The Fire-brands

I am amazed to see how some people are full of energy and vitality even when they have crossed the threshold of a successful career. Some used to say there is no retirement for the people with a zest! They might be tinkering the coffin, even after being buried, because they cannot keep quiet even for a minute! It is a joy to come across people of this category. Mind you, I am not talking about workaholics, who believe in working for the sake of it, but am referring to the people who enjoy the work they do. They are, as it were, married to their job, and would forego a meal or even biological need in order to get something done!

We often come across the people of the other category too, people who do not believe in giving their best, but be satisfied with the minimum they are expected to give. These are the dead bodies, walking on our streets, they have neither life nor vitality. They would delight in eating, sleeping, gossiping and indulge in everything that is unhealthy and harmful to oneself and the wider society. These people are the one's who become a pain in the neck of the people of the former category, and alas, if you get one of this type as your partner! Your life will be ruined within weeks or months. Before you change them, they would have converted you to their company!

Life can be a lot of fun only when we get into what we are busy with; it may be a silly routine job, or a highly creative process. It is the same with people who know how to turn each moment a magical memory! Some of the modern day messiah's have proposed one way of getting the best out of life. Take for instance, Eckhart Tolle, while proposing the Power of Now, has invited us to dissociate ourselves from the mind by savoring the present moment. Being present to the every moment can make us realize that life is not just a fleeting instance, but one which can make a dry stick bloom with a thousand blossoms! For these people, even deserts will be covered with oasis all the stretches!

The universe still has a breed of men and women who can defy nature and time, and contribute their little mite for the benefit of the world. These are the people who stop aging, and their biological clock as a matter of fact, moves in reverse. To come in touch with even one such person is like a piece of iron coming into the presence of a powerful magnetic field. You get drawn to, and it might be too hard for the iron piece to get out of the magnetic field. While being in touch with magnetic field, the iron too is magnetised, and when it leaves the magnetic field, it carries with it powerful magnetic current, and that can change the world around!

I call such men and women modern day sages and saints, who have the potentiality to change the face of the earth. It is possible that the world can boast of only a negligible per centage of men and women, who can ignite the lives of others, who can set the world on fire. The men and women with zest for life, are the treasure house of any society. It is not what they do, which nourishes the society at large, but their very presence is enough to inject new life and vitality to all around them. Such people never experience death; they only pass from one phase in life to another, and even their memories are sure to spread the magnetic field far and wide. The aura of their sanctity is the food for the world today!

Waiting for Godot!

Those who have studied American literature would remember the title, a modern English play, belonging to the genre of ‘abstract drama’ by Samuel Beckett. This is considered as a prototype of the abstract drama, which captures the absurdity of life in modern times. The entire drama revolves around a person waiting for another person named Godot! There is no forward or backward movement in the drama, at the end of the play, the audience are exactly in the same place where they were at the beginning, and so also the characters.

While on the one hand, the modern world swears by speed, on the other it is typified by endless waiting. Every moment of waiting has been added to the quest for better speed. We want quick solutions, and waiting as it were becoming a thing of the past. There is no one who really wants to wait. Waiting for three hours to get the parts of computers we have paid for, is not just a thing we can take so easily. People taking their own sweet time to pull out the required parts from the store, and placing them together so that they could pack off the customer in half an hour is an art which is alien to the boys working in this biggest computer shop in the whole of Eastern India. But who will teach them the art of getting things faster than they are used to?

But is it not time that we just throw our watches and clocks and just flow with time, following the course of the sun and the moon? Some years ago, when I decided to stay with the Santal tribals, I did the same, and I was happy without knowing the time, while staying in a village, where there is no way of knowing the hour of the day. What I could say was night and day, morning and evening and noon. I would look at the sun, and would guess the time for my meals. It gives a different feeling when we forget for a moment the human-made indicators of time. Time and space cannot be measured in human terms and categories; one has to let oneself to flow in the current in order to feel the cosmic flow.

