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?

The Breath of God?

Do you know that you breath the same air that was inhaled or exhaled by The Buddha?Yes the inert argon atoms in the atmosphere are the same ones and will be for all those who came before us and those who will come after.

 

The Vedas  state that nothing is created and nothing destroyed.It just changes shape.The atmosphere holds everything in the same proportion.The atoms interact with each other.Is the outer body experience that some go through a primordial instinct of the big Bang theory.Of creation itself?

 

Not till Galileo proved that the earth moved round the sun and not vice versa did the west accept this theory.The eastern ascetics have always known.For Vishnu 4 billion years are but the blink of an eye.A moment like millions of other moments.Isn't that cosmic time?

Listen to what the late Carl Sagan said:

“The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths.

It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.”

It is generally accepted that its dificult for westerners to grasp nonlinear concepts.The cycle of birth and death.Don't the atoms remain .Aint our bodies made up of atoms?Give up your cravings,let the soul control the body and thereby its actions-did the Buddha not preach that as a basic tenet of his 8 fold Path.The Hindu mystics around the dawn of civilization said the same things only in a different manner.

On this Earth Do Stand I
Unvanquished,Unslain,Unhurt.
Set me O Earth,amidst thy nourishing strength
The Earth is my Mother
Its Child I am                                                     - Atharveda

Alexander could have said this,so could Nebuchanezzar,Chengiz Khan or Ashoka The Great.

 

What is electricity.Isnt that Life itself?All the functions in our bodies are made up of electric impulses that fire with specific codes that guide our actions.The scientists can quantify electricity,show us its composition.But can anyone say what electicity is derived off?Isnt electricity the name for Lord Shiva,the Hindu god of preservation and destruction?Does it not give us fire to mould things as well as having the capacity to destroy.

 

In the begining lies the end.Life begins with a child and ends with old age.We know the ions and atoms will decay with time and some others will take their place.The same things in a different form.

 

The Sadhus have aimed to control their joys,sorrows,wants,likes,dislikes.Separating the soul from the ego.We say we are neutral or impartial.Truly?Dont those infinitesimal beliefs of colour,religion,caste caste a pale shadow?

An ignorant man is lost, faithless, and filled with self-doubt;
A soul that harbors doubt has no joy, not in this world or the next."                                                                                                                      - Bhagavad Gita 4:40

Who is qualified to judge the ignorant man?

Not I.

The God is the Universe.We are part of this universe.No wonder no one has seen God because he truly resides within these atoms that make up what constitutes US.WE the People.

 

It is not a benevolent God.It shakes,is riven with faults,feels slighted,gets hurt,feels insulted.Because its us.

 

Balance.Balance between war and peace.love and hate.eat too much salt and you get hypertension.Eat too little and get hormonal imbalances,calcium deficiency.Raze trees,burn and slash the mountains and the mountains start to fall as landslides.

Every religion in its own way teaches BALANCE.To create a state where pain does not hurt too much and joy does not cause too much glee.Some feel meditation is the way or Yoga or the pursuit of money.Each path has its success and an exhaustible capacity to fulfill.The milestones are inside our head.

This is Zen.This is Tao.This is Catholicism.This is the way of Sikhism.Divinity is ours if only we can listen to our daemon.




 

The Zen is inside You

                "Twenty years from today you will be more disappointed by the things
                  you did not do,so sail away from safe harbours
                  Explore,Dream,Discover."                                                    - Mark Twain

I used to be mortally afraid of water in my teens.One day as a challenge I enrolled myself for swimming classes.I went with my neighbours sons and the minute the trainer asked us to take a deep breathe and go under water,I panicked.Only ONE thing stopped me from running away.The thought of having to live with the shame of showing fear!!Ego won that day and the result was in the gruelling summers there is no better relaxation I feel than going for a long swim.

What facilities lie inside you you do not know.When you draw out each breath under water one realises the significance.To understand Yoga you need to swim.Draw breath and see the bubbles rise.Let it all go at once and nothing left but to rise to the surface.Learn to hold your strength and prolong the time to stay where you are.

 

Some do it with hallucigens!Its the search to separate the soul from Life itself.As Siddhartha himself.Seeing rest as the completion of a mission.Death itself the aim.The daily striving means that one is alive.To feel hurt is to say that emotion is alive.Its to ask that ONE eternal question,'Who Am I?"

 

What Am I?just follows.Most never find the time in their lives to ask themself.Some do but lose the thread along the way.A few are  truly afraid to ask and surround themselves with noise to drown out their daemon.

In History the first example of daemon  is in the writings of Alexander the Great.He who was controlled by his daemon to keep pressing.His senses were in finding new horizons .Soul or Atma,whatever the case may be,sometimes one feels born to do something.Even amoungst the billions on this planet each one is born to do something that they can do better than anyone else on earth.The success is in finding that elusive "WHAT".

 

What is difficult is letting go....just not thinking about things that need doing.Can we change the circumstances?Can we control the environment?Can we determine the ultimate result?

 

We tell our children not to waste time.Truly is anything a waste?Sitting alone on a bugyal in Garwhal Himalayas smelling the myriad orchids,lianas in full bloom and watching the bees sift from flower to flower might be a waste of time for me the equities trader,missing out on capitalizing profits?There are other traders but knowing that you may never again be in that moment or pass that way...is that a waste?

 

Wouldn't Life be boring if everything was predetermined as the Godmen would have us believe.Knowing that there is nothing you could do to change an outcome.Its the unpredictablity of Life that makes it so interesting.

 

Those who got swept away by the glacial floods at Kedarnath would not have known that there wont be another morning for them.Longterm plans,empty wishes.

