule. Passengers laughed at me from their high seats in the buses. But I was like a saint, immune to everything. Every time I had to push the thing to one side and release the breaks I thought about the tedium of human life and was content. This is just another instance of the absurdities that life holds.

Then I got to the office, things looked bleaker there, the girl who sits next to me is an inveterate talker, wouldn’t stop the useless effort if the world is going to fall down. She had already begun before I reached the seat. Every one else looked dazed and was immensely relieved when I came into their view and ran for a respite. Some were fanning themselves cool.

I put on my ear phones and played the music very loud into my ear because that was the only escape route, my ears have become deaf in the process, but at least it was music and I like music. Then there were other irritants, the boss calls and talks to me with her finger in the mouth. It is funny the way she does it, what for I could not yet guess. She is not young anymore and may have no such thoughts on her mind. I try not to smile, but the feeling somehow escapes through my eyes. She immediately detects it and withdraws her hand chastely. But then unconsciously it goes back into the mouth again and plays with her tongue and lips. May be she was thinking very hard! I had a bad time answering her questions. She gets very personal every now and then and that pisses me off, having this thing about personal life and privacy.

I struggled like this for the entire day at the office, alternately listening to music and talking to my boss when called, and that happens every twenty minutes. Don’t take me wrong; the boss calls every one into her cabin almost all day that is her way of having control.

I felt totally mauled after the fucking day at the office; imagine having to listen to the local FM station non stop for an entire day and having to witness the tricks of the boss’s finger as a side dish, no I did not get any work done, other than the most routine ones. And again in this land who is interested in doing something to make the system work, no one, sadly including me. I loath myself for it, but there are some things we could not do anything about. The work I do is practically useless in the sense that it has nothing to do with the people or their lives. Our department is like a monopoly guarding its trade secrets, but taking a muster only at the end of the month to pay good tax payers money out.

Things again worsened the moment I left the office. The bike was behaving badly. It required some drastic repairs. The brakes again jammed and the biker behind me veered away calling me something very bad. I was in no mood to let it go by then. I chased him down and told him to never think of using that trap which he uses for other enjoyable purposes on me again. His face became muddy and was becoming muddier still. Then I had to stay back and further enlighten him some more- That even if he was the top fucking goon in the locality I would whip him like he was a filthy bitch and he would have to take it lying down.

I left him standing there considering his options.

He was not as big as me but looked mean and could have put up a good fight. He would have been in the right too, it would have been a bloody mess if we had collided. I am sure that I would have reacted similarly in a situation like that. Any way he did not chase me.

The things were not improving at all. None of the fucking shops would have my brand of cigarettes and at the last stop I had to be satisfied with a pack containing seven measly cigarettes. There were other events too….. I was still blazing when I took off from there. Every thing went into slow motion then. The bike behaved sweetly, the day looked all red and quivering. I arrived at my house still crackling all over from anger.

Then there she was, at the door, smiling trustfully and demurely into my eyes. My anger went, I became human again.

After that the nature took over, thunder raged and a terrible whirlwind uprooted trees all over the territory. There has been nothing like it for a long time in the area. Power went and rain crashed over our roof, one or two giant thunder claps sent jitters into our house and into my poor girl. She had her hands over her ears and pleaded with me.

“Why are you angry? Tell them to stop.”

For, I had jokingly told her sometime when we were newly married that the elements of nature would always reflect my current moods- I being one with nature! She feigns as if she believes in it and would come up with such requests when nature starts to go wild.

Like always I ordered the elements to subside -and they wouldn’t.

“You try “I told her “You do control me, don’t you, why wouldn’t the nature obey you?”

Then she said to nature:

“Stop it, don’t do this.”

And miraculously the storm ceased.

