WHERE THE MIND IS WITHOUT FEAR...IS A PLACE UNKNOWN TO ME

She stood at the edge, the long sturdy bridge stood right in front of her and beneath it the fearless carefree water gurgled precariously as though laughing at the girl. All she had to do was cross the bridge and reach her destination. Her dreams were on the other side of the bridge and all she had to do was, cross it. What lay between her and her dreams? Why couldn't she just take that leap of faith and go on to the other side? She always wanted to be there.

She looked at the bridge; she stared at her dream right in its face. Her heart leapt..Go..go...go. What stopped her was something no one can see, no one can smell or touch. It was something which the river down below mocked at. It was the “fear”. The fear of the unknown; the fear of the worst. The fear that grips you and makes your destination look tough when it’s right there in front of you. When all you have to do is run across, the fear clings on to you and makes the simplest of things look like the toughest hurdles of life.

We all are faced with such situations day in and day out. It is not the lack of capability, or the circumstances or the confidence that hinders us. It is plain and simple fear which stops us from getting what we want. A self constructed illusion of the mind that intoxicates us and numbs our faculties and chills us to the bone.  Fear is nothing but a delusionary state of mind which concocts negative instances in our head and makes them seemingly real. It chokes our sensibility and makes us stiff and nervous. Just spare a moment to think, if you eliminate this devil called Fear from you mind, getting to your dreams seems to be the most natural thing.

What lay between the girl and her dream was a bridge. A simple harmless bridge. All she had to do was cross it but the mind was seized with fear. The fear of toppling over, the fear of the bridge collapsing, the fear of the worst created an environment in which the destination seemed farfetched.

It’s true that the toughest battle you fight is with yourself and the most powerful enemy you will ever face will be your own fear. Hence where the mind is without fear..is a place unknown to me. 

THE ‘JANUS’ IN US!

As the years pass by, hair turn grey and limbs become weak there is a parallel life that surreptitiously grows stronger. The more the present reality envelops us in its fold; there is an unleashed yet latent force inside all of us that grows robust. This force is opposed to everything sane in our lives, and is truly free like the birds flying in the sky. Free from the shackles of convention, pristine like the clear blue sky, carefree like strong directionless wind infused with the heady fragrance of fresh flowers. A dream world in our subconscious mind sometimes grows so strong that it starts sneaking a peek into our normal daily structured lifestyle.

This tussle of the real and the unreal is a fact of life. Most of us put on the garb of reality and shove the unreal under the carpet and convince ourselves that it doesn't exist. The fact is that it is an intrinsic part of our life and stitched intricately in our being. Till the time we keep the unreal at bay, life seems smooth but there are times in life, when the unreal force falls on us like a tidal wave and tries to wash away whatever the reality had built. Some people call it “weaker moments” when you end up doing something which shatters the perfect structure built by the rational and disciplined ‘present’.

So in some ways it’s true to believe that all of us are convicts and in some way our hands are always tied. The part of us which is truly free is too untamed to be true. It does not fit in our social fabric and is so powerful that it carries with it the danger of devastation. So engulfed with fear we all try to keep that side of us at bay and put in place necessary checks and balances that give us a sense of security.

So a person can be carefree and cautious; wild and tamed; sensible and crazy. Life is like the two headed Janus. There is nothing like the dark side of human nature. There is nothing wrong with the latent force that resides in us and there is nothing wrong with our present either. So there are times in life when nothing is wrong or right. They are just two sides of a coin. The two faces all of us have. 

PORTRAIT OF IMPERFECTION CALLED MAN

Can the water ever be absolutely clean? Can the air ever be completely pure? Impurities are as much a part of life as it in nature. The strange part is that all of us sometime or the other think that we are perfect or set an expectation that we are perfect and can never go wrong.

Seldom do we realize that perfection is not a state of being, it is a goal to live for. A goal all of us strive to achieve in our lives. Sometimes we achieve it in some sphere of life but slacken in the other. But the key never lies in achieving it, it lies in striving for it. Just like they say the destination doesn’t matter what matters is the journey. Similarly, how we gradually remove the impurities in us matters more than bliss we achieve at the end of it.

And there is no guarantee that we will not slip up. We will fall again and again but how quickly we get up and start walking truly signifies progress. All this is easier said than done and somewhere it is true that only when you experience rough patches in life do you realize how to overcome them. You will never know what fire can do till the time u touch it.

If the purest things in nature like air and water can be impure then we are mere mortals and are full of impurities. But the man who all his life strives to remove these impurities is the man who truly has lived his life and will be remembered and respected not for his feats but for the person he became.

The Powerhouse!

She clung to it with her life. Delicate fingers clasped round it, sticky palms itching to loosen the grip but her mind said “hold on to your stick or else you will fall and hurt yourself”. She listened to the voice that came from her head.

She started to live with the belief that the strength lies in the stick. It is her only support that will make her stand. She could lean on it and face the world bravely. This also somewhere reflects that she inwardly believed that she is weak and cannot stand without support.

We are all a lot like this woman. The only difference is we do not have a stick to lean on but we have our logical thinking and reason which we use as our stick that will give us support throughout our lives. We use our head to rationalize everything. Sometimes to such an extent, that we start to plan and influence our future.

