NavDharmyug

"Thus Nature spake- The work was done How soon my Lucy's race was run! She died and left to me This heath, this calm and quiet scene; The memory of what has been, And never more will be. " - Three Years She Grew, William Wordsworth Death always comes with a bit of spirituality. Still, some sorrows are so close to the soul that wisdom can not wash them away. Post-funeral, no matter how much water we pour over our body, there is a bitter taste of ash and sand which remains at the tip of the tongue.  I had first seen her when Nonu, my kid was in junior school, Five years back. That was the age when all kids look similar, similar miniature-esque walk of toy soldiers, similar eyes with bewildered happiness, running aimlessly around in the manicured school lawns, amid the quacking ducks. She was her classmate and older by few months.  Quite soon she was regular at our place, her house situated close to ours. She was exceptionally talented in penci...

I am in Pune. There are rains. Rains came to Delhi and passed it by. I too ran off to Pune. I do not know why. There is such a severe stench of mendacity in the air which settles around this time of the year. A pretense of significance of my life in other lives around me, a pretense of significance of my life, in its own solitude.  The city, which is always green and lush,  is violently green today. The airfield, the roads, the buildings- are all clean and washed and shiny. I did catch some drizzle outside the airport. Just a slight drizzle, failing miserably to clean the cobwebs on my soul. A soul that has aged years in last year. I finished Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre on the flight.  The novel is a philosophical story wrapped around the search and eventual futility of existential meaning. I am always contemplative around the birthday (this I wrote last birthday - Why I Hate Birthdays? )  . This birthday is even worse. While people claim that Forties is the...

I write this post, sitting in a muddle of thoughts. There are times when one isn't sure what one wants to write about. Life is happening, suddenly the Earth rotates too fast for sanity. A festival, a funeral, too many people. Good people, dressed in good clothes move about. A music plays. The tempo rises, and rises until it reaches a crescendo. Palms to the ears, a military band, the sound crushes the soul, and all that was soft, hopeful and fantastical lie about the life, dies. All that remains is the cynical, uncaring truth.  And suddenly, it comes to a halt. From behind the silken curtains, a face lurks- Death looks at life. Cruel and smiling, a spine-shuddering cruel smile plays on his lips. The music now is sad, and a smell of death floats in the air. A friend looks at me, his face ashen, his smile broken. Till yesterday, his soul was younger than me, suddenly, in him, I find, sages from the past centuries. A moment is all it takes from a young soul to turn old, an...

They say death is a great equalizer. The oppressor, the oppressed, the rich and the poor, the privileged and the deprived, the atheist and the fanatic, the prince and the pauper are all equal in death. They lie. They are wrong. All people are not equal in death. Death is as unequal as is life and as monstrously cruel. How we are treated in death is defined by the people we leave behind. We are quite helpless in our posthumous passivity. It is also defined by how we have lived. If we have mattered to people as name and person or only as number. What is our identity in death, numerical reality or philosophical rallying point? Many things define where we find ourselves when the cruel chariot of death has run over the fragrant floral lives and the dust settles down, giving way to the stench of dead body. From a very philosophical value, each life matters a universe in value, from a very cynical, realistic and analytic value, the quantum of loss out of any death will be defined ...

“ We live in a superficial, media-driven culture that often seems uncomfortable with true depths of feelings. It seems as if our culture has become increasingly intolerant of acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to meditate such sorrows away. ” – Edward Hirsch. Friday, 13 th of November, 2015, a sad, severe attack in Paris, at Bataclan concert hall and State Stadium claimed promptly by ISIS caused the death of 129 people and many more injured. As the details emerged, the gruesomeness of the attack became known about how armed gunmen fired at innocent victims, young and old, without discretion. The parallels to 26/11 in Mumbai are uncanny, which left 260 dead. The perfunctory sadness shifted quickly to justifications, with something as silly as Hijab ban by noted Indian jurist and a journalist linking it to US action in Iraq. While both could be reason, they cannot be justification. We quickly moved into the phas...

Picture: Reuters “Where was Rudy’s Comfort? Who was there to soothe him as life’s rug was snatched from under his sleeping feet?...He does something to me, that boy. Every time. It is his only detriment. He steps on my heart. He makes me cries.” – (Markus Zusak “The Book Thief”) Here is Death, as the Narrator speaking about the death of fourteen year old, Rudy Steiner. Some souls weigh heavy even on death’s conscience. A dying child’s soul is like that. In a world of 24 hours news and the information oscillating between insensitive and insane, some pictures hang about on our collective conscience. The hang like gray clouds hovering over our minds, tormenting our hearts, haunting our souls. The Book Thief (above) was written about the World War II. We would want to believe that the world has move far ahead in this time. Some events pull us up from our obnoxious slumber, wrench our heart and hits our head with hammer heavy enough to crush into powder the whole behemoth of m...

Courtesy : Marta Moran Bishop- Authro and Poet The Sun was bright, but its bright, white light, under which the rugged Earth shone, like youth in its prime, carried no warmth of love. The chill which seeped through the spine, overpowered the mild struggle, almost half heartedly put up by the splendid rays, landing on the arrogantly and audaciously rising mountain. Lance Naik Narender Singh looked out of the window of his barrack. The view was lovely, with only two things obstructing a complete surrender of human mind to the surreal beauty outside-Fierce, unnerving cold and the constant fear. The mountain spread before the eyes, like an enormous giant, with arms spread wide, the blues of the far, merging into to greens spread below them. He had tried to explain what he viewed outside his window, many times earlier to Titali, his wife, in the village back home. She had never been beyond the dusty lanes of the small village, in the hinterlands of the country, about two hundre...

Easier will be steepest of the paths if you whisper to them, to the trees, and the rocks like a friend. : Me with Sanskriti (Nonu) I finished reading The Book Thief to my seven year old, though in bits and pieces, and then closed it with watching the magnificent movie adaptation today afternoon. The weather was kind, her interest was up, having read the book and it was almost ethereal, in a happy way. I kept on thinking why did I watch this movie with Nonu. I thought about it and wanted to share. Not that I do not watch movies often with her. I am a movie freak and the weekend with no new releases leaves me uneasy. Between me and my daughter, we keep on watching all the animation movies, much to the chagrin of her mother. But watching The Book Thief was different. It struck me when I read another “ All The Life We cannot See ” right after I read “ The Book Thief ”. These two books are about World War II, these two books are about death. Should I expose a seven year old ...