I wish

His right hand fondled the left pocket of his loosely hung shirt with collars akin to an elephant’s ears. There it was, lying in the pocket at the bottom corner. Its mere touch sent a 100 watt smile across his face and his legs swung into action. Murmuring the poem, the one that has got his palms unpeeled, he dance walked, high in the air, towards the only tar road near his village. The time was right too, mid afternoon, teachers would still be at school and parents in the farm. The murmuring got louder and joyous as he thought about his new possession. He took out a polished rock, of the size and shape of a pebble, and started tossing it in the face of the sun, as if tossing his legs and murmuring the poem were not actions enough to justify his happiness. The rock became even brighter in the face of the sun making it possible for him to see it only once it landed in his hands ready for another toss.
The place where he reached was where he enjoyed the most. The people the buses carried in them were amusing. It sort of titillated him when he saw their inability to punish him on seeing him doing all sorts of mischief. He teased buses after buses. He won the arguments and the battles here which he couldn’t manage in his home and the school. And today he had the lucky coin too.

My Country, My Religion

Men of religion have become less tolerant. In fact, they always were and they always will be. Religion was a bright idea, which was meant to propagate universal brotherhood by the prophets of religion, like a country which limited the concept of brotherhood to its own land, on a smaller scale.
Thousands of wars were fought by men to either expand the boundaries of their religion or to save it from shrinking or extinction, just like men of countries did.
Could the prophets have fought wars to save or to expand their idea of oneness? No, is the only answer. Then why have the followers of religion waged wars?
As the followers they are and the followers are they, did the duty of fencing the ideas of their prophet by laying down the rules in the form of books and became proud of their religion and thus intolerant of anyone who overlooked or affronted it, just like the men of countries did.
The men of countries inherit a frog’s view and so do the followers of a religion. These men from generation to generation have taught their children to be proud of their country or their religion and to follow it just like a follower does.
Why do we men forget to see the real message and act blind? Why do we always love to be a follower and not a prophet himself? Why do we not become the prophets of oneness, which was what a prophet wanted us to be? Why do we become frogs when we are offered amendments?

virtue

The other day I was sitting in a pensive mood. I go into this state out of habit and not because of mood swings. It helps me channel all my emotional and intellectual (in whatever way, small or big, they are) energies in knowing the answers to those few questions which are not mere questions (atleast to me).
And the question that was nagging me was not uncommon. It was common and simple and it was this.
What is the biggest virtue that a man must possess, Love, forgiveness, patience, honesty, Humility, selflessness?
I agree all of them are big. Even if we possess one of them we eventually end up possessing most or all of them. Most of us think that we atleast possess few of them by connecting some instances/incidents of our lives where we had braved an act of selflessness or humility. We even have ‘example incidents’ reflecting our magnanimity, love, patience and honesty.
Why then, even after our many virtuous acts do we live in fear? Why are there so many moments and times when we feel frustrated, back-stabbed. The ungrateful acts of others become just like songs, our minds love repeating. The heart sobs for the unkind, inconsiderate, self-seeking nature inherited in people around us to whom we have forgiven umpteen number of times.
‘Silence’ becomes our virtue. Now, Silence means nothing more than just not talking to those who have inflicted a lifetime pain on us.
Oh! Wait, I think I must rewind back from here. Who inflicted pain on us? Somebody else? Really?
People back-stab, remain ungrateful and be unkind, I agree, even after we have shown all the goodness in us to them. But are they really responsible for our unhappy mood. Are they responsible for our sagged head? Are they responsible for deterioration our heart, mind and health?
Somebody else’s act of vice do not get plainly converted into our pain. There is a twist involved. It so happens that when we see, hear or feel an act of ungratefulness, we instinctively react to it in different ways depending on the character that we are (some cry, some slap and some remain shocked). But the twist is not this.
The twist is that that we do not act virtuous enough to let go the bad experience off the mind. We recreate the scene in minds and start playing it, by controlling the pace of the ill act that had taken place, just like the tape recorder with a fast forward and reverse button. What could have been controlled becomes uncontrollable. The same incident/experience becomes a chain reaction of pain hence unleashing the demon called intolerance.
What we don’t understand is the vicious song going on in our mind doesn’t help us in our resurrection. Mind you, our mind is not always the foe of the turncoat and a friend of ours. Just beware of the games that a mind can play. Avoid talking to it when it is showing its fingers on others.
And how do I avoid talking to my mind about the failure?
By being forgetful
Forgetfulness of bad experience, a virtue I am striving to possess, for my happiness and those around me.

