Gems

Coming home after that rough everyday struggle for your livelihood, literally. Looking forward to good food and a warm bed. Trying to drain the poison off my mind, recollect all the things I enjoyed doing. Trying to remember if there was ever a thing that could consume my mind, my passion, me. That I believed in, wanted to live for.

It was the evening before the Ayodhya verdict was to come out. And my rickshaw driver, decked in the traditional taqiyah, asked me not to step out of my house the next day without reading the newspaper. It was not very safe for me, though Mumbai has offered him lots of freedom, enough to visit his beloved mosque in the middle of the night and unload his mind in prayer. Why fight over such an old issue, he claimed. Why not build a hospital. After all, what could be a higher act of benevolence?

There are men of wonder who spend their lives in mosques, in prayer and healing, he said. Those maulanas, both revered and feared by different kinds of people, they can perform magic. Tantras they know, of great power and use, and these they bestow on the sick and poor. No money or food they take in return, but a blessing and a hope that man would not harm, kill or sin. Hundreds of superstitions they know of and preach. He followed many, several were given to me in advice.

Simplicity, yet comprehension led his life. Ignorance of several scientific marvels, perhaps. Yet, how much did it really matter what he believed, as long as he was happy and did not hurt a single soul in the world. And I remembered and felt what it had been like to have such conversations, such times of knowing, of trying to understand, of sharing thoughts and love. Like a passion waiting to fill itself in something.

Life may be full of crap, but it is a few moments of pure happiness as these which make it worth living. It made me smile, more than once.

Prayer

People fight. Everywhere and all the time. For money, land, work, possessions, but most of all, to feed their egos. They are not bad people. No one would make with his own hands a world of bad people. Only they do not know what they are doing. And when they realize, it could be too late. Too late to repent, too late to gather their courage and correct their wrongs.

Man is just not meant to live with others. He just cannot share his life, his actions, his mind with anyone else. For any two people are so very different from each other. And so they clash and they fight, to convince the other of their fault. Man is not witless. Yet his ego overshadows everything, until he has no energy left to fight or to pick up the reins. And at the end of it all, he still craves for the comfort of another hand to hold his.

He desires peace. And still his stubbornness leaves him no space to see the way to it. Through understanding; through acceptance of imperfections, their own and those of others. A way to have a perfect kind of happiness, where he may not have the ideal and yet can wish for no better. For if he can ever reach God, how can it be except through this state of having the most perfect happiness or knowing the most beautiful peace? Won't he listen and bend his knees; in prayer, in conciliation, in glory?