Waiting is associated with a lot of pain and suffering, and every waiting reminds the persons concerned that there is a great expectation, though the expectation may not end up with a positive result. Like in the case of Waiting for Godot, at the end no one might turn up. The entire waiting might come to naught, but then the waiting per se has a meaning, which cannot be separated from the act itself. Fortunately when I went to the shop today, I had not worn my wrist watch, and so was less conscious of every passing hour, but then there were wall-clocks which reminded me that I had already spent four hours waiting in that cozy room, with a lot of men and women crisscrossed, each one minding their own business.

Waiting is a sweet and sour candy that we are given, even when we are not in a mood to chew it. The taste however is not in the candy, but in the tongue and the mind which provides the taste. If your waiting is on someone or something that you would be delighted to, then the candy would taste sweet; if you are waiting to meet a bad news, or bad person, whom you would have liked to miss, but are forced to meet, then the candy would taste sour. You cannot throw the candy altogether, because each moment of our life comes with a waiting, with a sugar coated candy, and it is for me to make it taste sweet or sour! Waiting after all is not a physical phenomenon, but very much a psychological one.

Smile of Sisyphus

There are so many myths related to the Greek god Sisyphus, the most familiar being the man continually trying to roll a huge boulder across a slope, and the stone rolling back due to its weight... His was a futile effort to roll the stone across, and all his life is spent in such meaningless routine task, not knowing that it is next to impossible for him to do it. But at least 80 percent of the population in the world do just that, involved in works, chores, activities which do not bring much joy to them. Just to keep ourselves from hunger, starvation, nakedness, scorching sun and pattering rain, we run from pillar to post, ... but we don't stop there. Every little success is the starting point of yet another attempt to climb up the social, economic, cultural ladder. But have we ever paused for a while to check if we are truly enjoying the fruits of our labour?

Today the most important word in the information highway is "speed"; there are people who wish to compete with the speed of light, and would be happy to over take even that. Speed in our personal lives brings in its own share of drudgery; the people who move from one activity to another are the most miserable of all human beings. Many of us thus become machines... even a smile is mechanical, even love-making becomes a routine exercise, and what is there to enjoy? The false promises of the world will not dawn to them, until they are stuck by a lightening or thunder and find that they are on the verge of bidding goodbye to the world.

If I don't enjoy what I do each day, each hour and each minute, I can regret for wasting my precious days. It is not strange that if I hope I will like up to 90 years and if I am standing at the threshold of 42nd year, I am nearing my midpoint. And that means I still have 48x365 days, and that amounts to 17,520 days. That is all my life, and now let me look at this magic figure and tell myself do I intend to make best use of these days - to enjoy life to its maximum, or am I prepared to regret that I had forgotten to look at the rising sun, the numberless stars on a clear sky, the birds of the air returning home at dusk, listen to the cry of a child, feel the chill breeze brazing through my skin, let the rain drops splash on my body... if not today, then when?

That is the second myth of Sisyphus that I wish to look at today; he wished to test the faithfulness of his wife, and when she fails, Sisyphus pleads to Pluto to send him to the world from the netherworlds to punish his wife; but when he returns to earth, he sees color all around, the sun-rise, the golden rays of the sun, the gentle breeze, the colorful flowers, the rumbling streams; he is so enchanted looking at the world, that he forgets to punish his wife, and forgets even to return to the netherworlds. Once we begin to see the beauty and splendour of the world we live in, we will make a conscious effort to cherish every moment we live in here.

Today I would like to take just one minute at any particular moment of the day, during the day time preferably, and stop my psychological, social, cultural, religious clock... I close my eyes, and see the whole world pausing for a while... I become conscious of my little self, as being part of the limitless ocean, the endless sky, the ever-flowing stream, the never-ending waves of the sea, a shade in the thousand hues of the blossoms, the sigh in the melody of the birds... Let me 'see' with my full being the wonder of myself and the world around; let me 'hear' the sweet melody running into my ears, drink the soothing odour.... Let me be truly a citizen of this wonderful planet called earth, far beyond the narrow boundaries of 'my' nation, 'my' state.