NavDharmyug

कहते हैं , जब रही ना मुझे ताक़त ए सुख़न  जानूँ किसी के दिल की मैं क्यों कर कहे बगैर।   This delightful verse comes from Ghalib, which is so meaningful in today's world where truth is being replaced by rhetoric is laden with so many interests. I had once written about it and named it "Responsibility of a Writer- As Per Ghalib. (http://www.saketsuryesh.net/2016/04/responsibility-of-writer-as-per-ghalib.html)"   The couplet means as below: If I am no longer blessed with the Power of my Pen, why should I have access to the recesses of someone's heart.  What Ghalib is essentially saying, in my interpretation is that "unless my pen has the will and the strength to honestly convey the interests and thoughts of those who cannot speak, why should I continue to enjoy their trust and have access their hearts. This takes an important perspective in today's context, where a day ban on NDTV has given an opportunity to Ravish Kumar for making his point...

"Without music, life would be a mistake"said Nietzsche, the nihilist philosopher. Plato spoke about the all encompassing nature of music when he said,"Music gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything." A wise man in Kashmir, sought to contradict them and said music was the way to hell, and the harbinger of moral decline of social morality. He, in one ambitious step, nullified the wisdom of centuries; re-defined religion and killed music in the land of amazing beauty.  He, one night came on the national television, gleefully claiming his space in the drawing rooms of a nation to claim that when girls are put in the close vicinity of young boys, without the great, protective shield of the veil over their heads. This murder of music, this lunacy is one such evil which can not survive a day without pretentious sanction of religion. In the illegitimately gained legitimacy of interpreted religion, voices ...

I remember with fondness, a time when I was six years old. I was travelling with my mother in Bihar when she and all the famous fives of them(Five sisters, my mother and her sisters, my Maasis), boarded the wrong train. Those were the times of tight purses, and strict expenses. Thus as we had it, we could understand the blunder which was committed, only after journeying in the direction opposite to the one originally planned for. By the time, trains were swapped and new tickets were bought, the funds touched the bottom lining of the purses they carried. As we rode back to Munger, the hawkers came into the train compartments with loaded temptations. Ah, those were wonderful times of great snacks selling with lovely sounds inviting you to buy the stuff, against the chugging sound of the diesel trains. One hawker, I remember, was selling eggs, the boiled one. I asked for one, and he stood there. I asked my mother more, then I begged and I do not remember well,...