Ekla Chalo Re

If they answer not to thy call walk alone,

If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall,

O thou unlucky one,

open thy mind and speak out alone.

If they turn away, and desert you when crossing the wilderness,

O thou unlucky one,

trample the thorns under thy tread,

and along the blood-lined track travel alone.

If they do not hold up the light when the night is troubled with storm,

O thou unlucky one,

with the thunder flame of pain ignite thy own heart

and let it burn alone.


Rabindranath Tagore

If only you can reflect

"Your remedy is within you, but you don't sense it. 

Your sickness is within you, but you do not perceive it.. 

You presume that you are a small entity, whereas within you is concealed the vast world. 

You are indeed that magnificent book, by whose alphabet the hidden becomes evident. 

Therefore. You have no needs beyond yourself. Your essence and secrets are in you, if only you can reflect".

( Hazrat Ali A.S)

Creating Value

It’s a sight to behold. How he packs up his school bag, slipping books in one at a time, ever so carefully. These books and that stationery box with perfectly sharpened pencils may well be his only treasure; at least that is how it seems from here. Has he already realized the value of these books? I am not sure. Would he always care for them, manage them the way he does now? I can’t say.

No one I believe can really look into the mind of a young kid and map out his thinking process. Or perhaps I feel no one should. You know the principals and followers of some unknown revolutionary paradigm must realize, that there are processes in this world which are sensitive by nature, and connected such inherently with different factors that it is almost unbelievable how a seemingly insignificant input, of words, thoughts, or perception, could in actual change the entire process. Like a dent, for life. How a child develops and how he understands our world is, I believe, one such process. It does not need that ‘shaping – melting – reshaping’ exercise, it does not depend on our participation either; all it needs is some support, to augment what is already in there.

We have been undervaluing this for long, tangled in the debate of nature and nurture. Perhaps our job, as teachers, parents and society, is nothing but to hold back our guide books and just assist through the journey.

Journey that leads to the glory. And character.

Through the Night

Deep down inside, if you really want to experience, and experience the damned fucking contentment of life, what your mind feels and what your heart thinks would gradually become irrelevant. You wish to budge things along, as they would want you to, needlessly trying to keep everyone happy; but haven’t you realized; your baggage full of empty windows, and broken mugs, and untouched possibilities and compromised dreams, and disregarded sacrifices, and pictures, and wishes, and cards and gifts and carefully folded gift papers, and pictures and text messages and… blank text messages…

You got to move. Real. Forward. But not being frenzied. Appreciate the craft. Add. Lose yourself, in it.

How else would you correlate delirium and meditation? And haven't you realized, they always go together.

Jugal Bandi

‘A philosopher’s importance lies not in the correctness of his views, but in whether his ideas move men to action’. Some, irrespective of the earned knowledge or ignorance, go beyond their personal misery; an uncharacteristic feat cutting straight through the realms of both sense and fiction. One such man I met last week, painting his world with a butterfly wing, unaware of whether he was humanizing colors or were they just transcending him into a mystic. A mythical self that could trail any path, as for his curiosity, tangled stories producing nothing but experience are to be found everywhere.

Every story has its own color, but only for a meager fraction of time. It changes, as the subjectivity of both sense and fiction finds peace in confusion. Every story is colored by its interpretation, as you would know; black can be the color of love, and white may well signify both ‘nothing’ and ‘everything’ at the same time.

Why are you scared?

Life in a Metro - III

You probably don't know about it, but we have something so common within; it seems like a proverbial enclosure of identities. Yours and mine.

......

In a city like Karachi, your individuality is completely insignificant. Irrelevant because tangled images and their descriptions do only connect with obscurity and unqualified abstractions. Life here, dwells on common grounds. Love me or hate, I would always find a place to exist. I shall always contribute. Nothing in a city ever dies; this prevailing numbness makes everything immortal.

Progressions

“What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and "best" was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.”

- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

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Image: Orwald