“Love is a touch smelly as well”

“Don’t ever look back; there will be blood and tears all along the path”

These words of MT (M.T. Vasudevan Nair, the famous writer) were downright brilliant; they brought an entire realm of expressive experience into us. He was always fond of the ‘white spaces’ between words, and talks about them a great deal - About that shadow land which lies between the terms and his expressions filled those gaps and filled our hearts with unmixed feeling. Perhaps none else could have understood the vital importance of those words at that time than us.

I came in to the scene long after he wrote those words, but the feeling was still alive.

We were a poor society then, trying to find our feet after the independence without anything to fall back on to. Our homes and economy lay in tatters. Our young were then like beggars on our own land. No jobs around and no hope of finding any in the distant future. Our wants were great, our determination greater and our exploits for them were almost global in character. In our excursions to all parts of the world to find wealth we only had one thing on our minds, that of coming back to this very land and saying a few terse words filled with feeling to all those who had discredited us before. I know it is all very childish, but that was how we were, none are intellectual giants when it comes to personal feelings.

We were very angry at the world and were willing to sacrifice everything to win the bloody fight to the top. We had made ourselves immune to our own inner core, our emotions and our blood ties. We were ruthless and very, very egotistical.

One character in a movie script written by the same author spat fire when he was asked whether he thought he was god, after his triumphant return from the distant lands:

“Yes I am God; I am the God of money!”

And that statement sealed the argument for ever on those turbulent times in our past.
I think these were all part of our process of growing up as a society. The Malayalee sensibility was never the same again, he brought to us the words we longed to speak then, words and emotions of an uncertain period in our social and political life. None of the younger generation would be aware of the immense force these words had on our psyche. They would think they are emotional and sentimental and boastful.

And they are emotional and sentimental alright, for that matter, what is not emotional and sentimental in our lives? They are what life is all about. A cold and practical approach to it might satisfy some, especially those living in the modern times with its accent on the brutal principles of buying and selling (the market place). I know that the times have changed; the present generation is able to use empty spaces alone to convey a wealth of meaning! They don’t even need words to do that! I have sadly experienced it recently!

Not that it is bad, no; it might also be a new mode of expression and communication which might later make all language superfluous. It might be a good thing too, if we can transmit thoughts and emotions in a condensed format like that.

All the same, the most beautiful words that I have ever seen (they are expressions rather than words, they are like soundless entities) are those created by Vaikom Muhammed Basheer, another great and original writer in our language. He often used exclamation and question marks alone to convey meaning, some what like in the following construction.

“Why are the poor kids so agitated?”

“? ”

“I thought you knew”

“! ”

A lesser writer (like me for instance) might have said. “The other man looked up questioningly” and “there was surprise on his face” or something like that instead.

He was great, Basheer, all other writers pales into insignificance before him. He was sometimes crazy in life but was immensely wise with words. They were simple words (I quail when I have to use the expression simple, the damage certain friends have done to the word is terrible!) I still can’t remember his short story “The Birthday” without being greatly affected by it. It is a repository of every thing that adversity does to you, and all through it his wonderful love for humanity shows like silver light.

He was a wanderer in his younger days, seems to have enacted several roles including that of a professor and a Sufi saint (without any qualifications for those trades) in his life successfully and perhaps that of a pickpocket too! There is a story of his about a gentleman pick-pocket who had returned his purse after a chance conversation with him on a street about his predicament. A Critic in our land chuckled that he would not be surprised if that pick pocket was Basheer himself.

Basheer was alive then and never denied it! He had such an immense wealth of experience than any of the other writers had in his time, he had been truly around, and those jaunts sobered him to the real wonder that is human life. Those who haven’t seen the very depths of human existence can’t write like he did and I am convinced of it. (Interestingly reading the first few chapters of Adolf Hitler’s Mien Kamf can give you a good description of what poverty can do to man!)

No wonder he was somewhat insane, it was a genuine sickness that he caught from living sincerely. He was so direct and honest that we lesser souls often shudder at that which we see in his works. He sometimes has a very disquieting style I have only found in Dostoyevsky. His book Shabdangal (Noises, or Voices) would be banned in any snobbish society even now. None dared to venture on that line in our language after him.

