Punjab - The Land of Five Rivers:Reminescences of a Neem Tree,Part I

It is strange how the first memories of people we meet,places we visit,food we eat,are always the strongest.Ever afterwards we subconsciously compare our subsequent experiences with 'that' first time.

1979.A nine year old born and raised in the congested surroundings of Calcutta had his first rendezvous with the birthplace of his fathers -  Punjab.A village in Hoshiarpur district.A dusty forty minute bus ride from the district centre.

Those memories are as crystal clear as if it was yesterday that I got off the bus in the late afternoon sun of a mellow summer.The adobe brick house was the tallest in the village,with an open courtyard and one of the rooms was mud brick.

The roof dazed me.I had never seen so much open space in my short life.Wheat and yellow flowered mustard fields stretched out and across my entire field of vision.The dome of an alabaster white Gurdwara stood out amidst the green.

Sleeping under the giant Neem tree in the courtyard on 'charpoys' with a stick under the bed to ward of snakes.The brightness of the stars and constellations and waking up at 4:30am to the sound of shabad floating on the wind from the unseen Gurdwara.

So close to nature.To where my ancestors must have toiled for generations.

And the first peacock,not those mangy specimens of Calcutta Zoo,but a real wild one,dazzling plumage,the deepest blue neck and about 5 feet away.Thankfully a few survive till date in the surrounding villages.

Guests coming to see the 'important' visitors from the distant big city.Drinking gallons of smoked milk flavoured with jaggery.The freshest 'Makki ki roti' and 'Sarson da Saag'.

The village plumber and oddjobs man using a lassoe to trip bullocks before shoeing them.The thud as they fell and how important to get them shoed.The gentle ride on a buffalo cart,undulating between wheat and sugarcan fields and a mango orchard that stretched for 3 kilometres at places the leaves so dense that the sunlight could not penetrate to the ground at high noon.

Gone today in the mindless urbanisation.The orchards and wheat fields.For exotic vegetables.And the scrouge of mosquitoes that came fifteen years after my first visit when rice was introduced.

Those friends of my age with whom we contructed a swing from the branches of that Neem tree now long immigrated to Canada and the USA or UK.London,Ealing,Southall.Vancouver,Toronto,Reno and New York.

Gone that innocence.The landscape survives.A mere reminder of the 'Green Revolution' and the prosperity.A tough but satisfying life.

Mountains In The Mist

The serpent eagle was shielded by the green boughs.But I knew it was there.I had seen it fly into the dense leafy branches of the cedar.

Welcome to the remote village of Kaluk in west Sikkim.Sitting in the lap of the mighty Kanchendzonga Peak,it lies close to Gyalshing,the anciet capital of west Sikkim.Across the hill lies the more famous town of Pelling.As the whitecapped clouds scuppered away in the morning breeze I caught my first glimpse of the third highest Peak in the world – Mt.Kanchedzonga.

My journey began 560 Kms from this Shangri La or lost paradise(in Tibetan),in conditions dramatically different.Hot,humid,sultry Kolkata.Although the summer heat was giving way to milder conditions in the month of October,it still was bloody hot!

  

My quiet night journey ended at NJP station in Siliguri with a much needed air conditioned car waiting.Karma Sherpa,a soft spoken native of Kaluk drove the Innova the 124 Kms from NJP to Kaluk via NH 31A with stops in Tadong and Jorethang.The higher we climbed the more we felt as if we were shedding our urban skin,the noise and pollution of Siliguri but a memory.Tall cedar and oak trees lined the road,unnamed bright red orchids peeping from the front yards of small mudbrick houses.

  

 

Finally our destination.5600 ft. Up from sea level the resort.Small yet comfortable cottages with a small balcony and the first thing I see is a reclining chair!The stress seems to drain out in the pristine air,sharp and one can almost feel the oxygen going into the lungs!The gardens are laid out in terraces,I hear a cow mooing somewhere,I see a pig pen,vegetable gardens,I see swifts flying high up between where i stand and the mountains.

I see butterflies.The size of small birds.Vivid blue,black,red,gold yellow.I have never seen such a variety before.The owner has brought kiwi vines from Arunachal further to the north-east and I see three or four kiwis growing on the trellised vines.The “viewpoint”is a meandering path topped out over a bamboo grove where the valley falls away precipitiously to meet the Rangit river many thousands of feet below.The pine needles have fallen on the ground over years and built into a layer which feels soft and strangely soothing when walking on naked feet.

The varshey rhododendron sanctuary – it of the magnificent mutli shaped orchids of the strangest hues of purple and pink,unimaginable in its diversity.

The singular Tchangey falls,twin slivers of water drifting away as mist even before hitting the ground.To the Pemayansgtse Monastery in Pelling,smelling of incense and a huge prayer wheel.Eating hot momos at a nearby tin shack restaurant.

