Two eggs and a bird

Able Abe was an executive in his company. He had learnt the tricks of his trade early in his career. He kept his heart well sealed within his mouth. If he opened his mouth he was quite guarded about it. He selected carefully whom to give a view of his heart. Thus his reputation was built. The Chairman of the group which ran these companies, has his eye on him. He is tipped to soon become Executive Director of a sizable company.

A good egg.

Silly Sam’s heart was visible when he opened his mouth. He has tumbled his way through the rungs of the company. He has had his ups and downs and they alternate very rapidly. His peers said various things about him. Different people called him differently. Impractical, simpleton, crackedjack of many trades and master of none, etc. Some loved him and some loved to revile him. What he will turn up to be after five years or ten years, nobody can tell. Probably still remaining in his egg of potentiality, still furiously pecking at the suffocating shell.

Abe has people standing with some mental tremors when he deals with them. He knows how to talk with seniors, with equals and with his juniors. He is respectful with seniors, friendly with equals and affectionate in a restrained way with juniors. He has his measure for everything.

Sam is unpredictable. He sometimes advises seniors, nags equals and patronizes juniors. Or he could be respectful, loving and affectionate respectively. He seems generous at times and selfish at other times.

Mother-bird is warming all the eggs. She winks as she hatches her plot.

Swami Sampurnananda, 26 October 2003 – Genre 273 No. 14.

Corrected on 8^th August 2006, 6.35 p.m.

Nilambar Mukherjee Garden House

(Mother’s Place)

Old Math

Belur Math

Serendipity

The Ramakrishna Order is a continuation of the most ancient Order of monks in the world. It has two eyes both strategically placed. One eye looks backward, to the past and the other eye forward, to the future This order has one of the most educated cadres of monks. It has men of varied professions. All had felt their calling for monastic life and had plunged into its fiery crucible and emerged as a uniform entity, a Ramakrishna monk.

Did I say uniform, no, look hard, you’ll find a different impress on every model.

It is a variety in unity, to use a cliché.

One, who shows up this variety, is Swami Sampurnananda.

He’s just a statistics graduate but is considered knowledgeable in many subjects. Many youngsters feel his soothing presence but some superiors think him a bad influence. He had been a poet, accountant, musician and a preacher of sorts. Lately he has turned to internet and picked up his English writing again.

In his attempt to help somebody having writers’ cramp he stumbled across a website by that name.

That has been serendipity for him. He came into a contact with a varied group of writers. He was having one of the best times of his life.

Will he have to renounce his new friends too as he has supposedly renounced his family? Well, a monk for him is one whose family is infinity with an internet of connections. Nothing is ruptured, though like a spider one has to go places while at a job. So he’ll sure continue to be cramper so long he is cramped in a human body.

Swami Sampurnananda, 1 October 2003, Genre 273 No. 25

Jai Radhu!

Radhu looked upto her aunt for everything in her life. She had lost her father while she was in her mother’s womb and lost her mother to insanity soon after birth. As a child she was crying, desperately crawling to catch her mother who was herself mentally a child then and was playing about trailing strings of many colors. Her aunt had rushed to take her up at that moment.

She grew on her aunt’s lap. Her aunt too was suffering from the loss of uncle and Radhu was her god-sent prop. But her aunt was soon becoming god-mother to each and every child and grown-up near and far and was doing a great job counseling many people and guiding the destiny of countless people who came to her.

Radhu surely must have felt jealous of all this. Which child would like a hundred sibling brothers and sisters competing?

She grew up a good girl. Her aunt did whatever she could to make Radhu educated though her other relatives, going with the times, tried to prevent the girl from getting smart.

Her marriage, done with glittering ceremony, was not a great success.

She turned to her aunt again. But she had her greatest shock when her aunt, in her last days, refused her.

Did it hurt her love?

Soon when Radhu’s end came, she bravely preferred to die of tuberculosis in the hut in which she had lived with her aunt, with her sacred memories than in a modern hospital with all facilities, in holy Varanasi.

She and her aunt were both beings of light, each acting according to her script.

Jai Radhu!

Swami Sampurnananda, Genre 273, No. 24.

The Great Rope Trick

He was a Vedantin. He believed he lived mostly in his mind. Body was just an appendage he ignored. He would like to ignore his mind too. But he felt he had not yet reached that stage. He kept to himself most of the time. He didn’t despise the world. But he saw that most of his fellow humans in the world lived in a lower plane of existence. They would have to exhaust their Karma to come up higher. What if some of them wear the robes of a committed Vedantin? Let them be. He would better keep to himself and his thoughts of Vedanta.

That was him at his healthiest best when he went to his neatly made bed (which he made himself) in his spick and span room (which also he maintained).

Morning 6.30 a.m. will see him working at maintaining his considerable muscles. The body was all-in-all then. How enjoyable this working out his body! He pitied those who were still in their bed then. He loved to watch in TV, people working out their body in different games.

Now watch him when he is ill. Normally he did justice to his food. But now he has his own discoveries about which food agrees with him. Damn the dieticians. Their science is so imperfect. They’d have no chance with him.

A man mistook a rope for a snake. When light dawned, he saw the rope. But his reflexes did not yet ebb. He pounded away at the rope with a stick.

