R.K.

That's how he was known in the Mysore University Post Graduate Department of English.

Long before I came in for my post-graduate studies, I met him at the Regional Institute of Education, where I was doing my B.A.Ed.in English Literature.We were sitting around a huge oval table one afternoon--Varma, Vishwanath Mirle, Bezboruah, Suchitha Medappa-- staff members,and two students. One of them was myself and the other was...I think it was Amal. I am not so sure at this distant date.There walks into the room then, a small, very pleasant looking old gentleman wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches. He had kindly eyes that twinkled behind thick lenses, and a very shy smile. He pulled up a chair next to Vishawanath, and they got talking in Kannada.
I was sitting next to Varma. "Who is that that nice old man?" I asked him.Varma gave an impish smile and turned around. "R.K.!" he shouted " here's someone who wants to know 'who that nice old man' is!"
I was mortified at being so betrayed and must have looked embarassed.
"That's exactly how I would like to be known.Thank you, young lady." The man said leaning towards me with a smile. I still did not know who he was. But I swore I wasn't going to ask.
Vishwa smiled at my discomfort and said laconically "R.K.Narayan." hugely enjoying himself at the expression on my face.
That was my  encounter with the creator of Malgudi. And those, by the way were my teachers: a magnificently brilliant lot who looked more like truck drivers than the amazingly creative people they really were.
They were incomparable. I thank them for shaping my sensibility.

R.K.Narayan, I saw many times afterward, always in and out of the Dept. of English ,Mysore. Prof. C.D.Narasimhaiah, or C.D.N. as he was known in the literary world, was a very good friend of his.
R.K. lived in Yadavagiri, and drove and old Fiat. He loved Mysore, and so do I.
Nothing can come near , lifting up your eyes  and seeing  Chamundi hill, watching over Mysore. "Like Olympus over Athens" C.D.N. used to say. It changes the texture of a town, to be in the shadow of a hill.

"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help." [ Psalms-121:1, 2] .

Malgudi Days

Malgudi Days

Eleanor Rigby- The Beatles

Hubris

Its strange, but most of us talk without giving a thought to what we say. If we did, we would not say half the things we do! What figures most prominently in most of our statements, is the word 'fear'. So loosely used, without a thought as to what it indicates, "fear" is the one  word that  is easy to put across , its meaning, or whatever it is we assign to it is easily comprehended, and computed by the listener.

What kind of "fear" is the logical question to ask next, and to that the answer is very vertical. "Fear '"of all kinds.
Something else that I have observed is that people tend to be more sympathetic when one declares one is "afraid"
---never mind whether it is of animal, vegetable  or mineral. Ah! here is an occasion, they think, to dispense "tea and sympathy". I wonder why.
I would think that a person who is brave, takes risks, and crosses boundaries with confidence would evoke admiration in the fellow human's breast, but that is not what I have seen, at least not in this country.

The Greeks thought that tragedy stemmed from "hubris", which loosely translated would mean an excessive arrogance, pride,and sense of self. In Vedanta it is "egotism" that disables one from going out of one's self towards a larger, more comprehensive understanding. Both amount to the same.Does this then mean that being "afraid" is a residue of the ancient wisdom holding us back from transgression?Hard to agree, because I believe that human achievement ---in every sphere ,in every sense---is only because of an initial transgression that had to be undertaken sans 'fear'.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. T.S.Eliot.

"Fear" lives in us and corrodes our life, our sensibilities. We cannot then react "from our solar plexus" ----as D. H. Lawrence was wont to say--- because we are afraid of the consequences of our transgression. Ergo,we do nothing,just vegetate and continue...."By this and only this, we have existed.". No, we do not.
"Fear" has another form today, born of the psychosis of "terror".There are those who true to the Confucian way of thinking " lie down and enjoy it",others fight it their own way.

This is an insidious warfare that is fought from within, through minds. I read somewhere a couple of years back that  the Al Qaeda is not as much a physical organization, as it is a state of the mind. Therefore one can never really wipe it out. and why is that? Because it is all about "fear" that once planted can never be gotten rid of.
We fight our own personal "jihads" against the corruption of "fear" that keeps us from striving towards a more enlightened self.


"Fear" is also strangely, a very safe feeling. Don't ask me why, don't ask me how.It is when one decides to shake it off that one feels out on a limb. Wondering at having ventured out on this strange path, for a while one is sorely tempted to seek safe haven in being "afraid". But persevere,and voila no  burden any more; free to make the choices one wants. Very important that last bit. Sticking to prescriptions can be very convenient,but oh! the joy of creating one's personal parameters! The pride and the freedom! Convictions and the courage  are what is needed to carry them through. Not a comfortable life maybe but yes, a life  without the inhibitions of "fear"...
 Or  stay dithering like Prufrock:
Do I dare 
Disturb the universe?....
T.S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
.

Hemant Kumar - Tum Pukar Lo - Khamoshi [1969]

magic

The melody had been wandering in  my head, so I decided to pin it down. Thank God, for Youtube, and of course thank god for the internet!
When I first heard the song Leheron pe Leher I did not listen to the poetry of the lyrics. I just submitted myself to the exquisite music letting the epiphany take over,and I found myself crying. That is the magic of Hemant Da's voice. It can create the scene out of the melody...the magic of romance, the magic of being young and being in love... a totally one -time experience that only music can encapsulate.
To Hemant Kumar then,the magic of Romance forever!!

Ya Dil Ki Suno - Dharmendra & Sharmila Tagore - Anupama

Lehron Pe Lehar Hemant enhanced version

Us and Them

It happened during the coffee break. We all went up to the Junction for our resuscitating cup of whatever, when we saw the tiny thing perched on the table , surrounded by a crowd. It was a baby kitten, maybe a week old. Utterly charming with its big wide eyes,and all other things so kittenish. She/he made Page 3 that day. A celebrity status was conferred on the tiny thing just the size of a teacup. People took pictures, of the kitten, with their cell phones; and it blinked adorably. All very well.

