There was nothing unusual about the three friends meeting late evening and talking past midnight.
This had been a practice since their college days. However, Utkarsh had an intuition that
this meeting had something unusual; at least what it would end up with. He had sensed trouble as
Mayank insisted that the meeting was very crucial and could not be delayed even for a day. He
dropped in early to have a one-to-one talk with him before Ashish arrived.
He sat quietly till
Mayank made coffee.
“For years now, we have sat together to discuss issues and then reach on a key decision but I
have a feeling that you have already decided something very important and called us to just
announce it. I think Monku you should come clear on that. I am not complaining but it is
important for me to know. I have always trusted your decisions and you know it very well that I
also respect your freedom to make them. But, I need to be told as honesty and transparency has
always come first in our relationship.”
Mayank did not say a word. He had lowered his eyes, looking at the steam rising out of the
coffee cup. He shuffled his memories to find the right reply. Being a journalist, he always
remembered how important it was to have a good content as introduction of an impacting story.
A good content was one which could have a smooth navigation.
“You remember the cricket match we played against the St. Xavier?s school when we were in
class six”, Mayank asked still looking at the coffee cup. “You were at the non-striker end and
screaming at me as I was continuously missing the ball outside the off stump. From the nonstriker
end, you could easily see the out swing that the bowler was able to get but I was new to
the crease and realized it only after you told me at the end of the over.
You later told me that you
thought I knew the ball was swinging and still playing dangerously.”
Utkarsh could not resist his tears. He took his arms and hugged him. Both friends washed their
guilt.
“Monku, I am still scared when I feel you play and miss it outside the off stump. I do not care
whether you make a century or not. All I want is both of us remaining together at the crease till
the end of game.”
“What if the bowler bowls a really good ball? I can only assure I won?t be out on a bad ball.”
“This is exactly my concern. If you play to the merit of the ball and not commit yourself to a
stroke even before the ball leaves the hand of the bowler, I am over confident you will never be
out.”
“I have not committed to a stroke... not made a decision as yet. But I can admit that I am drifting
fast towards a decision. There are some missing links. Things have unfolded in such fast pace
that I could not acquaint you and Ashu with them. That is why; it seems to you that I am not
being honest. The reality is in the making and we are sitting together to talk about all these.”
Utkarsh could not be sure how he felt after Mayank?s explanation. He still felt some unease as he
could sense that Mayank had already half committed him to some important decision. He had an
intuition that this decision would change things in their friendship and would bring up an
adjustment which would be difficult for him.
“I have a feeling that you have breached the G-3 constitution of collective decision-making. I
have enough reason to believe that there is another person in your life who is replacing me and
Ashu in the collectivity. Who is this girl”, Utkarsh said, sounding, as if he was complaining.
Mayank smiled. This is the magic of transparency. The two friends were so honest and
unambiguous to each other that they could see through their minds.
“How could you know there is a new person in my life; that too a girl and influencing my
decision”, Mayank asked, still smiling.
“This is no Sherlock Holmes stuff Monku. I know you are not gay. I can see a new confidence in
you and that comes only when a female is involved in the decision-making process of a man. I
am married for the last six months, you know that.”
Both the friends laughed heartily. Mayank told Utkarsh everything about the woman in his life
and the influence of her being an enormous enterprise for him.
“You know Utta, I am being challenged. And it has exposed me completely. I can say this to you
with complete innocence and self-aplomb. Love does different things to different people. It has
exposed me. Her love for me has dwarfed me, made me feel what a pauper I have been all these
years. But look at the goodness of love; I don?t feel ashamed nor is my pride hurt. I am
exhilarated, deeply satisfied that I am such a stupid. Love has stripped me off the pride of the
useless possessions and as now I stand naked, I am truly happy because I can see what is to get
and that seems gettable.”
Utkarsh knew, Mayank did not need a prompt to continue. The two had such trust between them
that there was never a need of confirmation from the other. He could feel Mayank was on song.
