life's a kick

  To the friend who missed seeing the moon of Buddha Purnima on the day of lunar eclipse: Dear friend, I begin to write this while simultaneously gazing at the moon. Or Super Blood Moon, as it is called today. This is a sight meant to be drunk in with the eyes. It calls for a complete surrender. If at all I am taking my eyes off this spectacular vision of life, it is to convey to you, the unspeakable beauty I have the fortune of witnessing today. I was walking down the road this evening in a nonchalance that typically accompanies a deep meditation session. It was a normal evening, until this sight came to vision. I went out for a walk. Soaked in the colors of twilight. Sat by at my everyday corner to meditate. Completed the meditation and started walking down the remainder of the road, looking out for little feathered friends and the usual canine company. It was then that the road turned and brought me face to face with the moon of today. It was like being thunder struck....

“Don’t teach me. Don’t try to patronize. Tell me a story so that I may learn.” Two years ago, I met a friend, a prolific reader, who happened to utter these words in a casual conversation. He was talking of an author whose style he considered rather didactic. It must have stirred something deep in me, for I remember his words, and the lesson, clearly. And so I will clothe my message in a story. A real one. The year I joined college, Delhi government woke up to the traffic chaos faced by residents of Palam and Dwarka. Then, Palam was bustling with life and business, and Dwarka had been freshly dug for the coveted metro. Property hawks were, as always, the first to milk the fattened cow, and before we knew, our modest property had become Delhi’s latest desire. Resultant – habitation in Dwarka soared; cow sheds were replaced by buildings and private vehicles zoomed on the roads hitherto dominated by buses. What the property dealers inadvertently forgot to mention was t...

“Silence is a powerful enemy of social justice.” – Amartya Sen History stands testimony to the fact, that among other things, it takes voice to staunch injustice. Whether it was Raja Ram Mohan Roy or Nelson Mandela, one person with courage has made the majority, riding on the wave of voice and words. Today, as 52 small island nations across the globe face serious survival threat owing to environmental imbalance, as 1 billion people go hungry day after day, as 13 million hectares of forest cover is erased annually, and as species get extinct sooner than the most pessimistic scientist predicted…humanity longs to hear the surge of that voice of dissent. Nature knows the best The planet bequeathed to us by nature has a history of 4 billion years. Through eons of evolution, a gurgling molten mass of material cooled off to become conducive for life. First in the form of singular cells, and later in complex forms, life broke through the chrysalis of uncertain environments, and flour...

“Don’t throw it outside. Because there is no outside.” The statement above, taken from an award winning campaign against littering, bespeaks the fact that this shared planet is everybody’s home, and hence, everybody’s responsibility too. Cleanliness is next only to Godliness, is a proverb we’ve all heard in school, and in this essay, I shall try to understand and explain its multifarious facets. The topic of cleanliness reminds me of an anecdote narrated by a senior during my Plant days, seven years ago. During his official tour to Australia, while sauntering on the spic and span sidewalks of Sydney, he happened to drop a wrapper on the pavement. Unmindful of his act, he carried on without qualms. An elderly woman, walking a few steps behind him, lifted the wrapper and put it in her bag. Stumped, our man stopped in his tracks, as the lady went past him with a nod and a smile. “I learnt the lesson for once and for all,” he confessed. The eloquent silence of that woman was preg...