Long after you have left home, long after you have gone too far, long after you missed some people on the way, you realize how much you have lost. Those little joys of life. Those festival of lights, those moments of colours.
To be with someone, you lose someone. To be someone, you lose to be someone. But this would perhaps be a constricted way of seeing things. On a more cosmic level, everything belongs to the Divine and every creation of His, reflects Him. And that is the beauty of Universe. A reflection of the divinity in everything: light and dark, colours and their somber shades, spicy and sugary, heavy and light, big and small, away but not so far. Diwali the festival of lights signifies this spiritual aspect of existence.
Legends galore why the festival is reveringly celebrated all over India and perhaps the world. But the most beloved is the one that refers to Lord Rama’s return from exile after fourteen years. Lord Rama, is referred to as the ‘Maryada Purshottam’ in the Vedas. ‘Maryada Purshottam’ a Sanskrit word, when translated literally means, the highest and the best amongst all human beings. That is He signifies the best of human qualities, closest to the Divine.
In Hindu spirituality, there is a strong faith in re-birth and incarnation. It is believed that one of the reasons that Lord incarnates from time to time is to show love and come as a close relationship to those who loved and prayed the Lord in their last lives and wanted to have Him as their child, spouse or parent. The other important reason, Lord incarnates, is to destroy the demons and bring peace to the world. And finally to set an example for the world, as to how the best and ideal men & women should behave.
Lord Rama as ‘maryada purshottam’ as the ideal human set an example for the humans to act with serenity in the most difficult of circumstances, to fight the evil and to love everyone. It is said that Lord Rama was so much loved and revered by the people all over Bharat(as India was referred to then), that when their beloved Rama came back from exile, after fourteen years, people lighted their homes with ‘diyas’(kind of candles burnt with ghee, a type of Indian butter made from cow milk) and celebrated sweets.
Thousands of years may have passed away since then, but the spirit remains. The fragrance of this festival lingers on, the light lightens our spirits and reminds of those waiting somewhere for us. And in my heart, brings a promise to my parents, that next year there really will be a Diwali at home…. Till then, just a promise .. na juda honge hum, kabhi khushi, kabhi gham….
Till then, lets try spread the infectious spirit of love, life and spirituality wherever we are, wherever we go. Live a little bit of spirituality wherever we are, see that Divine residing inside each one of us that makes us a little more good, a little less bad!! … Happy Diwali!
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Of babies, economics, flowers & Moksha!
My friend loves babies. Nothing special. We all do. Specially the women. But having them and that too one after another is quite a ball game. So when my special friend had her third baby, I called her congratulating on the occasion & teasingly I demanded, so when do you plan to have the next. Benignly caressing through the modest tresses & the diminutive features of her new born angel, absorbed in the ecstasy of motherhood, she replied, possibly in 2015. Wow!! Pulling her leg, I asked her, isn’t there something like the law of Diminishing Marginal Utility in Economics. Simply speaking, for those divorced from the bizarre world of economics, it means that for each additional unit of a given thing I have, the value added for every subsequent unit that I can have, falls proportionately. Serene & smiling she replied, ‘children are like flowers, the more you want, the more you want to have them’. From my friend's lens, for the geeky economist, they disobey all the laws of classical economics!
So what is it about being a mother that makes it so exceptional. Perhaps its the mother inside a woman’s heart that makes her so feminine, so mother-like. After all how can you not love them? As someone once famously said, ‘a woman is one who shows man, what love, care and share is all about.’ Being a mother is one of the most special and divine ways to express this selfless form of love. It is an expression of giving. Helping this new born grow up, becoming a part of the world. 'Osho' believed that one of best ways to have a lifelong loving relationship between spouses is to love them like a baby. That doesn’t quite mean acting like a mummy. But there is an abstract element of that feminity that he referred to. The element is one of ‘selflesslessness’.
In the Yogic philosophy too, it is said that ‘ahankar’ is the root of existence. Difficult to translate exactly in English, literally speaking it means ‘ego’. The surrender of this ego and absolute selfless love for the Divine, for all His creations is Spirituality, the path to Moksha. Yoga is that first step towards selflessness. In the more earthly sense, perhaps its motherhood. Imagine there is this sweet little creation, who you almost sense as an extension of your own and then you give away all that you have to this little one. This for sure is the way to selflessness. Would children, ethereally speaking, be the road to moksha then?
Till we experience, between us!
So what is it about being a mother that makes it so exceptional. Perhaps its the mother inside a woman’s heart that makes her so feminine, so mother-like. After all how can you not love them? As someone once famously said, ‘a woman is one who shows man, what love, care and share is all about.’ Being a mother is one of the most special and divine ways to express this selfless form of love. It is an expression of giving. Helping this new born grow up, becoming a part of the world. 'Osho' believed that one of best ways to have a lifelong loving relationship between spouses is to love them like a baby. That doesn’t quite mean acting like a mummy. But there is an abstract element of that feminity that he referred to. The element is one of ‘selflesslessness’.