Rested,refreshed after a three day break we headed back to our old life....and reality!!

Bengali New Year,Circa 1422...Why I Still Have Faith

Why a post on Bengali New Year one may ask?

For one,I was born in Bengal.

Second,I grew up surrounded by all things Bengali

Most importantly,I have seen this amazing culture which in many ways is India,embracing others,influencing but never coercing.Enhancing everyone who touches it.

Across India,the Bengali has been stereotyped as a lazy person who talks more,does less,generally lives in the past and is totally ambitionless.This is so pervasive that some of my Bengali friends themselves believe this.

Yes they do hold onto Rabindranath Tagore,Netaji Subash Chandra Bose but let us not forget these people left a defining impression on the course of Indian history and not an overstatement to say that they not only defined it but changed the direction.Then there is the Bengali Renaissance,a socio culturural reform movement in the early nineteenth century led by Raja RamMohan Roy that questioned the prevailing orthodoxies like 'sati'or bride burning,polygamy and other practises that were corroding the very fabric of Hinduism.

Kadambini Ganguly was the first woman graduate from India.Henry Louis Vivian Derozio,an anglo Indian wrote about the glorious country that India was.

Swami Vivekananda,Sri Aurobindo,and Sri Ramakrishna were the leading philosophers whose vision is still relevant.

The war of Independence began from Barrackpore with Mangal Pandey then Binoy,Badal and Dinesh and Khudiram fanned the flames.

One blog is not enough to talk about character,some of them British,Scottish and Irish who were infuenced by the climes of Bengal to set up instititutions of learning that survive till today.The scientists,industrialists etc

India does not know how to cherish its history.Go to Plassey or Chandannagore and see the lack of care with which monuments are treated.

Yet like a phoenix that rises from the ashes,Bengalis abound.I will always remember a chance meeting with journalist Vir Sanghvi many years ago in Delhi who said,"the best work by bengalis is done outside of Bengal".

The sheer locational advantage of Kolkata and Bengal as a gateway to the natural resources of the East,a deep water port,fertile soil means that it will not take much for an agrarian-industrial economy to thrive.Like a wild creeper that just needs a foothold,a crevicefull of soil,a snatched handful of sunlight.

There were some noises made around 2007 of opening Nathula for Chinese goods to flow through Calcutta Port,of industries in the hinterland that subsided into political chaos.

Politics is and will remain the bete-noire of business unless the will to triumph.If Narendra Modi can make a wasteland like Gujarat prosperous then Bengal is far better equipped.

All those bengali classmates of mine today plying their trade in Delhi,Mumbai,Bangalore,Muscat or California have wistful ideas in some hidden corner of their heart to one day come back and do something.Of monsoon rains,freshwater fish.

Of Rabindranath Tagore's saying,"IF NO ONE WALKS WITH YOU.WALK ALONE".

A Bengal that will claim its rightful place in a modern,digital India.I have faith.

Nothing Ever Dies...

It is the faith in the heart
 That makes
 A dead dream
Worth resurrecting.

                               -haiku by unnamed writer.

This  is the picture of  the circuitry inside my brain.Latent images,memories  of incidents past,imprints of good or not so good experiences,people I have met.Just like the horseshoe impression left in the wet sand left by a horse minutes or hours before I was there,yet like a memory clinging to the last vestiges of recognance.

The brain like everything else is a machine.It needs to work at a certain pace not to rust and become a useless appendage.It also needs rest to repair and mend itself.

I see people around me,rushing.Rushing to prove that they are doing whatever the 'herd' thinks is in.Rushing to get in enough activity even on vacations so that they can stay ahead of the Joneses last vac!!Do they end up more tired post holiday?

How many of us have simply lain on a beach with a book we have wanted to read for ages?Or sat in that front yard of the Himalayan hotel looking at snowclad peaks?Or taken a scuba a few metres below the sea to look at the silent blue world down there?

Are we afraid that our friends or peers will call us lazy?Does our ego drive us ever onwards like lemmings towards an ocean of self destruction?

I read a beautiful quote somewhere that said,"Its good to sometimes pause in the pursuit of happiness and just be happy".

Guess as one ages the simple pleasures of childhood,the forgotten tastes come back stronger.At least it is so for me.

Yet it is more difficult to give the brain a rest than anyone may think.Just try to keep it blank and just in the trying sometimes the fears or phobias come back stronger.Even though I admire Deepak Chopra I do not agree that meditation done by a hungry beggar will make him forget his hunger or a person struggling with emotional or financial issues forget those.

The true Yogis spend years,sometimes lifetimes learning to disassociate self from soul.And most failed.We who struggle with the daily rigours of life are hardly capable.

