The Perfect Pilgrims ....

This Sunday calls for an another blog post , Amazing Weather in Bangalore , London Like, Clouds, winds and occasional rain . All posts that I write have a trigger somewhere, some event, some conversation, some song or a combination of all of these. 

Today's post is a combination of all three . Three discussions, this post was drafted last year but I believe every event has the explicit consent of destiny . It had to be published today . 

People think they already know how to live . They have taken this for granted that they do know both how to live and love . This is one of the greatest fallacies . We know neither. All we know is how to go towards a graveyard . From the cradle to the graveyard, we are all a perfect Pilgrim , nothing else . we won't leave  a mark behind , just a today's weather will be replaced by tomorrow's.

Some thoughts on the Perfect Pilgrim . 

Poets or Engineers: Just like every other teenager, i experienced the same dichotomy. Who we want to become and why? Why do some things attract me? 2 things always pulled me towards them, The Vividh Bharti radio, its music and poetry embedded, the Hindi books by Osho Rajneesh. To add fuel to the fire, A TV series Mirza Ghalib was aired on Doordarshan . I couldn't understand why is it that a man's primary purpose of existence is to be an engineer, get a job and make money . How would then a Sahir or Gulzar ever take birth ? repeat what been done in past and keep repeating to earn money . Middle class India is facing a tremendous flood of meaninglessness life for the first time. And the irony is, man has never been so rich, so affluent as he is today. Both things have happened together: the inner has become poorer and poorer and the outer has become richer and richer. We have more money than any other society before, we have more medical facilities than before, we have in every way more power than we ever had before, and still no society has ever felt such meaninglessness, no society has ever felt being so pointless ..

Life can have meaning only in the context of something that surpasses life. The meaning always comes from the context; now man stands without a context. What surpasses life now? IPhone 6 , Apartments , Audi A6 , Cruise Holidays . The Man is missing “Heart”. What can the heart give to us? Yes, it cannot give you great technology, it cannot give you great industry, it cannot give you money. It can give you joy and celebration. It can give you a tremendous feeling for beauty, for music, for poetry. It can guide you into the world of love, and ultimately into the world of prayer, but those things are not commodities. You cannot grow your bank balance through the heart; and you cannot fight great wars, and you cannot make atom bombs and hydrogen bombs, and you cannot destroy people through the heart. The heart knows only how to create and the head knows only how to destroy. The head is destructive, and our whole education has become trapped in the head. Our universities, our colleges, our schools, are all destroying the ability to be creative, we are producing taxpayers of future ,  people who will follow AIB inIndiand YO YO Honey Singh and assume that being our heritage . Unless man becomes balanced, unless the heart and the head both grow, man will remain in misery and the misery will go on growing. More depression, more discontent and more suicides. As we become more and more hung up in the head, in calculators and in risk mitigation, as we become more and more oblivious to the existence of the heart, we will become more and more miserable. We are creating hell on the earth and we will create more and more of it. Paradise belongs to the heart.

In today’s world surrounded by “Sorted People” the heart is completely forgotten, nobody understands that language any more. We understand logic, we don't understand love. We understand mathematics and The tools of Internet however we don't understand music, poetry and Creativity. We become more and more accustomed to the ways of the world and nobody seems to have the guts to move into the unknown paths, the unknown labyrinths of love, of the heart. We have become very much attuned to the world of prose, and poetry has simply become non-existent. (This is the addendum to my Bohemian blog last week ) 

The Poet has died, No More Sahirs and no More Amrita Pritams. The poet is disappearing. I am sad for that and by poet , I mean the painter, the sculptor. All that is creative in man is becoming reduced to producing more and more commodities. The creative is losing its grip and the productive is becoming the goal of life. How many flats , how many cars , How many diamonds ...really ? 

Man has always lived in nature. My great grandparents lived around trees and not in apartments. The growing trees and the faraway call of the cuckoo and the winds in the mango trees and the rivers moving towards the ocean and the proud mountains standing in the sun and the starry night, and it is impossible not to be reminded of some invisible hands. It is impossible not to see that existence is not dead but alive. The ocean heaves, breathes; the whole existence is a growing phenomenon. It is not dead, it cannot be dead. Everything is growing. 