In the Yogic philosophy too, it is said that ‘ahankar’ is the root of existence. Difficult to translate exactly in English, literally speaking it means ‘ego’. The surrender of this ego and absolute selfless love for the Divine, for all His creations is Spirituality, the path to Moksha. Yoga is that first step towards selflessness. In the more earthly sense, perhaps its motherhood. Imagine there is this sweet little creation, who you almost sense as an extension of your own and then you give away all that you have to this little one. This for sure is the way to selflessness. Would children, ethereally speaking, be the road to moksha then?
Till we experience, between us!
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
La vita è bella
Three days in Italy and the same sense of déjà vu as thirty years in India. There is more than an ‘I’ in common between Italy & India.
Celebrated as a gazetted holiday, 4th October in Bologna marks the day of Saint Petronio, the patron saint of Bologna. Infact, every city in Italy have had a patron saint. So I thought, it was going to be a long lazy afternoon. But the warm Italians had something more in store for me. So when a ‘joie de vivre’ elderly couple invited me to lunch, I could not resist, but to consent.
Walking through the historical boulevards, neatly carved narrow meandering lanes of Bologna, I finally reached the home of my hosts. It was more then just a lunch. A cozily set-up traditional home, a peep into the conventional habitat was far more enriching then spending an afternoon. It was an ethnic encounter. Where else could I expect a perfectly alien couple to give me all their afternoon, prepare a special ‘vegetarian’ lunch for a stranger, someone they had never seen, never known before. Serving me the pasta, they told, it was not a simple, any other italian cuisine. It was a purgatoire. Enjoying my stay in the land of Dante, the creator of Divine Comedy, I could sense the food eaten somewhere between hell and heaven.
Cracking endless jokes on cultural encounters or (mis)encounters, I could sense a thread of similarity that runs between the two cultures. Specially our love for English and the brazen abuse of the dialect. Be it the ‘Italian man who went to Malta’ or the ‘Indian who goes to England’, our English encounters are devastatingly humorous.
Emotionally speaking particularly moving, was the passion with which they gave me a virtual tour through the historical lanes of Bologna. Armed with an old book, containing very old maps of the city, the world’s oldest running university, my hosts took me through the constricted city in time and in space. And in one afternoon, I traveled through the lifetime of this historic place. I left the home with a feeling that I had seen all that was to be seen in Bologna. And I saw from the eyes of a couple who lived the city and loved it. I felt connected. I was touched. I saw more then I could ever see as a tourist, more then I could ever experience as an artist. It brought back a sense of déjà vu. A feeling long lost since I left home. The pleasant & kind couple reminded me of my parents back home. Just the way they would invite every stranger to eat with them, stay with them. There, it seemed, was a place somewhere else, under the sun, where they believed in athithi devobhav, that is the guests are symbolic representations of the Divine.
There was more warmth to the culture then just the shinning sun. Perhaps the affection emanating from the heart, that creates an ambiance of nostalgia & pleasantness in this sunny country.
Celebrated as a gazetted holiday, 4th October in Bologna marks the day of Saint Petronio, the patron saint of Bologna. Infact, every city in Italy have had a patron saint. So I thought, it was going to be a long lazy afternoon. But the warm Italians had something more in store for me. So when a ‘joie de vivre’ elderly couple invited me to lunch, I could not resist, but to consent.
Walking through the historical boulevards, neatly carved narrow meandering lanes of Bologna, I finally reached the home of my hosts. It was more then just a lunch. A cozily set-up traditional home, a peep into the conventional habitat was far more enriching then spending an afternoon. It was an ethnic encounter. Where else could I expect a perfectly alien couple to give me all their afternoon, prepare a special ‘vegetarian’ lunch for a stranger, someone they had never seen, never known before. Serving me the pasta, they told, it was not a simple, any other italian cuisine. It was a purgatoire. Enjoying my stay in the land of Dante, the creator of Divine Comedy, I could sense the food eaten somewhere between hell and heaven.
Cracking endless jokes on cultural encounters or (mis)encounters, I could sense a thread of similarity that runs between the two cultures. Specially our love for English and the brazen abuse of the dialect. Be it the ‘Italian man who went to Malta’ or the ‘Indian who goes to England’, our English encounters are devastatingly humorous.
Emotionally speaking particularly moving, was the passion with which they gave me a virtual tour through the historical lanes of Bologna. Armed with an old book, containing very old maps of the city, the world’s oldest running university, my hosts took me through the constricted city in time and in space. And in one afternoon, I traveled through the lifetime of this historic place. I left the home with a feeling that I had seen all that was to be seen in Bologna. And I saw from the eyes of a couple who lived the city and loved it. I felt connected. I was touched. I saw more then I could ever see as a tourist, more then I could ever experience as an artist. It brought back a sense of déjà vu. A feeling long lost since I left home. The pleasant & kind couple reminded me of my parents back home. Just the way they would invite every stranger to eat with them, stay with them. There, it seemed, was a place somewhere else, under the sun, where they believed in athithi devobhav, that is the guests are symbolic representations of the Divine.
There was more warmth to the culture then just the shinning sun. Perhaps the affection emanating from the heart, that creates an ambiance of nostalgia & pleasantness in this sunny country.
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