Thoughts

Warm spring breeze caressing the blossoms. There are days when the heart's soil is so numb. Why we live and why we die, no one knows. Funny how so many elements get together to create a collective 'me' and this me goes through the ferocious storms raging in mind and soul.
What do I want with my life? Reading Gandhi has led to a realisation that life is just not about self. There is little time years have gone by without sharing and now time is ripe to start giving away. If this body is given the grace to live and enjoy, it better spent itself in giving and making a difference every day, as a start and every hour when one reaches that plane.

Today, as I was heading to IIT, at a crossing I saw some eunuchs begging, I gave some change but was about to ask her why she was begging when her limbs were alright, I dropped the idea.

Like a flower is placed on the feet of an idol, I bow this head and place it on creator's feet. Lead me to do what I was meant to do here on Earth. If the wisdom is lost, lead me to the light.

Salt

Salt in my heart grits the delicate beats
The ocean evaporated and salt remains Finished reading this book and it ends with the assassination of Gandhi. Feeble after the fast, he would still spin cotton on his wheel as he believed that ' bread taken without labour is stolen bread'. Reading this book that is as much about Gandhi as India's independence, I realised that he was a man who grasped the truth when he saw it. Once while boarding Johannesburg-Durban train an English friend gave him John Ruskin's 'Unto This Last', Gandhi read this book all night and made a vow, he would give away all his possessions. According to Ruskin riches were a tool to secure power over men. A labourer served the society as much as a Doctor or a Lawyer and the life of labour, of tilling the soil was worth living. Gandhi was doing very well as a lawyer those days with an income of 5000 pounds a year. This thought process had begun in his mind since the past two years. He would do his own laundry, cut his own hair, clean his toilet and had delivered his last child. He settled his family in a farm with few friends and Gandhi's life took on a pattern that would rule it until the death. A renunciation of material possessions and striving to satisfy human needs in the simplest manner, coupled with communal existence in which all labour was equally valued. He also took the vow of sexual continence, this had been nagging issue since he had questioned his indulgence in carnal pleasures as his father lay on the death bed. It is this force of truth that gave him such power over the Indian masses. During his fasts he subsisted on lukewarm water and bicarbonate of soda and as the life would ebb out, the masses would give up violence and gather around him and promise to be brothers. He loved with his heart every human and it seems he had risen much above the divisions of cast, religion and colour. Seems he had reached beyond the individual to the collective, where all living entities are merely extensions of a whole. I will be reading more on this great man and share it with all. Working on reuse, reduce, recycle, we got a blender jar for a very old mixer that husband had bought when he was eighteen. Amazingly we got a new jar that fits perfectly. This brings me to rural areas, it is just the Indian cities that are now into the Western mode of use and throw. The moment you move to the suburbs and villages, you see old plastic buckets stitched up, innovative use of things like plastic bags and another sore sight, mountains of non degradable plastic that cities consume and dump in landfills that pollute the suburbs and little towns beyond. Reading Gandhi, one thing is clear, the things he believed in would have led to a world where everyone was happy, not a fistful of rich people like today, who sadly lead a life that is happy(Is drug, indiscriminate sex and corruption happy?). Still, the illusion is being heaped with such deadly skill by equally corrupt media. Percolating from those strata to those who look up to this fancy world, not knowing that the woman who they want to emulate sleeps when drugged or the man who looks so suave racing his ferrari has a heart bathed in guilt, how he cheated the investors and is now cheating himself with this pretty toy. Falsehood upon falsehood and now they say its recession, the crooks think they are smart but the creator is smarter, unless we do not accept the balance, there might be passing moments of gratification but no real peace. Dunno just putting down what is going on in my mind right now. On a lighter note, have discovered rare pleasure in licking the plates with solidified jaggery. Why do we eat as we think humans should? As children I am sure all of us have licked milk as a kitten does or ran with bread just as a dog snatches and runs away with the prize! Dunno again but I love to smell my kids and act like a mamma cat or mamma dog frolicking with its litter. Am I a bit off centre or everybody does it? I even love to bark and tug at their clothes and lick their arms and hands. Maybe I was a dog in my previous birth, was a piled piper of dogs as a kid! Enough of this peace to all... Pic: A simple kitchen in a Himalayan village, the floor is pasted with cow dung and mud(it's scientifically proven, cow dung is anti septic). Thankfully such simplicity is every where except cities of India.