"The Voyage of Discovery is not in seeking new landscapes,but in having new Eyes".Proust.

The Hills have Teeth....When the Ganges Shrugged

               "Off purifiers,I am the Wind,of the Wielders of weapons I am Rama,
                 Of Fishes I am the Shark,And of Rivers flowing,I am Ganga."
                                                                     - The God Krishna in Bhagvad Gita 3:14

The Wrath of the Ganges might be a more apt heading considering the death and destruction wrought to the Northern Indian states of Uttarakhand and Himachal.Having trekked,travelled and visited almost every place that is headline news today causes me to shudder in despair.

 

 

In a way this was almost expected.The same Bhagirathi river had almost dried up in 4-5 places for a stretch of almost 12 kms due to the various hydel projects and dams on it at different places in Uttaranchal around two years back.Swollen with water,silt and chunks of mountain it is a frightening sight,even,to people who were born on its bank and have never seen it rage thus.

 

I remember one memorable,bitterly frozen night at sub zero temperatures at Rambada.Midpoint to the holy Kedarnath shrine.The Mandakini flew in a tiny stream beside my cottage,gurgling on its way to the confluence with the Bhagirathi at Rudraprayag.Today Rambada has been wiped clean of the map.Gaurikund has been swept into the river.Joshimath is cut off.No one knows what happened at Gangotri or yamunotri or Dharcula?

 

Years of rampant corruption,concretization of almost all small towns in an ecologically fragile and earthquake prone zone.Building six lane highways to the Badrinath shrine by dynamiting the mountains,damming the river,creating silt.Add population pressure,resultant waste-biological and environmental pollution and we have the perfect recipe for disaster.

 

Can we lose the Himalayas?create an environment so hostile that travelling or living amidst them becomes a risk?

 

Over the past decade all this noise over the Tehri Dam was neutralized by the powers that be by saying it was 'for the people'.Catchy slogan but deadly.These hills fall in Zone 5 or MSK IX level earthquakes in the highest risk zone!!

 

 

Although I am no geologist,I was told that if Tehri Dam is breached,it will take 7 minutes for Rishikesh and 9 minutes for haridwar to be washed away(as in wiped off the face of the earth kind).All it needs is that One Big One of the century.nature waits.

 

Nature waits.And nature has its revenge.My thoughts go out to those shivering in the rain,huddled in the mud.Cityfied tourists more used to seeing the world outside through tinted glasses.To see car sized boulders rain down on their heads,swirling waters try to drown them and in many cases succeeding.

 

Nature lies submerged under a rampant Ganges river today.On the day that its descent to Earth is venerated by a million Hindus as Ganga dussehra.Is the Mother River of India sending a grim message?

 

The destroyer is not Shiva but -

 

Population

Pollution

Parviscient Government

 

Projects located on the Rivers in Uttarakhand:-

 

Loharinag Pala hydel project

Pala Maneri Hydroelectric Dam Project

381 MW Bhaironghati hydel power project

Phata Byung Dam

Singoli Bhatwari Dam

 

If completed these projects are expected to leave the rivers dry for a minimum 50-70Kms running the water through tunnels.

 

The Mountains I have loved all my life have finally shrugged.How much further rapine and plunder can their stoic facades endure?

 

Sir Alex:The Anti-Hero

Let me tell you at the outset that I am not a Manchester United Fan.There was something about the Liverpool team of the late eighties,when I began to understand football,with the sublime strikes of Ian Rush and the strong physical presence of Kenny Dalglish that made me watch games unblinking for 90 minutes.Mostly on TV but a few at Anfield that made me a 'self-confessed' Liverpudlian!

1999.UEFA Champions league Final.Ole Gunnar Solsksjaer scrambling in the mud and snow,shoots out his foot inside the eight yard circle and into the roof of the net.The match time was 92.17min.Manchester 2 Munich 1.The red shirts won that day without two of their legends - Roy Keane and Paul Scholes.

That in microcosm has been the USP of Sir Alex Ferguson.Never give up.Never back down.If you were an opposing club supporter,to see him hardjawed,grimfaced,pacing up and down the sideline with barely held in aggression was to hate him.You knew him and his team would coming at you.

He did have a cryptic sense of humour and of all the many quotes that comes to mind,the oneOn José Mourinho  ranks best in my mind

 "He was certainly full of it, calling me boss and big man when we had our post-match drink after the first leg. But it would help if his greetings were accompanied by a decent glass of wine. What he gave me was paint-stripper."

Hate in professional parlance translates into respect.Allegories to the corporate world are replete with words such as 'team building','leading from the front','judgement of the opposition','work ethic' etc are misnomers.They capture in words such a vast effort that few can manage and fewer still can match.

 

For such a dour,working class anti-hero,Sir Alex has shown how important it is to persevere,to experiment with new talent and tactics in a most uncharacteristic display of 'out of the box'thinking with just a hint of the old fashioned working class method of training and re training.Just show how important the daily,boring routine can bear results!

 

This aint an epitaph.I am sure that bulldog and sheerbloodymindedness will be in full display as a director of MUFCL.He was not a great player,but he is one of the best coaches in the world.Just look at the talent that he nurtured - Beckham,Giggs,Scholes,Rooney,Ince and offcourse the brilliant Ronaldo.

 

But the best testament to a teacher or a coach is not how he gets the brilliant and the best to perform but how he elevates the mediocre and the plain.Teddy Sheringham,Ole Gunnar Solskjaer,Irwin just faded away after their MU stint.He made the team work and it was the team that came to the party.

 

The best thing I can say for this man is that you couldn't bully his team.Ever!David Moyes hope you drop the baton...!!