He would call him Utta, only when he would be emotionally too high. He ensured closing the
world to his five senses to be in complete audience of the song of life.
“I think you remember Utta, we had a serious difference of opinion and our friendship was
threatened when we were in class three. We were discussing what we would become whe n we
grew up and you had declared that you would run a shop selling kites and its accessories. I had
grave objection as I told you I had decided much before that such a shop would be mine. I even
offered you to drop your plan in favor of mine and instead settle for a pastry shop but you didn?t
accept. We had quarreled over the issue and for three days we did not speak to each other.”
“Yeah Monku”, he said with tears lining up in his eyes. “We were too stupid not to understand
that we both could have opened similar shops or we could have done it on partnership basis.”
“That?s it…this exactly is it! Even now Utta, we are in similar state of stupidity. At all stages of
life, wisdom always escapes us by what looks like a short margin and lifelong, we chase
stupidity. Wisdom is always round the corner but seems a step ahead of us.
For most people,
wisdom is available only in retrospect but we have only one life to live.
If I were to relive my
childhood, I would give that kite shop to you and would also agree to be with you in the shop all
the time. Being with you and having common joys is the wisdom I can now understand but could
not do it then because we did not then understand love. Love holds the wisdom, does not allow it
to slip away.”
“You?ve got it right Monku, even I?m not embarrassed to admit that being in love is the true
satisfaction, if not the right wisdom?”
“No…no! Not being in love but love itself. And it is because it exposes you to the stupidity of
the world and yours. When you become love, you see the wisdom. Oh my God…
how can I
express it…it is like….! I can say that…you know, what we all do basically is chase our shadows
throughout our lives. The source of light coming from behind, our shadow is always a step ahead
of us. The source of light being the social expectation, or to say the world view created by our
contemporary social definition of success and goodness, coming from behind, creates the shadow
of personal benchmarks for us. And in sheer madness and stupidity, we chase this personal
shadow to attain the benchmarks. We die tired and exhausted but fail to understand that shadows
will always be unreachable as it will always walk a step ahead of us. What love does to you is
put a new light in front of you and suddenly, your shadow shifts behind you and starts following
you. You become a step ahead of your shadow and this is the ideal situation, the wisdom. The
shadow of your personal success and goodness, defined by social expectations should always
follow you and never the vice-versa. We quarreled in childhood over that kite shop because we
put our personal success ahead of us. Had we understood love then, we would have known that
wisdom was not in owning the shop but it was in being together in any shop, whoever owned it.”
“Monku, I really miss Ashu to know what he takes out of your wisdom thing.
I have always
found myself close to your ideas but even you would admit that ours is not the world view that
majority of people have. Ashu probably holds the common man?s world view, which is also the
popular one.”
“Yes, I accept that. Human mind is all about societal training. We were all trained the way our
parents and their forefathers were taught and trained by their societies.
We quarreled in
childhood because we were trained to the idea of ownership as benchmark of personal success
and goodness. If we were trained in childhood in the tradition of love and compassion, we would
have understood that ownership was not the joy thing; the joy is in just being there…together. It
is redundant who possesses a rose garden. Important it is that we have the mental training to
enjoy the beauty and fragrance of roses and share the joy and satisfaction together…not own it.
“But Monku, you cannot simply trash all that we have acquired and the world is so inclined in
acquiring. There must be something of real worth in what we have done so far as billions of
people are doing the same.”
“It is a matter of the world view. I am saying it that you have to understand the basic problems in
our existing world view to realize why it is not serving us right. The very training of minds as per
the existing world view is flawed, if you see it from the view point of love and compassion.”
“Where do you think we have gone wrong in our mental training?”
“Uttu, I am not saying I understand everything. If you ask me specific details then I am bound to
sound stupid. I sincerely feel crippled; I am shocked at the mediocrity of my mental and physical
faculties. Even the languages I have learnt are not helping.
