This is just a thought

Why does it leave us so shaken? They leave like everybody has to one day, but no, we still don’t get it, at least for that while. Why haven’t we learnt yet? We do learn to accept it over time, but the spaces that get left behind never get filled. We just cover them with consolations. What do we fear the most our own death or the death of the ones we care for? Who are the people who reconcile with death, do they really do it? They say life moves on, but it isn’t the same life at all. Death changes it. Death plays such a big role in our lives, in our existence. Death isn’t ultimate, it’s ever going. It’s a process. It doesn’t involve individuals it involves people. It’s one of the biggest events in people’s lives. It’s not the last event of life, it’s something that also happens at last. It seems I have strayed way too out of line here. When I started this one I had a doubt in my mind. That doubt is about death. The fact is we don’t like death. And the fact is we can’t avoid it. Does this mean we stop fighting? Does our conscience really approve of it? Maybe death isn’t good at all. Many people fought for causes they couldn’t fulfil. Does this mean they shouldn’t have fought in the first place? Bhagat Singh and many people before and after him fought for a seemingly lost cause at that time and they died fighting and achieved nothing significant. But we still remember them with reverence, don’t we? May be it’s the same with death. May be all the living things have been fighting it for like ever and are not making any significant progress. And maybe that’s why humans were made. The current fact is everything that is born has to die. The colossal stars can’t avoid it. Nothing ever has been able to evade death. But nothing has ever thought of death in such a way. May be us the humans are the first thing that have finally come into existence with that ability to understand life and death the way nothing has ever done before. Maybe that’s the meaning of our existence- to come around this inevitability. Maybe the people who are accepting death are the ones looking for shortcuts maybe they don’t have the mettle to stand their real ground and are intimidated by the formidability of death and lay down their arms and surrender. Maybe weak are not those who cling to life and material pleasures but those who give it up too easy. Craven and cowards are those who give themselves up to it and lie always in its looming shadow. Those who talk always of death’s inevitability and not life’s beauty. They say life’s ephemeral. Maybe be they’ve been corrupted. Maybe all those messengers weren’t that of god; may be they were of death. Maybe god doesn’t exist, it’s just a fictional character made up by those messengers to convince us to accept the supremacy of death. Maybe we’ve all been deceived so far. Maybe it just occurred to me. Maybe we all know it and that we are only made to think otherwise by the prevailing ideology. We are made to feel bad if we prefer materialism over “spiritualism”. Maybe it’s all tricks. Maybe it’s all just the other way round. Come to think of it. Ask why it can’t be? Doesn’t life and living things look so beautiful? Don’t we dread death? Don’t we feel really bad when someone dies? We say that some good person didn’t deserve to die. Why, is death something bad? I know a lot of people and scriptures say a lot of different things. But what do our basic instinct say of it? We instinctively reject it. Maybe we don’t believe in what we believe in. Maybe we only pretend to believe in it because we are made to. Because we are expected to.