Shakespearian tragedy

The two protagonists of Shakespeare’s drama are talking about the course of the drama behind the curtains just before the play is about to start.
Character1: We both start as best friends, but to end the drama tragically enough we both fall in love with the same lady.
Character2: To give it a twist, the lady loves you but I get to marry her.
Characher1: because you speak up and I remain silent.
Character 2: Yaw, but I get heartache when she tells me that she had loved you.
Character 1: And then you start despising me, so much that you contemplate to kill me, waiting for the right chance to come.
Character 2: Incidentally you come to know that my wife was in love with you; you confront your love to her and hatch a plot to kill me. I don’t get to know about this.
Character 1: And while coming out of your home, you stab my back with a dagger out of jealousy and spite; I turn around in pain and stare at you coyly (as if I was about to beg you to have used a sharper dagger); but you strike again, this time thwarting my heart. I fall.
Character 2: feeling of anger and envy gives way to feeling of miserable satisfaction. I reach home and as soon as I enter the door I am smacked with something very hard. Blood squirt out of head. I get hit again till I loose consciousness and fall to the ground. I just get to see a blurred glimpse of my wife with an iron bar in her hands watching me dying.

Character 1: hey we both meet our ends, what did the women lose.
Character 2: like most of the women on earth, she gets to loose THE MAN WHO LOVED HER AND THE MAN WHOM SHE LOVED.

Curtains open and the drama starts.

indian liberlism

The recent Mangalore pub incident has once again sent shivers in the evolving part of the society, the one which is labeled as liberal. The principles followed by it can closely be associated with the western culture, a constant target for its unnatural behaviors by the followers of the ‘Hindu code of conduct’ in India.
The incident didn’t come as a shock to the world, but it did provoke some positive reactions like the Mumbai disaster did.
Most city dwellers and the pub goers follow liberalist ideas, but unlike the dogmatic elements, this chunk doesn’t strive for a socio-political clutch.
Liberalism has an enormous social relevance; nevertheless it also inherits social absenteeism as well as silence-ism in countries like India.
The sorry story of liberalism in India is that it doesn’t actively participate in earning its place in society by opposing doctrinism. The ‘don’t care attitude’ of Indian liberalists has come back to sting them in a hard way.
The negligent liberalists have no time to vote or give heed to social prejudices but have time to go to pubs.
As long as liberalism doesn’t understand the complete social cycle it can’t enjoy its liberty.

aerins challenege

Aerin at In Search of Giants is hosting a/'>http://insearchofgiants.com">a writer’s challenge to foster inspiration and community. It's pretty low-pressure: 1000 words a month. At the end of the year, you'll have a total of 12,000 words, which is not even half a NaNo entry. Go here to sign up!

BONUS: If you sign up for this challenge by January 14, your entry to the Ascension'>http://clarityofnight.blogspot.com/2009/01/ascension-short-fiction-contest.html">Ascension Clarity of Night contest counts as all 1000 of your words for January!

matter- instinct... life?

Put two drops of water on the table close to each other. Now take a pin and draw a line between the two drops. What do you see? They try to come to each other and they ultimately mix and form a whole. Put a stone instead of one drop and draw that line again. The drop still goes but doesn’t mix with the stone.
Who told the drop to do things that way? Who asked it to mix with the other drop and not the stone?
We have evolved in a similar way, mixing with some things and not mixing with others.
Don’t we humans react to things outside us in the same way? Things which are good for us are taken in and things which are not are just scraped.

We react to things in the same way as that droplet of water but the only thing is our mind is a much much much more complex a material than water.
Our emotions and our thinking and our feelings are just the instincts that all matters in the universe carry. We are formed so complex that our matter-instincts give a false impression/illusion of something called life

company

It rained all the week that week. It stopped in between sometimes only to gather strength. Water gave way to nothing, except for hunger and plight. Our faces were the repository of nature’s fury. Darkness had swallowed everything. The dim morning sun reminded that the slippery terrace was the only place left without clogging water. The umbrellas couldn’t stop us from swelling like potatoes soaked in water.
Death floated all around picking up the weak souls, leaving the strong ones for some more time to fight before giving up.

Beyond him or after him Satan was omnipresent, waiting. The fear of loosing his company lifted my spirit against the Satan. I might have done the same things to his hope.