One day, by some cosmic stroke of luck, the woman lost grip of her stick and what she feared happened. She fell. The stick broke. She looked around for help, for support but the only source that she found was herself. She had no choice but to muster courage and try to stand on her own two feet. She tried once, she failed, she tried again and stood up a bit. Her legs trembled, her eyes wet. She stood up and looked around, except her, everything was unchanged.

All of us have a similar situation in life, when we are left with no choice but to stand. No choice but to look inward and find that reservoir of strength which we thought lies outside. We let reason and logic deafen us and subdue the faint yet strong inner voice. It’s true when someone says, “you yourself are a powerhouse of energy waiting to be tapped and explored and the day you do that, you will truly be ‘self contained’.”

WHEN YOU TRULY MAKE A DIFFERENCE TO SOMEONE’S LIFE

Children who were coldly rebuked the minute they were born, who felt the meaning of ‘unwelcome’ as soon as they took their first breadth were the ones who ‘ welcomed’ me with a warmth. 65 young girls full of life filled the campus of ‘Love India’- a charitable organization for young girls where I had gone to give unwanted warm clothes.

Parents who left them due to dire constraints, relatives who abandoned them when parents died and some who just gave up on them because of convention that cage a girl child, were responsible for the existence of these 65 bright young girls. Housing girls in the age group of 5-20, the organization supported the livelihood of each girl. From basic need of food and shelter to studies and preparing them to earn a livelihood,  ‘Love India’ helped this unwelcomed bunch of girls to stand up and make space for themselves in a society that said ‘sorry we are closed’.

They sat around me, greeted me, and excitedly spoke about their daily chores. Each voice was pleasantly calm and content yet had a happy and courageous tale of survival share. It was heartening to see how these children can be so spontaneous with their warmth and love.

As I distributed the clothes to them, a  jigsaw puzzle, in my head, with blocks named ‘unwanted’,  ‘clothes’,  ‘children’,  ‘warmth’ got completed and I smiled like a victorious child!! 

A PICTURE IS WORTH MORE THAN WHAT MEETS THE EYE

When expressions speaks louder than words and when life is captured in a moment- this is what I call a breathtaking picture. If you closely observe any form of art, a brilliant piece of photography or a near real painting, each has a story to tell. In its own subtle and colorful way it uses a tiny window of reality to communicate with us.

Imagine a gallery full of images and paintings, each representing a different aspect of faith. One showing Ganga Puja at Rishikesh, the other showing a girl sitting on the floor in a mosque and the third showing the vast expanse of the Golden temple at Amritsar. Each picture is a depiction of faith, of belief in an unknown power. While there might be a common thread of faith that connects all of them, yet each has its own story to tell. Each has a vibrant history attached to it and conveys volumes about the present.

Most people who view a picture analyze it from two extremes. One who would look at the technical aspect and say the light is perfect and the angle is great. While the other would be layman’s view which will take an instant in saying it’s a nice picture just like they would say nice to a dress or a movie.

Most of these look ‘at’ the picture but only a handful will look ‘into’ it. An old man with a wrinkled face and eyes that have seen the world is sitting with his hands on his lap. He is wearing 32 rings in his fingers. To some this will be a boring picture but to some it will be an image that conveys rustic belief. An image of India as a land of snake charmers, elephants and people who believe in the power of the supernatural. A picture that speaks volumes of what our predecessors believed in. It is a story of blind faith.

You might say that the beauty with which a picture conveys a story lies in the hands of the artist and on how well he is able to capture it.

This brings me to conclude with the fact that while talent might lie in skill of the painter or photographer but the ability to truly comprehend and appreciate it lies in the wisdom of the onlooker.

THE ROAD LESS TRAVELLED

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;"

Shakespeare said it years back and I remember it even today. After fifteen years of reading these lines, today I sit down to deconstruct them a little differently. A thought that has been lurking in my head for the past few days is that, while we all have a role to play in this world , we have a role to play in each other’s life too.

Every person’s duration in the other person’s life is predestined and he or she is in our life for a reason. Till the time that reason / goal is not met the person keeps walking in and out but does not disappear.

We might play the blame game all our lives but every person teaches us a lesson. A lesson for life. The only difference is some teach the hard way.

The sad thing is, we are too busy to comprehend what the person has taught us. How he or she has made us a better person? Sometimes we are so preoccupied with what I call the ‘blame game’ we cannot pause and reflect to see what I learned from this person. We might misconstrue the word learning and still get nasty and say ‘I learnt never to trust’ but again that cannot be the ultimate truth because there has to be and always is a positive learning even from the nastiest and the most painful relationship. Again the difference is in the way we decipher or want to comprehend the situation.

The beauty of it all is that, there are times when people just walk in and out of life all the time and you are left amazed, viewing your life as a thoroughfare. The reason why this happens is because the mission with which the person was made to enter your life has not been completed. Till the time that objective is not met, he or she will keep reappearing and you can do nothing about it. The difference is that while all this is happening we remain baffled, we never know why it’s happening or what the mission is. We see it only when the person is gone.

Some of you might contest what I say, but it just might be worthwhile to sit down with a cup of coffee, in you balcony. Looking at the glistening rain drops, slowly walk down memory lane and think about what were the good things each person who came in your life taught you. Before you know it, you would be smiling seeing the miles you have travelled.