Tuesday 27 January 2015

Red with rage

"Sri Krishna said: O Arjuna, There are three gates leading to the hell — Lust, Anger and Greed. Every sane man should give these up, for they lead to the degradation of the Soul."

"Sri Krishna said: O Arjuna, One develops attachment for the sense objects by thinking about the sense objects. Desire for sense objects comes from attachment to them, and anger comes from unfulfilled desires."

"Sri Krishna said: O Arjuna, Delusion or wild idea arises from anger. The mind is bewildered by delusion. Reasoning is destroyed when the mind is bewildered. One falls down from the right path when reasoning is destroyed."

"Sri Krishna said: O Arjuna, Those who are free from anger and all material desires, who are self-realized, self-disciplined and constantly endeavoring for perfection, are assured of liberation in the God in the very near future."

"Sri Krishna said: O Arjuna, Pride, arrogance, conceit, anger, harshness and ignorance—these qualities belong to those people who are of demoniac nature."

This is what the Bhagwad Gita says on "anger".

It is but rational that every human being falls into the anger trap. And I am no exception. I admit that some of it is inherited from paternal genes. As one grows up especially when the euphoria of adolescence embraces delirium all worldly sense gets derailed. With the budding of youth, life is at the crossroads - awkward and riotous. The booby trap of anger is cavernous enough for a free flat fall. Realisation of rationale dawns at a time when you find yourself to have missed the bus long gone. You mellow down to a life not cherished with acquiescence.
 
Is flushed with rage worth? Over the years with age beckoning maturity, I realised my physical strength dissipated at a horrendous speed after a deadly brawl sucked in rage. That left me spiritless for days together and clueless when conducting activities that needed utmost zeal. I even lost my appetite for food and roamed around the house in unkempt hair. Surprisingly my lips got sealed for hours right after the raging episode. What sapped me most was lack of concentration on any book I read or any activity I carried out that needed mental vigour. I acted silly, taking stride of my pride hurt, exaggerating on an imaginary victimhood. Eventually I got myself doused in depression.
 
Now when I turn my thoughts to those volatile fuming episodes I find them utterly capricious and graceless. That was certainly not me. No oddity in guessing your instincts correct once smitten.            
 
As changing seasons caress and make love to the nature regaling her with a sense and spirit so do age and actions leave man, from buoyant youth to maturing grey, in bare introspection. I consulted my family doctor - the first steps were embarrassing but the next ones were easy. Speaking out helped. At every time I became angry at the behest of someone else's actions or words I started writing down in my diary: what was the issue, the settings that made things go wrong, what was my stance and continued inventing words and lines on paper until I found the tide inside me ebbing. On top of it my love for travel acted as a fillip in rejuvenating my senses. Long walks to the nearby gardens or the city library and lakes, bookshops and bistros, spa and salon brought back the laughter in my life.

To me travelling and reading, the dear choices I have made in this life, conditions the frail nerves a lot. I have observed and felt strongly that on many a passages, while meeting strangers and re-living their established routines that are in no ways different from what I travel through, my resilience to endure the tests of time take roots that are profound; bit by bit etching into my anger and arrogance, pride and parsimony and sulk and suspicion.

"Travel makes one modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world" - Gustave Flaubert.    

I also know people who enjoys cooking or swimming or watering flowered pots or shaking a leg when their blood boils. Trust me these pills act perfect.

It is easy to address but hard to act. Anger is such a demonic constraint in our everyday lives, accentuated in cities and corporate spheres that can harm not only a man's senses but also pollute a soul. With my own experiments I have found that forgiveness ushers humility to one's character. Anger in a way is weighty in nature. One cannot do away with burdens overnight but only with patience and perseverance. In many cases I still have miles to walk and really unsure of the extent of chagrin within when life throws the gamble at you - there are no definite solutions or thumb rule to follow. To remain calm inside is a hard choice to make but we have to adapt and adhere to it strongly. Yoga and meditation, as in detoxifying agents, swab a handful of mental clog.

The outward manifestation of cheer, through physical journeys to distant lands or mental journeys through the pages of a book, is but an inward reflection of a mind, body and soul in contemplation. Dag Hammarskjold justly said that "The longest journey of any person is the journey inward."
 

Tuesday 20 January 2015

Bookshop fables

Belonging to a kaleidoscopic nation gilded in culture and traditions, food and festivals, humanity and hospitality, I am but natural akin to love books, cherish and cultivate art and literature. More so when it has been handed down to you from one's parents who takes delight in reading. 
 
In my childhood it was a monthly ritual for my father to take me to his friend's brother's bookshop "Katha - o - Kahani" at College Street in north Calcutta. College Street is every book lover's sanctuary. Hundreds of big and small bookshops and publishing houses dot the narrow lanes and bylanes of the old part of the regal city gracefully sealing approvals even to the meagre booksellers to lay out their limited yet assorted treasures on the shrunken pavements lining the College Street. The archaic buildings of the University of Calcutta, the quaint Coffee House, colleges and administrative offices gave the Street a labyrinthine setting resplendent with a glorious past.
 
Tales of the Coffee House confabulations, that was similar to Foro Romano”, where who's who of the Calcutta politico-literary circle gathered over cups of coffee and tea, sandwiches and snacks and a comradely smoke for meetings and interactions, debates and discussions are now retro profusely narrated inside and out by literary zealots. 
 
I remember the times when I was sent inside the brightly lit standard sized bookshop with my father leaving strict instructions to his acquaintance to look over me while he ventured out on his errands. Barely aged six or seven and steadily holding onto a piece of paper which I had taken extreme pains to copy the authors and books from newspapers and magazines or overheard in school parleys, I would hand it out to one of the shop's assistant who bade me to sit on wooden stool in a remote corner out of the active shop entrance passage and vanished with my dear list.