It was on the eighth day, that the nature had shown mercy. Sun shone bright that day.
Few birds sang for their lost ones. Fishes and frogs started plopping up on the surface of the water.
Water had seeped deep, courage deeper and faith the deepest in both of us.
Was there a way to survive any longer? He looked into my eyes and I in his and we did survive.

I can't live without you

‘No stop, I am sorry!’ These were the words that in a way had made him leave the place he lived in. His home, which until a few years back was a place of love, compassion and forgiveness, has turned into a graveyard of these same things.
His house has lost its memory; it doesn’t behave the old way. Things fall anytime from anywhere. It has become a place where two people madly in love have become complete strangers for each other.
How long can a man live with a stranger. Not longer than a train journey.
He found strangers all the quite same. They all seem to be happy when you are sad and they all seem to feel suspicious when you are happy.
The place he has just come was not where he wished to get down. But the idea of a lot of strangers in a single place was working up against his mind. He took a break from the journey. A journey he still didn’t know was to nowhere.
When his hands rested on the handrail of the escalator, face looking up, mind looking back, he heard few words. The words as though sent deliberately by The God were whispered in his ears. ‘I can’t live without you’.
He immediately looked around to find no one speaking.
He had the answer, whispered in his ears, to a question he forgot to ask himself in her bad times, from the time she was declared a patient of amnesia.
‘No, I am sorry!’ In his heart he meant apology, responsibility and above all his undying love.
He looked up. He felt as though he stood on a path to ascension, a path which would lead him back into her arms.
He took a train back. He couldn’t avoid grinning at her beautiful memories. Good memories are bad news for Time. It just has to vanish itself.
He shouted out her name the moment he flung open the gates. He again shouted when he flung open the front door of his home. He filled her name in the air. But there was no one breathing back. Nobody’s heart raced back at his voice.

He sensed her presence and her disappointment in the room upstairs.
He climbed up to the place. The smell grew more, the one with a larger proportion of disappointment and small proportion of her presence.

His trembling hands creak opened the door.

Thud!!! He fell down. His legs and arms behaved dead at what he looked at.

Her beautiful eyes were popped out. Her tongue was apologetically hung.

After many hours his damp eyes took notice of a letter on the bed.

‘ Dear, I want to do it before I forget how much I love you, before I forget how much trouble and pain I cause you everyday, before I forget that you have left me, before you come back and stop me from doing it.
My ascension to heaven or hell can’t erase you from my heart. I would always remember that someone loved me so much to even forgive me for walking out of his life.
In heaven or hell, I know, I can’t live without you’.

I have wrtten it for a contest : http://clarityofnight.blogspot.com/
I have exceeded the word limit though of 250 words

PS 2: i have edited it to 250 words now.