So rather than put pressure on oneself to do what works for others just...pause.....and think what makes you happy.....and do that...!!

I was born by the river in a little tent

Oh and just like the river I've been running ever since

It's been a long, a long time coming

But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will

It's been too hard living but I'm afraid to die

Cause I don't know what's up there beyond the sky

It's been a long, a long time coming

But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will

Sam Cooke,1963

To be honest,Change always comes.It comes with the good,the bad and the ugly.Inevitably it comes.Like taxes and death,Change is a certainty.Some things go round but some things are gone forever.Let us accept and move on.

Yet having accepted everything,it galls me to see children and the aged begging on the streets.Not the countless Nobel laureates,the IIT and IIM grads and all those super-'thinktanks' have a solution.So I guess there aint a single-simple solution!

Nothing ever dies,it just changes shape.

Socialism is alive and well as many Americans found out during the 2008 bailout.Capitalism too took on a socialsitic face.Old fashions come back with new names.It is as if the atmosphere of this Earth holds in not only the entire 'matter' but also the soul of things as well.

Nomads

Muflisi aur yeh Mazahir hai nazar ke samne
 Saikaron Changez-O-Nadir hain nazar ke samne
Saikaron Sultan-O-Jabir hain nazar ke samne
 Ay Gham-e-Dil kya karun, Ay Wahshat-e-Dil kya karoon

Le ke ek Changez ke Hathon se khanjar tor doon

 Taj per us ke damakte hein jo pathar tor doon
 Koi tore ya na tore mein hi barh ke tor doon
 Ay Gham-e-dil kya karoon, Ay Wahshat-e-dil kya karoon...

extract from Majaz Lakhnawi's awesome poem 'Awara'

I am a nomad,son of an ancient land of nomads.Descended from a peculiar mix of people who lived at the confluence of a traditional thoroughfare for invading armies over the millenia.Alexander the Great and his Macedonians would have known my ancestors in the Punjab.Ghauri,khilji,Tughlak and Nadir Shah all came into India through those broad plains.

The result was a landless,literate,proud people,difficult to govern and always looking to the far horizons to find that fortune or just see the world.They covered the breadth of India,then Europe and the Americas until there is hardly a country in the world that has not known some of us.Where we settled we took on the indigenous customs,inter married with local people and are a generally law abiding people who brought raw intellect,strong bodies,a sense of independence and the realization that wherever i am is home.

All of us have a story to tell.Shaped by where we were born and where we grew up.For those who have ever done even basic diving - its a totally different perspective,widening your world with a view above,below and all around at once.Difficult to know where to focus on at any one moment!Its sometimes(for me its most of the time)tough to know which way to take,which story to follow and which crossroads to take.

In the potpourri that is India with a myriad cultures,traditions,mores;not one single strand can represent the complete picture.Each state tries to impose its language or its sense of asthetics.Can we as a Nation survive the regional parochialism?

I remember a decade back the Punjab government decided to have all road signs changed to Gurmukhi.Me as a Punjabi who can speak but not read or write gurmukhi had a terrible time driving around the countryside.The irony would not be lost on you-A Punjabi lost in Punjab!

My whole issue with Islam is that they try to 'impose' their beliefs through force rather than letting the finer aspects(and there are many)shine through to persuade.Its as if Islam was born for the Jihadis.The politilians have used it to foster insecurity and keep the mullahs as shepherds to control the flock.I was startled to discover that in Kashmir ,most riots happen on fridays which being the day of Jumah,fire and brimstone preaching by hardline mullahs in every mosque leads to a squabble bursting out onto the streets raining stones and what have you on whatever catches their fancy which is mostly the police and security forces.

This is the age of PR and none can do better than our political class.The question that most disturbs me is that the majority is too defeated to change the status quo and a small inority feels that there is no alternative to picking up the gun.

Who will stop then?Change their world view?

Its just not in India.Look at Syria,Libya,Pakistan,Africa,the Balkans...

A Zulu friend around a long ago campfire in the South Africa bushveld during a heated discussion on what ailed the mineral rich continent said,"Nkosi sikelele i Afrika".

God Save Africa.

I can say the same for India and about two fifths of the rest of the World!!

Dichotomies exist.Only in the promixity does one feel alive.Memories of being chased by an enraged Elephant in Betla National Park,being a few feet away from the unfurled trunk ready to pluck me out and ground me in the dust.Having survived,the rest of the normal,boring day seemed like a miracle!

Too many of us are living with petty politics,selfishness and obsession with our infinite jealousies.After thousands of years of living in societies we are as yet marooned from those next to us.

Be not like the butterfly(Monarch not included) that lives and dies in the same patch of garden where it was pupaed.

Be a Nomad.

 

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?