He was terribly funny sometimes. He says somewhere that “love can be a little smelly as well” and that is priceless, and don't ask me why!

I like these two for what they wrote and what they conveyed in between their words and lines. There is whole literary theory based on Dwani (evocation) in this land. It is old and it is in Sanskrit. They believed that the text is just a garb for something else. Some of our contemporary writers do not need to study it, for none can beat them at it, it seems!

A Visit to Make

I have been lax in visiting my mother for the past few months. We do not really live that far apart, she is only about 30 Km’s away by the road. But she lives in the countryside, a terrible one at that, though we, her children, were all born there. There is supposed to be all facilities in the place but none would be available when we were around. There would be no power, no gas, no cable and no other amenities when anybody is there. But there is this rumor that these exist in the place, though nobody has seen then in action for some considerable time now, at least we haven’t when we are visiting.

We dislike it there now, may be as we grew up our needs grew too! Both my younger sisters would come and depart mostly on the same day excusing themselves with the schooling of their children. My younger brother is abroad and would come only for a day when he was around. My mother also thinks of them as a nuisance because of the children. The children would make her run around so much that she would be sick for some days after they leave.

Not that the place has changed very much from our younger days. But my mother, she seems happy at that house with her old TV set and her tele serials. I think I caught the movie/TV fever from her (It has subsided now). My father used to look down on such things with infinite contempt. But my mother and her family are the greatest movie/TV buffs I have ever seen. They would be always glued to the TV set as if drinking every image through their eyes of the screen. The TV is totally the magic box for them

To them too it is difficult to subsist without power. This would put anybody off, especially as it is insufferable to live in the countryside both in the monsoons and in the summer( the only two major seasons we have, we have six moths of rain and the rest of heat) without power. It would be killingly hot in the summer inside the tiled house and in the rains the old house would be so dark that it would require some guts to move inside the house. When we were little we were afraid to go to the second floor even, and that too at noon on the brightest of summer days as the shades inside used to frighten us. Well it is a little vain on our part to put off the visit to our mother because of these minor inconveniences, since we have been once familiar with the conditions ourselves.

She likes it when I and my dear one visit her, because there would be no fuss when we are around. I would have nothing else to do but sleep, my companions of yester years being all settled in life and very, very busy. Even though they would invite me once in a while to their homes that’s just out of politeness and we would be both uncomfortable if we pursued it further.

So I would sleep and my mom and my dearest would either talk about everything they think of or watch TV or cook. There is some sort of chef cum servant always around and they would not have much to do with cooking. They get on well together, in fact when I had to stay with my mother for some moths they were mostly on amicable terms, very rare in mother in law- daughter in law relationships, my mother with her old world ways providing the occasional irritants.

She is a tough lady, my mother, wouldn’t budge an inch once she has set her mind on something. If she says that a rabbit has three horns that is that. There would not be any further arguments, the point being settled once and for always in her favor. I do not know what technique my dearest uses to get along with this adamant lady. Perhaps mom is a little soft in her case because I have always been the trouble maker in the family. She is literally afraid that I would do anything in the world if I get really angry. If I was not entirely the black sheep, I was quite close to it in our family. I used to get into so much trouble when I was young that my grand mother had kindly predicted that I would destroy the entire world when I become a man.

I am sorry that I couldn’t fulfill her fond hopes. I think it would have been much better for the world had I done that. She said it when I was very young, but up to the point I got married, I would periodically steal my parents sleep for days on end. My father used to say to me:

“You are useless; you would become nothing in your life”

And would add as an afterthought “You are the Jack of all trades, but master of none”

And again

“You have a lot of fancy words in your kitty; you think they are great, they would land you in trouble”

He is no more now.