My. post no is #100 in the contest

Mr.Anand is unhappy

A vulture took a deep dive in the air, straight in the verandah of one Mr. Anand’s house.It perched on one of the pots with very little water in it. It reached out for the water, but the water was too low. The vulture saw Mr. Anand coming out, he looked agile and in a poignant mood. “Can I get some water”, said the vulture expecting a ‘no’ from Mr. Anand,” I had so much to eat but didn’t find water anywhere, since most of the wells and tanks of water are used up by the fire brigades in extinguishing the blazing buildings in and around the city”.“There”, pointing towards the pot on which the vulture was sitting he said,” Put some stones in it so that the water level rises”.“I don’t have time, I have to take some meat for my children, there are so many freshly dead, men lying around”, said the vulture and took off from there,” please put some stones in the pot while I come back in some time after feeding my children”.Mr.Anand who was deeply merged in thoughts picked up the stones . His thoughts were rocking between one street and the other, between one dead body and the other, between one blazing building and the other.There is no end to it. This will continue as long as our politicians’ attitudes remain lackadaisical, these vultures will keep getting fresh dead bodies as long as our attitudes remain lackadaisical. We will have no option but to put stones in the pots so that at least these vultures live on. The enemy will keep assaulting our security. No, we have to stop it. We have to stop voting to those hackneyed, lazy bastards, who have time, just for empty rhetoric. Mr.Anand was engrossed in these thoughts of reforming the so called action takers when he saw the vulture approaching back to him.The vulture perched on the pot, saw that the water had risen in level. It drank a lot of it.“I am so thankful to you. You seem to be few of those rarest human beings with a gift to be selfless even in your worst times”, continued the vulture,” You have helped me even though you knew that, seeing your dead body would have made me more happy”.Mr. Anand was indifferent to what the vulture had said about him.“You seem to be very distressed at what is happening. Can I be of some help to you?” asked the vulture genuinely in a low tone, even though it would have been happier to talk to a dead Mr.Anand.Annoyed, Mr.Anand said,” Can you solve this problem?”The vulture understood what Mr.Anand meant by ‘problem’.“I have the solution, a long term one, but human minds can’t understand it, they would find it very impractical and absurd, eventhough men claim to have understood far more absurd things, this one is just too absurd for lifetime sighted humans”.“Tell me”, hopelessly asked Mr.anand.“Practice what you preach”, emphasizingly the vulture uttered again,” Practice what you preach”.Mr.Anand couldn’t remotely relate these words to cruelties happening around.“Please explain?” Mr.Anand requested desperately.“You men never practice what you preach. You tell that the religious atrocities taking place are preventable if all of us(mainly pointing to the people who are bombing) could understand that there is only one god, but when your daughters ask you to marry her off to a person from some other religion or community, you become the same extremists, you repace them for the same actions.When it comes to vote, you vote for the people of your place, community, caste and religion seeing a short term security of your community alone, forgetting about others.These leaders are hackneyed, since they take their voters for granted. They know your revolution can outgrow an election or two, but it can never outgrow the class, religion, caste boundaries that you have created around yourselves.You preach your children to be soldiers when you see these attacks and the very next day you ask them to be an IAS, or an engineer instead.You never bargain in a big showroom, but you never forget to bargain with a rickshaw wala, you never forget to mention a poor roadside vendor of his costly ice-cream and still you preach to love the poor. You preach everyone to be alert, but you never care to look around your seats when you travel in a local bus, thinking that it would look embarrassing if you are the only person doing it. You need a company even to be alert.You never forget to preach him to never compare himself to anybody else but you keep comparing your kid to a distant relative living in USA or an IAS officer. You ask your children to be strong, but you never forget to reprimand their friends every time your child has a brawl with them.You preach the militants to show restrain, whereas you kill your brothers from other states for they came to your place for better opportunities.The list of your inconsistencies of ethics can go on. But as I said, it would be difficult for you people to comprehend its real meaning.You won’t understand the fact that you as an individual is completely responsible for what is going on. You preach but you are mean.And as long as you men are mean, I will have to keep coming to you for water”, saying these words the vulture flew away.Mr.Anand turned back and as he was walking to the door, the volume of the news on the television ceaselessly increased.“62 hours of brave battle by our soldiers in the Taj is over. All the militants have been killed and one has been held alive.People have come on the streets. They are asking the government about who is responsible for the attack.The people are angry”For Mr.Anand, the question, 'who is responsible' was the answer.

PS: reposted

show off times

“Happy new year to you too”, I replied back to the person sitting beside me. “You going to Hyderabad? “, I expected him to ask me, so that I could reply him saying, “Ya Hyderabad and from there to Delhi. I work there for a software company”, but instead he said,” I am going to a friend in Hyderabad”. It was followed by an eternal silence. He unzipped his bag making sure that I read the tag of IBM on it and he took a book out to read or may be re-read it.
My co-passengers were all trying to show that all of them were actually going for something beyond and better than Hyderabad. Everybody’s eyes were trying to show something off. Some took out their mobile phones more often than required. Some laughed their lungs out talking over mobile. Some took out novels, the cover of which I thought could appropriately have been titled- I am read only in buses to show off that I am read in home too. Few even closed their eyes to show off that they actually sleep at this time of the day or to show off that everybody else is trying to show too much off and I am not interested in doing it that way, but by being awake my own way. There were many who wished to take out their laptops and showoff for once and for all. Few lucky once got to show off their latest iPod. I could see they were blissfully listening to everybody else with their earphones in ears.
Some were trying to show off by hiding their worn out shoes or worn out bags or the looks which said,’ this is not the first time I am going to a big city. God promise!’

The urge to speak to a friend on mobile is very common in places like these, so that we could loudly say them,” Ya my flight is at 2:00 P.M from Delhi via Amsterdam to New York. You are coming to Delhi airport to see me off right”. But to my dismay my cell phone didn’t ring at all. I could have called too but that could not have been convincing enough.

Bus is really a strange place.