“Express your ideas Monku; there cannot be things which human words cannot describe. You
need to put your feelings and ideas in words.”
“This exactly is the mediocrity. There is a whole universe that needs to be described and
expressed but falls outside the scope of human words. There is also a life outside the popular
world view that needs to be lived and enjoyed but we are not mentally trained for it. I remember,
when I stood at the point in Kanyakumari where the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal merge, I
was overwhelmed by the expanse of blue and green water all around me. I did not want to
possess it, it could not be. All I wanted was to stretch my hands to the farthest limits of the sea,
hold the expanse and huddle it to my bosom. There was an initial fear…the immensity of the
expanse triggers off a fatal fear…the first sign and symptom of a bad and faulty mental
training…then gradually I could sink in into the song of serenity of the waves. I wished to
describe my feelings, I wanted to write poetry on it…I wanted to paint the landscape...many
things I recollect I wished to do but I could not. I was crippled; I was not trained for that.
Similarly incapacitated I felt when I was on top of a mountain cliff of the Himalayan ranges at
Rohtang pass, around 12,000 feet high. The suffocation, the debilitation of having an untrained
mind is hundred times more when I am with her and feel being love. The passion, the joy, the
satisfaction is beyond my capacity of expression…and the compassion loves fills your heart
with…it needs expression Utta but we have not been trained for that. It cannot be expressed
through words. Uttu, we have missed a huge learning in our lives. The faulty training led us to
accept the mediocrity of words and languages as mode of expression. We missed the far superior
and divine modes of music and dance. I am in love Uttu…and as I reach the high point of joy,
compassion and exhilaration, words become useless for me. I wish to sing, I want to dance and
paint to express myself. I need to express myself; express it not for others but for myself, I need
a talk within. I feel suffocated…deeply defeated. I feel I am losing out. I feel wasted. We did not
learn the song and dance…everyone must learn them.”
Utkarsh could see the pain in his eyes. He dabbled in poetry and knew the suffocation of the
inadequacy of appropriate expression through words.
“I realize it only when I am deep inside love that there is a huge unlearning process that I need to
go through. Then only I can think of developing the faculties that are needed for what I have
understood as wisdom. The languages that we have learnt are very mediocre.
They have been
designed for social economy. They put us in somehow manageable situation when we need to
express ourselves as social beings in the collectivity business of mutually agreeable survival
mechanism. But we also need to express individually. There is a world of love, the universe of
compassion, the cosmos of spiritualism where this language we have been taught loses
significance. The society where we speak is only one small part of our individual universe. We
need a language for other parts of our universe too. There is a talk going on inside us. We need to
reach at different dimensions…different state of beingness…distinct from our social state…! We
need to reach there and how can we? Our minds are not trained to understand what happens to
us. My mind must tell me what and why it is happening to me. I need a language, a mode of
expression to tell me constantly what is happening to me. This expression is required not for the
collectivity. It is not required for social interaction. It is altogether a different need. I am so
poorly trained that I feel incapacitated. But look, what love has done to me…it has landed me
into a harmony of sorts. It has taught me to stop and take my new journey to the positives of life.
It has given me the courage to unlearn the redundant and accept the unknowable.”
“Whatever is your current state of mind, is it primarily because love has happened to you or you
would be same even if love did not happen?”
“I am not sure; should I give the whole credit to love or not. You know; we all basically attempt
to be a comfortable person out of the inertia. We are socially trained like that. Throughout your
life, you think you can do lot of better things. You always look for better alternatives to your
current position in life. But, we have been trained to reject an existing thing only when we have a
better alternative in hand. We do not drop out of a chaos simply because we think it is not good
for us. We wait till something good or better comes to us. This also is the case with me. As I told
you, I knew it well that my current state of things was not good for me. I had already rejected it
mentally but physically I was continuing with it, as my social training of comfort of inertia made
me to. When love happened to me, I found an alternative. I already had the reason to move out of
the world where I was. Love provided me the will and a beautiful refuge. If love did not happen
to me, maybe I would have lingered in inertia. But, I think I can say that may be late, but I would
have done the same, even if love was not there as a powerful catalyst.”
