Last autumn, I was with a friend of mine roaming the lanes of Lumbini, the holy birth-place of Buddha. As I myself come from this place, I call round to my village every year before Xmas. This time Steve was with me. He is from Lyon, France. For some obscure reason Steve has taken up with Buddhism. He meditates, performs yoga, chants arcane mantra, follow some weird rituals, and walks on naked feet on the premises of the holy…
I know you. I think I know you. You know me. You think you know me. The knowledge I and You arrive at going the thought way is just an accumulation of information we gather, thereby get the brush and color to paint a picture of the object we observe and store in memory. And, we do it aided by some other supplementary knowledge already acquired through cognitive development or imprinted on our mind by people, events, or surrounding that…
The word EMPATHY we are told to take as the ability to identify with another’s feelings. This brings me somewhere near a person who puts himself or herself into the object he or she observes and lives the former while clinging on to the latter. To me, it is like someone swimming in a river hanging on tight by the branch of a tree arching over the running water. I find it awkward. There is a conflict between the…
The only thing left of him is the label or, more precisely, his name. Other things surrounding him is foggy. No one knew where he had come from but everyone knows where he went. A few thing about him sticks in my mind. My knowledge of him is physical, or rather earthly, though. To me, he didn’t know as much. This fellow of my age, or may be my elder by a year or two, lived too short but too…
Let me dig a kite out of my memory box that got flown in there when I was ten or twelve, way back in late 70s. The dusty village I grew up, now a town, would go mad to put their kites in the air for a good while before the onset of dreary monsoon that would turn the drab village into an island of sorts shortly thereafter. Getting one’s kite in the air gave the local boys a real…
I love eggplant. It gives me wind. My stomach doesn’t agree with it. I can’t resist the temptation of eating it. There’s nothing like eating an eggplant. Conflict between the body and a taste in mouth! Let go of the eggplant! The problem is solved, naturally. No hassle! But, that’s not possible! I am not prepared to forgo eating eggplant. I just can’t do without it. Simple as that! Hmm! So, go and eat it! Yeah, but this f**ing thing…
You call it a delusion or a hallucination! A phenomenon issuing from beholder’s own mind and nothing out there. You can call it a thing churned out from one’s own knowledge accumulated in memory over time or far beyond time with the person being aware or non-aware of it. No way can you be wrong. I myself do not have an iota of doubt about it that everything I see, sense, or feel, proceeds from my own mind and that…
This is politics, a disgusting thing we need but only to loathe at, and yet, can’t do without it, for we don’t know how else to row the boat. One can clean the dirt off a thing but can’t clean the dirt itself up. All the while, we rack our brains and bend our mind and efforts into converting the dirt into detergent. We’ve always buried head in sand to the stark fact that dirt can only get dirtier and…
The eye-feasting panorama of milky-white snow peaks stood miles away, at a hateful distance from my single story ten feet tall non-plastered home, siting on the edge of a natural pond fed with rain-water, ruled by duckweed. No bag of tricks could take me anywhere near the crown of monstrous mountains except my imagination given wings. A thought that often flitted through my head was that if only some mystical power suddenly find a way into me and transmigrate me…
War breeds poverty. Poverty breeds war. They are like blood and bullet. One spills the other. Some people think that bullet and bomb can smash down the Chinese wall between poverty and affluence and bring about a level playing field. Others who are born with fish in mouth talk of teaching those denied of it about how to fish so that they can catch the haul. And, if they begin to harvest the haul the war again leaps out…