Perhaps he is right. Maybe, external action catharsizes and kills the snake relentlessly biting away in the mind.

Swami Sampurnananda, 29 October 2003, Genre 273, No. 20

The Old Beggar Woman

Her old bones lie on bed till sun shines down the entrance of her shanty hut. She lazes as the sun warms her barely covered cold skeleton. As the sun packs punch into his rays, she reluctantly gets up. She has to obey the call of her duty. She has to do her bit to fill up her belly to keep hunger away for as long as possible. She has also to care for another soul. She breastfed him when she had the stuff. Now though her son is forty years old, he is but an infant mentally.

She waited for that opportunist rickshaw-wallah who charged her sixty rupees to take her to her spot and to bring her back at night. She crawls into the rickshaw in the morning and crawls out of it, to sit on her bricks at her fixed spot. She can't stand. She barely moves. She stretches her hands and she can talk. Talk indeed she can! She calls out the passers by in endearing terms. Her large, gluttonous, meat-consuming, circus-animal-handler-cum-rope-walker late husband, used to love her for her talk. Now she employs that charm on the passers by, mostly pilgrims. They give her coins, fruits, chocolates, odds and pieces. She gathers them into the folds of her sari.

On most of the days she shows profits. When dark sets in she leaves for the cold comforts of her home. Her son springs like a child that he is mentally, to clamour for any food she might have brought.

She fights, presses hard to get the last drops from her stony fruit of life.

Swami Sampurnananda, 18 Nov. 2003. Genre 273, No. 26

By the bank of the Kasai Ganga

On the outskirts of a Bengal village; at the bank of Kasai Ganga

Kids hang about grazing their cows and goats. Some adults at times lustily break into full-throated songs. A workman cuts up some wood for our cooking and a few kids extend their expert helping hands. A youthful do-gooder has done a bit of cleaning up of the temple’s flowerbeds and walks to the river bare-bodied, soap in hand.

A shallow but long and quiet wide Kasai river flows on the outskirts. Many villagers bathe there. A sizable school building, which has a good library and two computers stand imposingly in the middle of the village. A public library lies next to an open auditorium.

In all, an idyllic, picturesque setting, enough to warm my poetic cockles and launch me into an attempt at poetic prose.

Now, beauty is only skin-deep, it is said. I get inside the skin of this village.

I notice that while it is not too much undeveloped, neither is it much developed. It is a typical present day Bengal village that remains in its stagnant self unless a series of lucky circumstances happen to move it forward.

The kids who hang about are either school dropouts or never been to school kids. The workman who cuts wood for us will perhaps not find work tomorrow. He may have to furtively dip into his wife’s interest free, piggy (or rather rice-potty) bank. The computers in the school remain mostly idle even when the power supply happens too be on. The computer teacher absconds after drawing up his salary. Perhaps he finds better business elsewhere. The borrowing of books in the library is left to the natural curiosity of the children than any encouragement by the reluctant librarian. Many times more worms visit and take to the books in the public library than the members of the public. The tranquil cows that graze the lush rain-fed grass, have to become tricky thieves egged on by their not-so-innocent herds and try to crash into the temple’s fences and reach the well-tended plants within, intruding violently upon the placid meditations of the poetic monk residing there. The lusty songsters happen to be drunkards too. Some drink out of boredom and some perhaps to fill their, not too full a belly. The folks who bathe in the river go there for its less cold flowing water, as it is less hard on their skins. They have perhaps heard of electric water heaters but few have seen one. The do-gooder remains content with hanging about doling out his little goodies. One would like to see more verve and go-getterness in him.

The whole picture becomes off-colour and the writing more prosaic.

But it is said, real beauty is deep within.

Deeper still, a stream of Spirit flows. Its water gleams when the eldest able-bodied mother of the family blows the conch of thanksgiving at day’s end and surrenders to God. Its waters spring out of the underground in spontaneous joy and abandon at national festivals of gods. Boats float in the stream. But most remain tethered to the bedrock. Their navigators are still in a daze after waves after giant waves have passed over them. They have arisen and are paddling but not awakened enough to raise the anchor, which has served its purpose. A few have awakened and raised their anchors but only those individuals who steer their boats in the direction of the current go places. Those who labour against the current, sometimes make a heroic picture but remain where they are.

Amidst the sluggish, teeming mass, one sees the freshness of fighting life forms here and there. There is a struggling author who wants desperately to make it big. There is an old man who trudges along, rain or shine, ill or well, many times alone, to the temple, to do his laboured singing. If ten youths pass their time playing cards, before they pass into old age and pass away, there are five who found a society of the living and toil to wake up the village.

Amidst the morass of dead of dying leaves, there are these spirited, living seeds and sprouts. The leaves do their bit to fertilize the earth for the living.

A hundred and odd years ago, a wandering seer monk saw the seeds that were buried still deeper. He started cleaning the grounds and clearing up the stream too.

Old Mother Bharati! Young India has taken up your baton. Welcome India that is Bharat! Vande Mataram!

Swami Sampurnananda; Lalgarh; 11 Dec. 2003; 1 p.m. kuthia veranda