Curiosity Killed The Cat.Or Did It ?

Some people leave a lasting impression in your life that speaks to you from their grave.Br Kyle my teacher in high school was one such.In his thick Irish accent he would say,"Mr Prabakaar...dont look back when you are old and grey and say...I WISH I  HAD DONE THIS..."

 

There are so many things in Life we prevent ourselves from doing from eating what we want to going to places that seem expensive or frivolous.

 

Today this post of mine is dedicated to that Teacher of mine in a school that I have not been for 25 years.He thought me to be CURIOUS.Be curious.Have Curiousity!

 

Do not in the last flicker of your life,lament something that once piqued your curiosity but you neglected to go see it or do it and now never could.I do not know whether you or I will die unhappy but it certainly will be dieing UNFULFILLED.If you seized that chance you might have been sorrier or unhappy if that thing had been unapprovable(to society)?

 

Do not abjure or ignore it.Confess.If a person has to have a fault let it one about which You are passionate at least.It would be a pity to be damned for a paltry thing!

 

I have heard tell that in those last moments when a being is almost devoid of all faculties,of all urges and senses the sense of curiosity remains.Not for all the things you did but those you did not.

 

Do not live in dread of missing something.You may fully expect never to become Prime Minister of the Nation.If that happens,well...Now here is the chimeral difference.

 

Do not miss the unattainable but what is within your grasp.That is the point.

 

Imagine going into Death without having tasted the Good,the bad or merely the Indifferent.Here even indifferent becomes a positive attribute.It is something,not bland,mass-less,egregrieous as it may be.To know at that final moment that it was no one other than you yourself,through careful caution,careless choice or failure to follow your curiousity and where it would have led?

 

Could there be a more hurtful pang in afterlife,if such did exist?

 

On mellow evenings when the sky is leaden with the promise of rain and a faint whiff of autumn on the air,I feel the missed roads I did not take.Its not a feeling that can be shared cause its merely the shadow of doubt or relief or fear.

Because I did hope
In the New milieu
To find answers for old questions
Torn from the pages
Of the Book of Life

To grieve or cry in ecstasy
Or give Curiosity another chance

To see where it would lead anew.
Green or Grey
Happy to accept
The Choices I made

The above poem is my own.I chose to stop sketching,writing and a few other pursuits in the mundane daily living.Sometimes its important to remember that you are you and there is none else in the whole wide world.

Who Killed the Mongoose?

In tufts of greenery,nature fights to holdout in our overcrowded cities.Viciously concretized,unplanned,undermaintained cities.Of filth strewn over roads.The Emerging markets of the World.

 

Vignettes from childhood,of playing football and taking a dip in the nearby pond.The gennext bathing with perfumed anti-bactireal soaps!

 

Vignettes from childhood;hiding cuts and bruises from distraught parents.Gennext,using bandaids for a mosquito bite!!

 

In the small back gardens,sometimes mere dumps behind outhouses where the tropical shrubs took hold,came to live a family of mongoose.using the sewers as higways they melded from island to island in search of grubs,beetles and other food.

 

 

Rising above the grass on their hindlegs as once their predecessors might have to run from the fox and the jackal a century past.Now the brick walls burden the horizon.A tired kite with a broken wing watches from above.

 

I would see it pawed scratch marks in my alley especially after a sharp shower in the night had whet the mud.Of a mixing of two worlds in the middle of night.Of the mongoose's search for food in my yard.

 

Today in the morning while collecting my newspaper I found it dead on the road.Was it a passing car?a stray dog?the tired kite?a wandering jackal?Who played a dirge for my unseen mongoose.

 

Or did it just die of defeat.Losing the battle to meander the shrinking pools of food and water.Giving up the land of its ancestors to be spoiled with filth,concrete and people.

 

Overwhelmed.

 

Just like so many other drifting into nothingness,a once great land living under the burden of a greedy population trying to gulp down the remaining resources.The Buddha came and went.The Jain Muni.Mahatma.

 

 

Children of a lost generation.Shorn of principle or respect for their fellows.Intent on consuming for the selfish whole.

 

"In the Begining lies the End".Wasing their dust onto the street without understanding that the next gust of wind will blow it right back.

 

Why just India.The entire Globe losing.Aborigine children stolen and raised by foster parents bereft of indigenous culture that kept them alive since Father Time.The Bushmen,hunted by black and white alike until the great Kalahari swallowed their existence.Of a thousand nameless tribes slaughtered in the name of progress.

 

Valuable knowledge,traditions,language and culture wasted.

 

The Vulture is dead.So is the Mongoose.How many more will follow before the End?