I grieve deeply whenever I think of him. We fought all the way, not because of any fault of his. He was the nicest person I have ever known in this life, very, very simple, very, very honest. He could not be called an intellectual perhaps, but he was steady enthusiastic, did all with a dictum of “do the deed and do not think of the fruits there of”. He was a great soul, I could never become like him. I sometimes ruefully think that I have not brought any discredit to his name though, for people often say,

“Oh he was so nice!” and would look at me very disapprovingly.

It seems that I haven’t done much damage to his name.

Well my mom and my dearest regularly talk with each other over the phone and I would hear myself being discussed again in not very flattering terms

One would be saying

“It is your son, you know!” and the other would be responding with a laugh

‘Why did I ever give birth to him?”

There would be more laughter.

This one would then say.

“What should we do with him?”

“We can’t pack him off to somewhere can we?’

My dearest would sigh.

“Would have been better for me’

There would be laughter and tears on both sides. I could not ever guess which was which. They laugh talking about the cruelest things that I do and they cry talking of the gentlest of my deeds. I am afraid I can never understand them.

Whether I understand my mom or not I should be visiting her soon.

So what was I writing for?

I could be in the seventh heaven now (if there is such a place); my blog is being noticed at last, may be for the wrong reasons, but who cares!

Much obliged to you, children, you have regenerated me, I have been idling and thinking of winding it up, and then you came along with your youthful fervor and enthusiasm, tore what I have ever written in the blog to tiny shreds. I was sorry to see my poor words bleed so much, always cared for the them you know, but then what of it, they are nothing but words, and they can’t cry.

I cried for them. They pitied me and came back to me although bloodied and maimed badly, but still loving me dearly, for I have been their lover ever since I first saw them , it was a love at first sight, they spoke another tongue then, a slow and heavy tongue .

It was great then, we were close together for ever so long, we got to know each other intimately, they became like wax in my hands, and I could shape anything out of them. We broke all precedents; we created a new land where the sensual was transformed into the intimately tangible, rising like sweet mist to take bewitching shapes, thrilling us with that which they subtly transmitted. We could even make the inanimate talk in pure ecstasy.

Like what happens in all such great loves perhaps, we are at a plateau now The period of experiments are over, the feverish expectation for something new and exciting has subsided somewhat, there are certain insurmountable obstacles which we can’t cross, even in the lingo you know like the palm of your hand.
Knowing this, a great poet in my tongue despaired:

“Even now, the language is imperfect
A flawed understanding might breed errors.”

If he was so doubtful about it, what could people like me say? He was called a Mahakavi even though he did not compose any Mahakavyams( Great Epics, like that of Bhasa or Kalidasa) So there I was with my darling words at some place high but not rarefied enough for me. I looked around. There were legions there in the same predicament, trying vainly to break the shackles imposed by the form of their medium. It was a losing battle, once you reach there, either you ditch your lover for something higher and mystical or you flow downwards.

I knew the genius of my tongue and was not really a bad writer in it, though I did not do anything in it due to my deplorable apathy and perhaps boredom. I have this strange habit; once I become aware I am comfortable in any thing I usually get fed up with it immediately (ever the egotist you see!)!

This happened with my writing too. Perhaps the words of Umberto Eco may have also dissuaded me further.

He said that any moron could win the Nobel for literature, well if so the Nobel was out for me! So what was I writing for!

And then there were legions as I said roaming on the higher levels of my tongue producing like rabbits. There were also cliques, fraternities and what not. Not a conducive atmosphere to turn out pure world literature!

Well I hope that those who are reading this would take it with pinch of salt. I must admit that I was not great shakes as a writer, I was about there, could write a story or two and get it published. That was all.

It all came back when these kindly kids mauled my words with their subtle innuendos and in their blog.

I am happy that they brought it all back. There were some good memories too, seeing my very first story published (the very first I ever wrote) was one such. (God I could have been an A.J. Cronin perhaps only that my medium was short story. What a miss! ). This happened some twenty years back (don’t guess my age, you’d be wrong!). I don’t even have a copy of that story know.

All very sad!