It had to be a long day and my father's friend's brother engaged me with Russian fables, Thakumar Jhuli, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, Asterix, Goldilocks and Rudyard Kipling, blank pages and crayons to get me started. He was magnanimous to order sandesh from the adjacent shop every time I visited. I was a quiet child and do not think I ever caused any alarm on a busy business day of the bookshop. I found myself contented enough to gaze at the neatly stacked shelves, the fingers of the assistants running through the lines briskly picking up the author or publisher they were shouted at over the counter. The smell of the fresh hot off the press pages of a book and the old coat of the paint of the bookshelves was fetching - the musty young odour hung in my senses for long.

Growing up I was given a free hand to go through the pages of any new book I laid my hands on in the shop or any title or author that caught my fancy. With age I could freak out to other bookshops in the vicinity, peak inside the dimly lit printing houses on the College Street and linger for hours on a book at a store on which I have laid my heart on but budget did not comply.

One of my college friends was very good at bargaining and that is a skill you need to fiercely manifest while buying any good from a peddler on the streets of Calcutta and unfortunately that I was not blessed with. My friend hugely helped me procure some gems, although second-hand, at prices beyond my imagination easing the burden on my pocket. Till this day I owe her (my friend) gratitude beyond words as she used to travel through the traffic snarls of the north part of the city from down south accompanying me just for my cause.  

My parents never said "no" to any book I wished to possess but of course they delimited a sum that I could spend on books in a month. I was as happy as any child could be when given a candy and more so my parents readily indulged as I had no other wish to yap at.

Many years have passed by then, with each changing city and country my local bookshops swapped one for the other. The lanes altered, the landscapes expanded, I read more authors unknown of  in the pre-internet days, hobnobbed with new publishing houses but the charm of delving deep into the chock-full and colourful lines of a book shelf at a store is riveting even to this day.

I admit that over the years the world changed for better and worse and so did our books, publishing houses, our writing style, our reading habits and our snippety book-learning habits. Today I am really not surprised to see the veneer of the bookshops with all its ostentatious decor, swanky coffee places, jazzy audiobook corners, richly hued wallpapers, lucent kids' corners replete with books, glitzy stationery, stuffed toys and shelves done in bold colours jammed with books from moneyed publishing houses. The cacophony of the trade in these mega bookshops is more pronounced than the clairvoyance that germinates from the pages of a book that a shelf is so proud of. Mushrooming e-book business start-ups, with limitless choice and discounted prices on offer, also have led bookshops to lose their gloss.

There are small towns, till to this day, housing Gothic contoured neat and painted bookshops intact. What is more surprising is that here we end up reading books in death of silence and get to know of small time publishers devoid of any advertising blitzkrieg. Often I have found Doric paintings shielding the sodden plaster peeling-off walls of such treasure houses.            
 
"The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page" - Saint Augustine. Our journey into the edification of the bodhi is often in the lookout for the bathhouses of tome. The pus from the pen on the paper is just what a soul needs for prescience and prudence. There is nothing else to prove.   

Tuesday 13 January 2015

The way we paint life

What can be more beautiful and laid-back to start 2015? Happyily recoiled on my sofa with a mug of hot chocolate in one hand and a good book in the other. I am talking of my present close knitted affair with "The Snow Leopard" by Peter Matthiessen. Travel writings have a wonderful way of bringing us close to landscapes, people and habitats, culture and traditions, soul and sanity, and obliteration and oblivion.

A book, an act or a place transports us to meditate on life and its philosophy. Sometimes we despair and sometimes we laugh out loud. Who facilitates our reflections on life? Who is the harbinger of one's introspections? Life is a vast cauldron where the cook empties ingredients both bitter and bland. The meal prepared is feasted upon by all but taste buds differ. But then feasting environs differ from one man to another.

"Keeping steps with that restless, rapid music,
seasons come dancing and pass away -
colours, tunes and perfumes pour
in endless cascades in the abounding joy
that scatters and gives up and dies every moment."
                                                                    Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore.  

What is fascinating about life is that it is not important what humans think of it - we are just a miniscule in the entire canvas - but how life raptures us in its splendour. Some may qualify the phase as a "trance" but I love calling it "comma" before a "full stop". The life we weave around before hitting the "comma" glorifies the texture, the pattern and the shade of one's fabric. None of us are skilled at what we weave but we are crafty in spirit living every moment of our lives though most of us fail to realise the essence of life's art.

Life is a fascinating subject. The birth of an heir in a Hindu household is ushered in by blowing conch shells signifying the celebration of "life" or the existence of being. The hallmark of a man speaks of the life one conceptualises. The shades of character in a man vary that owes its allegiance to the roots of his birth, cultural sanctuary, knowledge and experience. A man's ethos in conducting one's mind and soul to steer clear of the grim scenery at hand makes for a fitting tribute to life. In today's world we very often term it as "crisis management" or "reputation management" bringing out the light of the man and a leader is born.

Living in adherence to one's convictions throughout a man's existence is a "life" in cognizance. Rarely a man succeeds. The seasons that come and go during his being brings with it sun and snow, rain and rarity. The canvas has all colours in it, only the painter's incandescent style gives the life's framework a whiff of fresh air. That does not mean non-existence of a drab portrait whose insipid strokes cannot be brought to "life". Like in death - the shell of the soul perishes but not the soul that is yet reborn. Of course this has to do with the way of how I see "life".  

"All life is a journey, not a home; it is a road, not the country; and those transient enjoyments which you have in this life, lawful in their way,—those incidental and evanescent pleasures which you may sip,—are not home; they are little inns only upon the road-side of life, where you are refreshed for a moment, that you may take again the pilgrim-staff and journey on, seeking what is still before you" - Anon.