A Quest (ion Mark)

Life. What is it. What is it for. Are our lives consequential. Why are we here. What is hope. Why do we hope. Does it make us accept our fate with gratification. Or discontent. Or anger. Why do events occur the way they do. Why do we regret things that didn't happen. What is luck. What is good luck. What about bad luck. What's the difference. Does it matter. Do you actually believe life would've been any different if it mattered.


Are we really the supreme authority over our destinies. What choices do we have in shaping our destinies. Can we really create our destiny. Do we CREATE our destiny. Do we accept it. Have we truly any choice on when we rise and when we fall. Or a force larger than ourselves bid us our direction. Is anything certain. Life. Death. Do we live in a dreamworld, a coma, inside an amorphous maze, as a part of an illusory ordeal, trapped within a labyrinth of infinite boundaries. Why bother if life's going to make its own choices.


What is the role of divine providence in our lives. Why are suffering and evil so manifest in human experience. Is this place another world's hell. Do we live after we die. Don't we die before we die. What is consciousness. Are we indeed conscious. Unconscious. Do our struggles have meaning. What makes mankind tragic. Is it the fact that we are victims of nature, or that we are conscious of it (Conrad, eh). Is it evolution that has brought us our way. Or is it GOD who intervenes, keeping us safe.


Are we in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is stable, firm, absolute and knowable. Or is it an incomprehensible chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux, which our mind is impotent to grasp.

Where are the answers.

Sonnet XVII (100 Love Sonnets, 1960) by Pablo Neruda

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

Pablo Neruda (is great).

Longevity

Humans are perhaps the only species cognizant of their impending demise. The same evolution that inevitably developed consciousness in us has turned us into quakers. It is so difficult for us to accept the fact that the universe was not made for us, and that there is no special meaning in our being here. We are constantly seeking out ways to prolong life or find an afterlife - in the kingdom of god, or here on earth, reduxed. We have to learn to let go and accept death. It is all transient. Enjoy it while it lasts. Let it go mate !

This fear of things ending makes us cling to beliefs and ideas even after they have outlived their usefulness. We want to stop evolution in its tracks, believing falsely that we have attained some perfect sentience. We want to believe in millenia old ideas on how to live, like religion, or the more recent ideas of communism and capitalism on how to make a living. Move on and create something new. An idea for the times, and when it doesn’t work, let it go.

The hardest thing we have trouble accepting is the end of the affair. It was good while it lasted, but it’s no more. Knowing that it will all come to an end does not make it any easier to deal with, but it’s a start.

Live it, and when it’s over, dust yourself, and get back on that dark saddle. It is the fragile and ephemeral nature of life, the unknown expiration date we each have, that makes it so precious. If we were immortal would life be as beautiful?

The Complaining Types

Okay. I recall this happened a few months back. There i was, sitting in the middle of a moderately jam packed bus. Two middle-aged men pushed their way effortlessly into the bus (regular commuters, i could easily make out). Much to their good luck, they found themselves seated almost immediately to my next seat. As a matter of fact, it is highly improbable that you find yourself a void to fit into, at least here in Delhi. Such is the piteous condition of buses and traffic on the whole. 

Alas, coming to this episode of mine, I realised to my vehement distaste that one of the fellows was chewing the oh-so-aromatic, darling of the masses -GUTKHA ('Unche log unchi pasand'). What wine red mouth watering (read: reddening) delicacy it is. And the pride in shooting out that jet of blood red discharge. Ah !

So this rich-red soul neatly lets out his brilliant tobacco-spit on the middle of the road. Needless to say, the spurt closely misses a biker (much to the bad luck of the radiant spit). So far so good. Now this spitter lets out a dejected sigh, takes a long and awaiting look at the congested traffic and with the ease of a retired Government Babu's pension, says - " Saali Dilli bahut gandi hai.." (This Delhi is such a filthy place..).

With a melange expression of surprise, disgust, anger and sorrow, I gave him a nasty look, but found it utterly pointless to make him understand his shamelessness. It was no use saying. Such people exist in tens of thousands. You simply cannot disregard them; considering that they are the yield of the same civilization you live in.

Boast of Quietness

Every now and then you stumble upon a piece of writing, a work of such vigor that it dwarfs the customary bubblings of your mind to obscurity. Here's one such wave of astonishing writing, a wonderful blend of peace and openness, of light and shadows, awaiting rediscovery with every reading.

Boast Of Quietness by Jorge Luis Borges -

Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.

The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.

Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them.

Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air. Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.

They speak of humanity.

My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of that same poverty.

They speak of homeland.

My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls.

Time is living me.

More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetousmultitude.

They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.

My name is someone and anyone.

I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive.

I come back to this time and again. No other piece of writing has struck me so much as this one. Borges with his wealth of invention, creates a world outside time and space. His greatness and the profanity of his writings is indeterminable.

In Borges' own words - " The greatest poetry is always motivated by a writer's sense of that terrible dislocation between the mind and the world; the poem itself rises in that gap, intrusive, begging for consideration, helpless and hopeless, trying to patch over the silence that is always beyond improvement yet somehow unsatisfactory."