A friend of mine is a Yogi. I’ve known him from the time when not even a ghost of the idea of a Yogi was anywhere near his head. Then, he was a family man. He is now hailed as an accomplished Yogi, wears long hair coming down to his waist and black beard with streaks of grey brushing his chest. His get-up gives him an aura of a mystic, attract people whose minds he is said to set…
I gets angry, envious, jealous, excited, mad, dirty, frustrated, disappointed, depressed, anxious and hell of other things! I likes, dislikes, loves, hates and does hell of other things! I thinks, meditates, transcends, descends, reasons, calculates, figures out, concludes and does hell of other things! I feels down, up, high, low, and hell of other things! I is big, small, good, bad, euphoric, dysphoric, and hell of other things! Now it is this I that sets the stage or is a…
Tony and I grew up about the same time in one and the same neighborhood. Getting to his house on foot from mine would take as many ticking of seconds as it takes to boil an egg. His was a shelter nowhere near a house but more than a hovel, squeezed between a group of back to back tall houses like a lamb in the herd of camels, non-plastered, made of home-made, unbaked bricks with a roof of iron-sheet over…
My job ran me into this man. By job I mean the development consultancy. Or otherwise, I take any job up for grabs, just anything, for jobs are scarce, little going on, and no dearth of people to take the bread out of your mouth. So, that’s it. This man was not someone I was after. Nowhere in my head was he when I was ready for the off, nor had any idea that I would bump into him….
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…