memories

I can still visualize the pensive, soulful eyes of my mother, like a flashback to the yesteryear's, when the pace of life flowed like a river. All along like a master craftsman she was molding us to assimilate the shift of ages and face the world. From a caterpillar she cocoons us till like a butterfly we emerge into the world stage. Her love was never partial or personal…something beautiful, genuine, creative and renewing like an alchemy of pain and joy. The ultimate, source of inspiration, truth and perception in an adulterated world.

spirituality

Religion and Spirituality are not the same.
Because religion is self-enclosed, so are religious studies. The point of asking questions, is frowned upon it seems, one must believe what is written in the holy books. Don’t ask questions. Call it belief for belief's sake. Does a religious scripture have the freestanding power to change the world? Does it make us more alert, more skeptical, more humble, and more open? What are scriptures? Does a piece of writing achieve divine status by virtue of its intrinsic quality, or only as a product of social consensus? Spirituality on the other hand means awareness, it is useful because it wakes us up from the sleepwalk of self-involvement—of plans, anxieties, resentments, habits, the fog that clings to our eyes as we stumble through the day, stumble through our lives—and shows us the world, shows us ourselves, shows us life and experience and the reality of other people, and forces us to think about them all. The pleasure of spirituality is not escape or fantasy; it is this very shiver of consciousness, this troubling exhilaration. Thinking and feeling, both at once and both together, simultaneous and identical...
As for Religious scriptures, the only people who read them are the ones who make a career out of studying them (Parsons), and the believers who attend the sermons.

Sojourn in the hills of mahbleshwar.

Went to the mountains on a brief sabbatical, was cocooned in the lush environs and the remoteness of the mountain resort was awesome. The natural beauty,serene mountains and hush were all overwhelming. Even the dogs were quiet and never barked, the birds snuggled contentedly. Here there was only nature and peace, cut off from cellphones, internet, and cacophony of TV a coud of calmness descended over my sanity. Now that my batteries are charged I will have to return to the insane, but more interesting mundane world of everyday problems, noise and madness. As GEKO said "If problems can be solved why be sad and if problems cannot be solved what is the use of being unhappy? Trees are happy, because they don't aspire for much,only sunshine and water. Let us mentally enter the forest,look at the flowers and embrace the world and look at the stars for answers.--Vinay__

The cycle of life

Life is cyclical and a succession of events /days/years in a time loop of eternity, and pretty soon all of us get trapped in this endless cycle. Our life is like a river collecting all this debris/ events within the day/month /years like tributaries which flow into our larger self. There are two banks into which these vectors of opposing values run side by side. Each of these embodies a spectrum at whose extreme ends lie these contradictory vectors of positive and negative values which are necessary to bring in a proper balance in life. We must not slip completely into despondency or zones of joy or confidence or complacency. We have to keep growing, learning and share our glory with the Universe as a whole. This equipoise is what matters like the quiet moment in the ocean when one wave falls and the other rises. It only when you reach this stage of awareness, humility, understands and acceptance of our own destiny that philosophy of the external world and its illusion becomes clear. In short we must not be affected by the twists and turns of our life, and like the river we will finally enter the larger cosmic body. Nothing is to be feared, everything should be understood, we should not be attached, and just think it is a passing illusion and move along with it. Otherwise we will fade into the sunset with a dead man’s smile!

Gridlocked in the lap of luxury

It was a typical Monday morning traffic snarl with thousands of cars bumper to bumper on the arterial roads, an air conditioned nightmare. I glanced at the commuter in the $ 1 Million S.U.V. who was compulsively checking into his Blackberry mobile and then his expensive Piaguet wrist watch, both products despite the price their humungous price tags were of no help to him in his current predicament.
This is life’s greatest paradox, that all there rich and powerful who possess, swanky cars, rare watches, fine art, haute couture and $ 10,000 suits are stuck in the same log jam with those living on the fringes of Society. The poor can afford to get down and walk but this luxury is denied to those who have access to designer brands. The rich and famous don’t have time and freedom to be free. Luxury pampers you, you feel differentiated, adorning products that are special, but don’t have the luxury of time. La coste, Benetton, Hermes, Gucci and Armani, reveal the insecurity of the wearer, whose personality has been subsumed under the manufacturer’s label. All of them have been relegated to the status of mini-moving billboards that displays the marketed image of the Company. The brand label is the assumed language of the sartorially dumb. How would a handsome lion in the jungle look if he sported an Yves St Laurent headband?
They are connected 24 hours a day, seven days in a week in this fast paced world, where they think they are calling the shots. Yet all material things are not the ultimate luxury in life through we may think so for variety of reasons. Real luxury is having a simple meal, enjoying the silence of nature, watching the sunset and spending quality time with the family. Real definition of luxury is having precious quantities of time and the freedom to enjoy it whenever you want however you want. It is nice to have a pause button and hit the reset key when you want and you don’t need a designer brand for it. –Vinay--

Writers block

The line between a novelist and a liar is a fine one. If writing is a kind of lying, then lying is a form of art, albeit of a lower order—. Both liars and writers refuse to accept the tyranny of reality. Both carefully craft stories that are worthy of belief—a skill requiring intellectual sophistication, emotional sensitivity and physical self-control (liars are writers and performers of their own work). Such parallels are hardly coincidental. Indeed, lying and artistic storytelling spring from a common neurological root—one that is exposed in the cases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular kind of impairment, called, chronic confabulation, a rare type of memory problem that affects a small proportion of brain-damaged.
The liar lies on behalf of himself; the writer tell lies on behalf of everyone. If writers have a compulsion to narrate, they compel themselves to find insights about the human condition to express a curious truth that can only be expressed in a furtive and veiled fashion, masquerading as what it is not. A novel is a lie whose secret ingredient is truth.
Writers don’t use expletives out of laziness or to shock, they use them because sometimes the four-letter word is the best one.

God

After all, once we scrub away all the theological bric-a-brac and pluck the exotic cross-cultural plumage of religious beliefs from all over the world, once we get under God's skin, isn't He really just another mind—one with emotions, beliefs, knowledge, understanding, and, perhaps above all else, intentions? Aren't theologians really, just playing the role of God's translators, and isn't every holy book ever written a detailed psychoanalysis of God? That strangely sticky sense that God "willfully" created us as individuals "wants" us to behave in particular ways, "observes" and "knows" about our otherwise private actions, "communicates" messages to us in code through natural events, and "intends" to meet us after we die would have also been felt, in some form, by our Pleistocene ancestors.