I asked the tea dispenser whose kitten it was, and he beamed proudly that it was theirs, meaning the kitchen staff. I am kind of goofy about all animals, and so the next day saw me looking for the kitten.there it was in a corner trying to push a metal plate around, and what stopped me in my tracks was the fact there was an open stove right there on the floor near the kitten. I told the tea dispenser to be careful about having open stoves, while the little kitten darted around exploring this "brave new world"!

The next day found me eagerly looking for the new interest, and I found it nowhere.I asked one of the canteen helps, and he mumbled, without meeting my eye, something about it being hurt.
My next question was about the vet, to which the answer was equally evasive.
I knew then for a fact, without anyone telling me, that the poor kitten's brief sojourn in this world was over.
It all came out many days later,that the curious kitten got hurt by the ,don't ask me how,  huge grinding machine that does the batter making for the dosa et al.
"Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies" seem to be the motto of the canteen people, and also, "Get a move on," they seem to say, "its only a stupid cat!!"

That's where this blog comes in, my friends, at that very phrase "only a cat!"
Such a contempt for anything that is not human, that seems to be the common sentiment of most people everywhere.
Whenever I walk on the beach, I observe the stray dogs and I find them to be utterly peaceful, in that they remain in their own orbit, and never for a moment do they transgress that. They live in their parallel universe and yes, it is all peaceful if you can look at them for a minute as you would look at a another person, and see in their eyes,the shining light of intelligence ,the eager desire to communicate  albeit non verbally.If you can look at them and include them in our universe, the world would be a better place.
 But no, we need them as objects. We need to have pets around us, to look and behave as we think they ought to. Do we love them? I am sure we do, we feed them, don't we? We walk them, drool over them,and most important, we spay them.
Do we ever worry about the moral implications of this act? Spaying dogs and cats? You must be joking! What has morality to do with animals?
What about respecting the primary thrust of all species ? The need to reproduce. Do we ever see it as the natural right of an animal?

This blog is my personal outcry against all forms of neutering be it human or animal. We have no right to make this decision for another just because we do not want to be bothered by the matrices of mating and birthing of our pets.
What if roles were reversed as in "The Planet of the Apes" and we were lead out to the same fate that we mete out to our cats and dogs? Whither double standards?
The Jataka tales are about animals that are "Bodhisattva". The word, very roughly, means "the intention to enlighten other beings."
Enlightened thinking then, is not a human monopoly. I saw that beautifully illustrated in the movie "Hachiko: A Dog's Story". Hachiko, was a "Bodhisattva".
Whitman just sums it all up:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained;
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.... 

Walt Whitman : Leaves of Grass

The body on the beach

There was dead body on the beach yesterday morning. A young man, by the looks of it, in the prime of his life; face all bloodied, washed up on the sands.
Most of us taking a morning constitutional  were brought up short at this sight, and we stood there a few minutes paying our respects to this young life so rudely snuffed out.
We learned later on, that this was one of a group of young men who set out to celebrate their reunion on Marina Beach. All except one, decided to go for a swim, and then apparently a huge wave carried the swimmers away. The Bay of Bengal had been acting very rough and stormy these past two days, what with the torrential rains in Sri Lanka;  we here in Chennai are after all just a ferry ride away from Lanka.
Two bodies were washed  up on the Andhra coast, one on our beach, and yet another way down near Mahabalipuram. The others, badly hurt, managed to survive, and are struggling for their lives at the Medical College hospital.
  Sad end to a day begun in high spirits.
The west coast bordering the Arabian sea is known to be treacherous ; the jagged coast line of natural harbors is in truth made up of razor sharp laterite rocks that can rip your body to ribbons. The beaches are enchantingly inviting especially the lesser known ones south of Mumbai like the Aqsa beach. You tread the sand happily and walk out into the ocean to wet your feet,  the water seductively draws you in, and slowly without an inkling you walk into it. All at once the sand under your feet gives way, and you go hurtling down into  underwater ravines,and of course, that is the end. The jagged laterites tear you up before you can probably gather your wits, or whats left of it, to attempt an escape.
We always used to  read about it, and the dead were always the very young: teenagers, college students out for a picnic... Aqsa never claimed old or even middle aged lives. It craved the lives of the young. Warnings were of course put out, but the young, bless them, do not know fear. Lucky to be young, and not feel terror at every passing incident both national or otherwise.
Take the Egypt debacle for instance. What is one to believe? The newspapers make Mubarak out to be some kind of a monster spawned by Western, read USA, powers. Not entirely true of course, the papers in India have vested inetrests.
The Egyptians are protesting about unemployment and the spiraling cost of food.  Familiar themes?
History has shown us that no government can hope to last if food becomes expensive. This very basic requirement is the stuff on which political regimes hang in balance.
The fear is about what will the face of the future be? In India, too we need a change, and like in Egypt, we will probably be veering towards the religion based party that has made Gujarat such a success story. The same will happen Egypt, but,and this is a terrifying but,what if fundamentalism gets the upper hand?
Could it be a "Second Coming"? Are we all poised on the edge of the collapse of a "civilized " world?
Its strange and self contradictory that as we go on towards being what is so often called a "global village" ,we are increasingly insular and violently intolerant. I shudder at the prospect of a "Gotterdamerung".
Blessed are the young, so intensely caught up in their lives,they cannot see beyond their deadline at work,the weekend end with the one they love, or of course, how can I forget: the prospect of a raise!

The young....
In one another's arms, birds in the trees...
  ...at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

 W.B.Yeats: Sailing to Byzantium