Because of this growing "head centred " approach , man is increasingly in denial of the invisible, mysterious force behind it all. Still when you go deep into the Himalayas, you again start feeling a kind of reverence, awe, wonder. Again you start feeling something that was very easily available to the primitive man. I walked once from Sanjoli to Summer Hill, a few kms down in Shimla and realized how anti- nature we have become . Watch a Khajuraho

We are simply dragging our existence, burdened, seeing no point in it all, just carrying on somehow for some  incomprehensible reason , some just wish death, that too seems pointless. To live seems pointless, to die seems pointless. Just the Perfect Pilgrims . 

Acceptance or Denial : Why do we people over iterate something , does a person with a fair complexion ever talk about how fair they are ? Does an able-bodied man often talk about how amazing his feet are ? We over-iterate things , reiterate conversations that hurt us , bleed us and concern us . We mention people who we are missing . There is an amazing Sher i have treasured since March 1994 . 

तूफान से हम टकराएँगे, तुम अपनी कश्ती को संभालो,

आरिज़-ओ-लब सादा रहने दो, ताजमहल पे रंग न डालो.....

The second line refers to lips , when one wears a lipstick, it is confession that the colour of their lips isn't desirable , so a lipstick would hide the real colour . People who often iterate that they are strong , may be going through a patch of lack of strength and such dialogues are often a monologue to themselves . Acceptance of a wrong is not the inverse of denial , they aren't two poles , they could be two poles close to each other. Not all denials are rooted in deep conviction . 

Optimism or Pessimism: Before I even write that topic down , I have always believed in this rather unusual conviction . Every child begins with a positive attitude towards life. That is natural because if the child begins with a negative attitude he will not begin at all; he would have died in the mother's womb. He waited for nine months, he passed through the birth canal, which is a painful process, suffocating. There must be deep down an unconscious hope; hence he is patiently waiting for the day when he can see the sun, see the light, be in the world. He is like a seed, very unconscious; he is not aware of it. But every child is born with great hopes, every child is an optimist; he looks through the positive. But life disappoints everyone. Optimism therefore, to me, is a trait of all living beings, prominent in some, not so prominent in some.

Man can look at life in two ways: either through a no or through a yes. There is also a third way, but to achieve to the third you have to go through arduous effort of becoming more and more evolved. The positive person lives through a kind of optimism. His optimism is shallow, but he is full of hopes. He counts only the roses on the rosebush; he does not look at the thorns, he ignores them. Sooner or later he is bound to be disappointed. The middle path can be termed as Realism.

Just like Electricity, nothing can exist only with one polarity, positive or negative; it has to have both the poles together. It is possible only through the tension that is created between the negative and the positive. But there is a third kind of person -- I call that person the realist. -- who looks at life in its totality, who is neither a pessimist nor an optimist, who simply accepts life as it is; who accepts the night, who accepts the day, who accepts the rose and the thorn, because he understands that life is out of necessity dual, dialectical. 

Optimism always ends in pessimism. Every pessimist has been an optimist once -- he is an ex-optimist. He hoped too much and because those hopes were not fulfilled he has become sour, angry, enraged... Whatsoever you look for you are bound to find it, remember, because life consists of both -- positivity and negativity -- in the same quantity. Life cannot exist without the other; the other pole is a must.

I am neither a pessimist, nor an optimist not even a full realist. I am of the opinion that no one size doesn’t fit all situation and people, never. Just Be , the who pushes himself out to birth. Just be that ....

Bashir Badr ..

Hope is the aphrodisiac every one lives on . 

ख़ुश रहे या बहुत उदास रहे, ज़िन्दगी तेरे आस पास रहे......

चाँद इन बदलियों से निकलेगा, कोई आयेगा दिल को आस रहे......

रात के रास्ते भी रोशन हो , हाथ में चाँद का गिलास रहे 

आदमी के लिए ज़रूरी है , कोई उम्मीद ....कोई आस रहे.......

A Rare video with conversations about the context of the song.