That kind of a day, that kind of a thought

-

 It was Eid and Ekadashi today. Thus far, I have managed to keep the fast for Ekadashi. But we still have 2 hours to go so...let's see.

I had this urge to go to a temple. There is a small one near my house. Today it was filled with people singing keertans. So I went to the  Iskcon. I like the temple. It's so big and bustling. It's organised and musical. 

But today was very crowded. Usually I go to temples and do a quick pranaam without offering flowers or fruits. But I felt like buying a thali. I got one with some fruits, tulsi leaves and a single marigold flower that lay there like a fully energized petaled sun. There was a long queue and I was already feeling stressed in the pit of my stomach. But the line kept moving and just like that, I had my darshan and I got done. 

I came out and thought of getting a flower for the pooja room in my home. I bought a lotus. The florist fluffed out the petals and it looked like a sweet little bird. 

I caught an auto back and as is my nature, I thought.

The trip to Iskcon was an impulse...a strong, deep tug in my stomach. But the road had a few unpleasant skirmishes - the auto-fellow whose meter was galloping away. When I confronted him about it, he got defensive and started arguing. The security lady at the temple shoved me a little bit. Inside, another lady was flapping her elbows to twist her way ahead of the queue, and the florist overcharged me for the lotus saying that it was a special day. 

Earlier I would have thought that religion or these kinds of rituals make people dishonest and bad. But the fact that all that happened, yet I had my darshan properly and returned home without getting wet...that says something. There is a man, a tantric called Rajarshi Nandy, who says that the purpose of all the rituals etc. is not for the gods or goddesses. They will be perfectly fine without it. They are for the person who has to live out his or her life here, being constantly distorted with the corruption of daily living. 

I saw that today. This trip, I thought, was like my life. There seem to be many things and people in the path who really do put me off my larger goal. The path itself is too crowded and the goal feels unwieldy. But I expect that someday, for a short while, the crowds will thin and I will grasp my goal like dandelion fluff in my palms.

It will be a simple, sweet miracle that I will forget about the next second. 

And that will be a life lived the way it should be. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to...
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She ...
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei...
Read more