Monday, December 28, 2009

STRANGE DAYS...


Teenage – a phase of life when every kind of discovery is accompanied with strange bouts of three chief kinds of emotions – fascination, awe, excitement……and of course not forgetting the fourth and most important….. the “ I know it all” syndrome…

Enter 9th grade and I started turning more into a preacher of philosophy, philanthropy and introverted fantasia rather than a student of primary science…
j.krishnamurti and r.k.narayan replaced the original and never read course books of physics, chemistry, maths et all which anyways would rot on my table with a spider weaving a cobweb between one edge of the book and the table which would be dusted off very less occasionally with the poor creature being stunned yet getting another opportunity to start at it again..
sr.dominica’s death was a strange and least expected event and it did effect my stability at school for I was now nowhere to be found nearby the refectory or the school church or even the library ….actually now I avoided the little pass that went around the refectory for fear that I might be unpleasantly reminded of her and would be overwhelmed with sadness for her memory seemed to encapsulate me into a purple haze of monolithic melancholy….
I now spent my hours sitting in the playfield in recess under the shades of the pine and cedar trees …. Their shades encrusted with small pinecones that would once in a while fall on my head and destruct my concentration …or I would be absorbed into my novels … my latest obsession with j.krishnamurti was taking over…..all but a part of some strategy to forget sr.dominica whose essence seemed to be haunting me wherever I went around in the campus…….
But like james bond said in a movie I watched 3 times…..”shaken but not stirred…”.
nobody in my age group or my class had then kind of caliber to go for j.krishnamurti for actually nobody really understood what the dyeing old man was trying to make the world understand…or was the old man himself really sure of what he was trying to say???? The answer I never found… for his philosophies were too wittingly put together to try and decipher.
I found him when I went to an annual book fair that took place in nainital and there was a stall devoted solely to j.krishnamurti…the stallkeeper was a member of the krishnamurti foundation or trust and himself seemed to be living under an influence of some ethereal kind…. Face radiating a certain kind of glow which generally takes over when one is awakened to the realization of some strange idea or purpose…. He himself was dressed in khadi dhoti and a khaddar shirt as if his entire physical being exuded the fact that he had changed his purpose in life….as if he was going back to the gandhian era.
My mother had accompanied me to the outing and given nana’s influence on me regarding spiritual pursuits and my fascination towards drug addicted poets, philosophers’, saints, sages, rock stars and people who suffused into magic…. It seemed to me very absurd as to why normal people actually wanted to spend their one of a kind lives just doing what everyone else did…namely, studying, getting married, having kids, growing old and then dying without anything more eventful to leave behind to the human fascination…….?
I roamed about the fair in a disgustingly bored manner as if I was writhing with the feeling of having been left purposeless….
I came to a sudden halt when I saw j.krishnamurti’s poster…. Ofcourse… born on 11th of may 1945. Krishnamurti was a dynamic force to reckon with in the field of philosophy and thought. None of my classmates had even heard of him….. but then.. how could they not???? This was a legend we were dealing with here… and it was impossible to not be eNtering that stall devoted to him…
I went inside and scanned the huge stacks of endless philosophies surrounding me in search of a title that was downright appealing to me which I could not resist from laying my fingers on…. Yes here again I worked by instinct rather then logic….
My gaze stuck on a navy blue colored cover that had the image of a tree facing a storm…title : “god and his meaning”.
I picked it up immediately for I could not resist it. “the right book calls out to me at the right time”, I used to tell khushbu. I fancied myself as a demulsified writer in the making… after the age of 20 all I could imagine myself doing was sitting in a dimly lit corner of a deserted solidified room on the hills and writing a book!... I geused right so… I never forgot what was written at the back of the book…
a philosophy a 9th grader would never understand,,, but which could shake the very foundations of religions believing in the perfect anatomy of a system that regarded one single minded concept as the base of the universe…. It clearly shattered it and made things simpler
“god in all of his glory is but a concept of the mind. In all of its seeming power he is the human encapsulation and incarnation of what the mind actually craves. It is the incarnation of hope in despair., the thought of good over evil,, it is the desire to believe that rain will come one day even in the most barren, dry and deserted of lands…. God is a concept of the human mind. When we are weak and in need we formulate an image of a supreme power that can change everything at will, this is a natural “reflex mechanism” of our kind to actually encapsulate the thought of “hope” within our understanding… for hope is what motivates our actions in times of utter disbeliefs of circumstances… this entity is not bound by any law of nature, that Is not restricted by any morality or belief…. We look to it for support ,… and we are the makers of god…. The real god is not the creation… but he dwells within the creator. .. and the creator is too lost in his creation… marveling it… but not knowing… never knowing… never accepting or acknowledging his ability to be able to “create”. God is an articulation. God is an illusion shadowed upon a reality….god is the formidable truth…. Yet the untrue… do not look to god.. look unto thyself.. for he … is your creation.”
I stared back at the shopkeeper…. Utter divinity and spark beaming through my eyes…. All my life I had been told that god actually existed…. That god was real and living…. That it was a power known only to a few who had actually felt it and witnessed it… maybe they actually had… but here was a man who countered the theory with absolute defiance … it was shocking why he didn’t come under the open firing of accusations made by the religious brigade of non believers… starring back at my image on a mirror kept at a meters distance from me at the shop…. “look unto thyself”…. !.... i failed miserably in realizing the truth the writer tried to communicate.

Powerful words. So powerful. I delved into the realms of a secret diary that night. “god is an illusion…. How true… or is it just what he said?”

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