“Okay, I accept what you say but there is still something you have not made clear.”
“What.”
“What is so bad and faulty about our mental training and contemporary world view that makes
you so critical of it? You seem to completely reject it.”
“You think I know the answer?”
“That?s why I?ve asked you Monku. We have always shared all good things in life. If you are
confident about your position and thinking, I will have all the ease in accepting it as my truth
too.”
“I truly appreciate your feelings Utta but I am not sure of the answers.
What I have been telling
you is about my discomfort with the world view which leads us. I feel my mental training is
letting me down when I want to fly and reach to the expanse ahead of me.
That makes me feel
that there is something terribly wrong with it. All I can say is about my own perception of things.
Are they answers? It will be stupidity to think so. But yes, I can say, my perceptions are my
truths as I think now I am much better qualified to say that, as I have love and compassion in my
heart.”
“Let us not waste time and energy on the terminologies Monku. Let us say, what you understa nd
are your perceptions and personal truths and not universal realities… okay with me! Now give it
to me. At least I can decide they are my truths too or not. The world and its seven billion people
have their own truths and we are not here to decide for them. I want to know what you think and
that is my universe.”
“Uttu, there are larger questions in our lives. Why are we born? Why and for what we live? What
is the ultimate aim and end of life – money, status, power and prestige...or for that matter
attaining spiritualism and moksha (liberation)? Since thousands of years, the questions have
remained with humanity and the struggle to find the right answers. I am also not an exception. I
also spent sleepless nights over the questions. I know that I still don?t know the true answers.
But, now I have realized something that makes me comfortable with the questions and this is
because of the wisdom love has brought in. Well and good if we humans find the ultimate end of
life, the final destination of all of us and most important is that we should all agree to that.
However, if we see the larger picture and accept facts objectively, with whatever knowledge
humanity has so far evolved and understood, we shall have to accept that all life on earth,
including humans and its evolution is one huge random and multi-dimensional event-cyclicality.
On the other hand, what we humans make out of it and charter our own ways for survival,
purpose and excellence is another multi-dimensional cyclicality. Both forces, though interdependent
only at the core and having some patterns, which can be replicable, still, they remain
highly and intricately randomized. The element of unpredictability, inadvertence, accidentality
and asymmetricality in both largely sovereign forces of the cosmos only ensures that humanity
can never ever remain in perpetuity of singular purpose, peace and order.
Especially in
contemporary situation, when humanity long before evolved and acquired the criticality of
conscious intelligence, which is bound to lead it to ever-growing entropy (degrading
randomization) and ultimate extinction in the long run. Finding a purpose and purity of singular
pattern or model of culture and virtuosity for global community is out of question. The
mechanism of cosmic realism never ever allows it. It is more impossible now. The wise can only
understand that and find its own subjective peace. However, not all these are what look
important to me now, especially when love and absolute intimacy has completely absorbed my
consciousness. The destination is not important; important is that we all, you me, all our closed
ones, travel the path with love and compassion and together, so far as possible. If we all travel
with love and compassion all throughout our journeys, wherever we will reach will be the
desirable destination. Moreover, even if we do not reach anywhere, our path itself is so beautiful
and satisfying that there is no need for a destination. It is love that has shown me this simple
wisdom. Love does not look for ends of life. It believes in the simple fact that life is one endless
drive and on the way look for no signposts to reach anywhere…the joy and satisfaction of
journey is more important than the nobility and utility of destination.
There is no need to reach.
Be on an endless journey and make it your destination where you tire. But always remember to
travel with love and compassion in heart and why I say this? Because, when love and
compassion are with you, the path and the journey becomes the theatre of infinite song and
dance. When song and dance is with you, journeys are full of incessant joy and satisfaction. If
you reach the stage; if ever there happens to be one, you will automatically lose the question of
destination. The question of meaning of life and its purpose will be lost.
