NavDharmyug

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...

Monsoons are here. The day is a typical Monsoon day, all fresh, washed clean day, as if ready for proper parting of hairs and to be sent to the school. It is a perfect day. I slept through most of it. In between, I thought about what the day signifies. It is Friendship day. I am at the age, on the wrong side of forty. There are articles in the newspapers proclaiming that forty is the new twenty. But than those are just pretentious words of solace as the life slides faster than before. I feel pre-historic, ancient on the days like this. It is not like we used to jog with the dinosaurs in our days. But we did not have the days like in our days. I still remember going to Archies, near Sharda Chowk in Raipur in 1993. It was a new entity and was relegated, me and my Engineering roommate had first encountered Valentine day there. My room-mate, Arvind Gupta from Balaghat, was freshly in love and thought of buying a card. We both looked at each other, clueless of what it meant. Tha...

" Every Parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of resurrection" so said the great philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer . A journey filled with tearful departures- a string of them, begun from the engineering college, NIT Raipur, where I spent a great part of foundation on which my later life was to stand was made. That was the place where to put it poetically, we turned from tadpole to the butterfly, and to put it plainly, we turned from boys to men. This 13th, September, we had a reunion.  It was in Bhopal, for two reasons- one was logistical connectivity and secondly, the city somehow had the most enthusiastic lot, the lot which could protect their enthusiasm through the years of growing up and growing old. I wanted to go and was inclined but some I spoke to weren't much. Why should I go? who was I to meet?   Is this whole exercise is to meet balding, graying men with slight paunch, like me, struggling to establish their own station in life and on some...

Courtesy: Old Friends By Rupa Bhaty Her work is at  https://rupabhaty.see.me/ We grow up with our own ideas of the world and life. From a weak existence, which is sure of its own ideas, we grow into an existence of power when those ideas take wings. We trust in those ideas, talk about them and argue for them. We love them truly and dream about surrendering our selfish well being to propel those ideas. As the Sun would set in the backdrop of tea stalls, we would speak with the conviction of a sage who has found his truth. Life hits back. It throws at us a rule book framed out of the lowest common denominator, the law of average. Every word is countered by the already tamed society with a rare vengeance. We conform to the social mold. Each act of conformance is an act of violence against the sacred spirit which we are borne with, a stab on the Will to live. With each small surrender, a word dies, one after another and the next rain flushes away the dead, through the dark n...