The Mad Man
It was the beginning of college. Living away from home was a new thing for most us but we had managed it quite well. The painfully small rooms were hard to get accustomed to, and since we were too fresh to get out of the secure walls of the hostel, our eyes often wandered out of the window. As days passed by, the curiosity of the ones outside the windows in the dwellers waned and the curiosity of the insiders for the outside world grew. The crepuscular charm of the last hours of the day would often turn our feet towards the nearby cafeteria, and we would find ourselves sitting under the quaint shade of the ancient trees that stood tall around the parlour, along with the sparrows, who after a long day’s work, settled in the trees for the evening gossip, and filled the place with sweet music. We would do our best to keep our voices down and were wary of eyes contacts, still fearing unnecessary attention.
It was one of those evenings when, amidst the talkative clusters and hushed ones like ours, sitting in a corner under a colossal banyan tree, a man caught my eye. He appeared to be talking to himself. Poverty seemed to have turned his unkempt beard white a bit too early. Mad man, the conclusion came chasing after the curiosity and devoured it. It was already getting dark and we went back to our rooms. Our lives swept us off some direction and his some other, until one day, when the roads happened to cross once again. Just like the other evenings, we had gone out to the parlour to relieve ourselves of the heat and crammed rooms. Only this time, I found myself sitting on the farthest side of the bench just below the old banyan. There he was, sitting upon a broken bench and muttering. We talked for quite a while until sipping of drinks and helpings of food allowed a moment's silence, and his voice came pounding into my ears and startled me. I turned my eyes in his direction and found myself facing the man. He was looking directly at me, yelling as if in a heated argument. I had no idea how to react, his gaze, his voice held me there, held the conclusion, and let the curiosity endure. The first thing that came into my mind was maybe he was begging, but then, you don't yell and beg. His tongue, I couldn't understand, it might have been Bengali for there were many Bengali speaking people around, but I couldn't tell for sure. The yelling made me uneasy, so I stood up and went to sit at the other side of the bench, away from him. To my surprise, he was still looking at the same place where I was sitting. I did my best to ignore him.
The talks had been resumed and the food done with, and my friends were preparing to retire to their rooms. We went to the counter to pay the bill. During the transaction, I casually enquired the shopkeeper about the mad man. He was indeed mad as he informed me, but with an interesting story behind him. He told me not to waste my time, but on my insistence, agreed to tell me something about it. He told me the man had a laundry shop behind the parlour, pointing towards a ruinous room by the boundary. He lived with his wife and son there. They did the laundry of most the hostellers around, and earned enough to feed and clothe themselves well. But with time came ill fortunes, his son went missing one day and never showed up.
"Such a fine young lad he was! He often sat with the students here and laughed with them. Police inquired hard but the college lads swore they had not the slightest idea about his whereabouts."
The police had long given up, and darkness had grown in the lives of the poor old couple. They would sit below that banyan tree and argue all day long.
"The old hag tried hard to convince him to sit at the shop but he won't listen, just kept on arguing."
Until one day she died. The shop had already gone into ruins.
"But he never let go of his woman. Went along with her into that other world, but only in soul."
A loud animal like laughter interrupted us. We looked up to see the mad old man pointing in front of himself and shaking in hysterical laughter as if laughing at someone right in front of him. To our eyes there was just an empty bench and a mad man laughing at it.
"I think he is happy," The shopkeeper decided, looking thoughtful, “Happier than most of us."
We observed the man for a while with amusement in our eyes.
"Don't you waste your time on this, boy. Better get going."
It was getting dark, I realised, hurrying out of the parlour. On my way back to my room, that animal-like laughter rang in my mind, along with shopkeeper's words-"Happier than most of us."
It made me think hard about myself and people like me. A whole world , full of gossips, full of wonders, full of curiosities, full of danger, of surprises, and queer things surrounded him, and yet failed to interest him. He went on unaffected by what others thought of him, and in a world of his own, was happy with his wife, and maybe his son, who knows. He stood undeterred against the waves of criticism, of judgment, and disapprovals, and paid no heed to it. And it stopped existing. Belief had such power. He is a mad man, my mind argued. But he didn't know that and for him, it didn't mean anything. Only his own world mattered, happiness mattered.

                                       -Ketan Mishra

Ever thought about darkness??
Ever went into a dark room for a time out??? TRY IT!!!
I'm talking about pitch darkness..mind it!
In darkness you don't observe anything and what we normally tend to do is look out eagerly for a slightest hint of light. This time try to control your natural reflex and just stop trying to perceive any outside light. Make friend with darkness. just let it get upon you, let it fill your eyes, just feel it there, dense and heavy.
Then you'll feel your own heat radiating from you, an AURA purely yours. Darkness will clear your mind and then you'll will perceive the otherwise invisible things. You perceive them as the reflection of your own inner light in the darkness.
It may be your fears, the ecstasies...all projected from inside you. Your utmost confusion would get clear in the dark. the outer light is like the sun that obscures from the eye the beauteous stars and the moon, out own lights...which only get a chance to twinkle in darkness...
Great men can see their inner light even in the bright light of the material world...but thats hard achieved.
Darkness often makes you face thing, the values that you try to hide under the dazzle of materialism...

     OFTEN TIMES I STOP AT MY PACE TO THINK ABOUT STRANGE THINGS  AND AMONG THEM A FEELING I SUSTAIN:-

AT TIMES ITS NOT THE EXTREMITIES OF FIRE THAT CHASTEN OUR SOUL BUT THE DEPTH OF THE VOID DARKNESS.