Love makes you
understand the futility and redundance of the intellectual concerns of life?s larger purpose and the
material desire of life?s acquisitions. Love and compassion makes you understand that the true
wisdom is not in reaching but in traveling well. May be also because, there is no destination and
reaching. Love and compassion and its accompanying innocence is the greatest intellectualism, it
is the best acquisition, if one defines life?s purpose in terms of acquisition and possessions.”
“And where do you think our current world view and mental training puts us away from this
realization?”
“I have the feeling that our mental training to see the world as a stage for perpetuity of action,
aimed at personal acquisition, based on societal and cultural notions of utility, possession and
consumption is major trouble. This somehow engenders a consciousness in all of us, which is
majorly and perpetually reactive, as against the need of being receptive.
This makes us refuse to
see the mechanism of cosmic realism all around us. To only a few, who have this highly
receptive higher consciousness, the cosmic mechanism of asymmetrical randomization is
unraveled. That is why the wise have said, wisdom is always in the domain of unknowable,
something which can be realized but not known. First of all, the idea of meaningful action, what
we term as our karma, has become such a misinterpreted thing that our world view has become
majorly faulty. I rate myself a super idiot but even then I feel there is so much stupidity attached
to the word karma. I fail to understand why we humans attach so much physicality to the notion.
Most people confuse karma with physical labour. Karma is not labour, it is nowhere associated
with action, as most people conceive it as. Shram (labor) and karma are two distinct things. I
have always wondered whether this association of a pure idea like karma with daily life shram
has been the basic fault with our world view and the resultant mental training. It seems, the
cardinal error is associating human duties on earth as an actionable entity. The problem is that
there is an over emphasis on one?s karma but most people follow what looks like the
misinterpreted version. I have read that most great people in the long history of civilization have
said that the purpose of life is to perform his or her karma but what I feel is that what most of
them actually meant to have associated the golden word with is not action but a mind
positioning. I know, all goodness are ideas and they need to be converted into action to be of
larger good for humanity but the problem is; you need to understand the idea in its purest form
then only a suitable and commensurate action pattern can be devised.”
“But Monku, you know it very well that average people have the ir own limitations. You must
have read the philosophical premise that most humans have such limited mental levels that they
only understand matter and not the idea. They need to be told all ideas of goodness in actionable
terms only.”
“This makes out a case for change in our mental training since early childhood. You know Utta,
all major questions of humanity are thousands of years old and that is why I presume, the right
answers of all these questions must also be around for thousands of years.
Reason and rationality
have been there since ages to guide all generations of humanity. What I have told you about love
and compassion may be my own personally acquired and experienced wisdom but there is
nothing new about it. Millions of people before me have realized this and many have even
practiced it successfully. What I have said about love and compassion has also been told time
and again. Millions of more will realize the same in coming years. Read the ancient scriptures,
read the ideas expressed by great humans, read the Holy books of all religions of the world. All
of them have given common answers to all major questions of life. The answer is love and
compassion. But this commonality of goodness is only at idea levels. When it comes to practice
them, when the idea descends down to the actionable platform, it changes meaning and seven
billion people on earth start practicing eight billion ways to attain the good. Loads of hypocrisy
creeps in. The problem of humanity is not the idea but the action. That is why; I always say
hypocrisy is the greatest malaise on earth. People in general know the idea of goodness but they
rarely put them in action; or, they make bad actions out of good ideas.
There is something
majorly faulty with our mental training and current wor ld view as it fails us in converting the
right ideas into good action and practices. The knowledge of science makes us good doctors and
engineers. But when we start prescribing unnecessary drugs and treatments to our patients for
acquiring money and status, when we mix sand in cement in making a bride to acquire luxuries
of life, can we blame the goodness of the idea of education? There is something terribly wrong
with