Idyllic Thoughts

Ask any woman who wears the quintessential attire of the sub-continent -- the saree -- about it and she will look at you scornfully and let out a hmmph! which conceals a long, resigned and tiresome tale of draping the 'six yard (now down to five-and-a-half) wonder' as the blissfully ignorant call it. At first glance, it seems so easy. A long cloth draped around us ! So simple, yet so graceful. Only those who have battled with the stubborn beauty knows how it has defeated them time and again. They are aware that a saree has an independent mind of its own and looks upon its possessors with contempt. As they are smiling confidently that they have successfully pinned the pleats, a naughty one will slip out of their grasp bringing tears to the eyes. Successfully dazzling others with a saree is by no means a lesser feat, which teenage girls, newly introduced to the saree, will be well aware of as are older women with even half a century experience. 

It is 16th January, 2015. It will be 16th February, 16th March... soon. What is a date, month or a year to me? Nothing but a jumble of numbers and words in my mind. They have absolutely no significance to me. They come and go, uninvited and uncherished; forgotten soon in the melee of life. The mornings, afternoons and the nights are a blur within each other. Only the evenings are mine, for thoughts, dreams and frustrations. And the serene hour in the early morning when I water the plants and they seem to wait for me eagerly, nodding with content after their thirst is quenched.

Children often learn how NOT to live by looking at their parents. And when they become parents, in an effort to NOT be like 'their' parents, they in turn teach their kids how NOT to live. 

In the film 'PK,' the alien says in his planet, there is no language since they don't need it as they communicate with each other thru mind. Don't we need language to think, to speak in our minds and even to feel? I tried and failed. 

Mysore haunts me even after a year of my estrangement from the city. The roads where I walked and waited all those interminable hours for that elusive bus, the marble Swami Vivekananda statue which stood forlorn and forgotten in the circle until one day it was discarded in a nearby park and replaced with a huge bronze one, the amphitheatre (Vanaranga) at Rangayana where I spent many a lost evening, the University paths where my sis and I collected gulganji seeds and searched for knowledge among the old buildings once frequented by the greats of Kannada literature... I miss all but one part of the city - the so-called litterateurs and intellectuals who claim to be an authority on all and sundry under the sun. I once asked a colleague about the books written by a famous 'litterateur' of Mysore and she replied she didn't know. Nobody knew. I searched the net and found the titles. They just talk, talk and talk. Why?

Some people are so straight-forward and truthful that they tend to see everything in black and white - the truth and the lie - the black truth and the white lie. Confusion and chaos exist only in the colours which contain hundreds of shades. I consider black as truth because there is nothing to hide in it: it is plain and shadowless. Whereas white is a lie because it can hide behind many shadows, and is also the meeting point of all colours - in short, chaos too which arise from the untruth (as pointed out by my hubby).

What is so unattractive about silence that people fear it? Why is there so much chaos around us -- the cacophony on news channels, the jumble of words trying to express a feeling thru speech or songs, the mind-shattering music praising god and man, the chattering of a thousand minds where everyone wants his/her opinions to be heard and to be mattered, the honking of horns and quarrels on the roads, the calling out of hawkers and bargaining of shoppers, the chants in places of worship and in the seeking minds... Why is it so difficult for us to be silent? To communicate with others without the help of words (or mild words), to put our point across without arguments, to converse with god without hymns and tolling bells, to immerse oneself in the clear, unmuddied waters of silent contemplation where solutions can be arrived at within, arguments are done with the self and the beauty of this world taken in without the help of words? When will we learn to shut up and speak... thru silence? ...