Saturday, February 26, 2011

Godhra: 'What happened to the accused is a crime'

These were people who had lost nine years of their lives because they were caught in the crossfire in a battle between the state government and civil activists, who disagreed on how the case should be conducted. In the police buses were people who had never seen their children. There were people who could not perform their fathers' last rites.
.
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"It takes one day to apply POTA, and eight years to clear your name after that. Don't ask us if this is a win for us. What happened to my father is a crime"

கவிதை

கற்ற கல்வி கவிதை தரா,
எண்ணிய எண்ணம் கவிதை தரா,
மொழித் தேர்ச்சியும் கவிதை தரா!
சொல்லிழந்து உணர்ச்சிபொங்க நிற்கும் தருணங்களில்
தாமாகவே வெளிவருமே கவிதையானது!


நன்றி: நவீன்

Monday, February 21, 2011

குரு - சீடன்

குருடு நீங்கான் குருவென அறிவிப்பான்,
குருடு நீக்கும் வழி அறியான் சீடனென அறிவிப்பான்,
குருடும் குருடும் குருடாட்டமாடி,
குருடும் குருடும் குழிவிழுமாறே!


*கடைசி இரு வரிகள் திருமூலருக்கு சொந்தம்!



He declares himself to be a guru,
who is still blind.
He declares himself to be a disciple,
who know not how to rid himself of his blindness.
The two blind folks,
play out the blind dance.
Eventually, the two blind folks,
land themselves in a pit!

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Life in the heart

"Life in the heart comes when consciousness is centered in feeling" - Hazrat Inayat Khan

Purpose of Yoga

The frogs do not have to worry about Yoga. Neither do the eagles have to. But, the ancient seers found it necessary for humans to. The only reason I am able to conceive of is that humans, as a society, stand a chance of living in a fashion that is free of violence and is full of peace. But it is no mean task, for, though we stand a chance, the forces of nature bind us strongly. Unless a significant majority of humans free ourselves from the bindings of the material manifestations of nature (which includes ones own mind), peace in human society will be a distant dream. This freeing up of oneself in all aspects is Yoga and in its essence it is an attempt to directing the natural process of evolution. This peace cannot be achieved without inner and outer development, for one cannot exist for long without the other. This directing of our energies towards peace is the fundamental and only purpose of Yoga. Towards this, individuals, who are the basic building blocks of society need to be educated to find that space of purity within, the space within, where there is neither birth nor death, neither past nor future, and to let skillful action emerge from that space in order to bring about a peaceful society.

While this is the singular unifying philosophy, the modus operandi varies tremendously with different people. The process of going towards this varies with individuals and their natural capabilities and inclinations. Towards this, the so called various branches of yoga have emerged. While superficially they appear different, they cannot really be classified into different schools as all of their purposes is the same. The purpose of eating is a valuable analogy. There really is one purpose for it - to nourish body, mind and soul. But, depending on the individual, the actual kind of food varies. But, by and large, all individuals need some of all kinds of food though proportions may vary. Some of the popular branches are:
  • Karma Yoga - Here, one works on the external world (non-egoically and dharmically) and through which evolve themselves.
  • Gnana Yoga - Here, one understands human nature and by using wisdom and intellectual understanding, one evolves and also assists others.
  • Bhakthi Yoga - Through devotion to the supreme, one can discover the space of divinity within and also hold that space for others to easily join them there.
  • Raja Yoga - For those who are on the path of self empowerment of every aspect of them - mind, body, intellect and the soul.
  • Other esoteric disciplines (Hatha / Kundalini / etc) - They work on the body mind connection. The mind affects the body and the body affects the mind. These other disciplines work on this connetion to bring about a transformation in the individual.
Ultimately, since the purpose of yoga is one, all practitioners should necessarily try to incorporate the best practices from all the disciplines into their lives. An item when cooked in different houses will have the various ingredients in different proportions. But, ultimately all of them need to use all the ingredients. Similarly, Yoga is much larger than any one of the ingredients.

There is an urgent need to go beyond these superficial and narrow definitions of Yoga (yoga for fitness / weight loss etc) and really look at it the largest perspective of Yoga and align ourselves with it. In my opinion, unless this grand unifying purpose is discovered and deeply imbibed in our lives, it is not Yoga.


PS: A small write up I wrote as part of an assignment in my yoga teacher training course (slightly differs from the original)

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Why public transportation?

The most important reason why we should use public transportation is that it provides ample opportunities to be in touch with the sensitive parts of us. The countless beggars on Indian streets have mostly become mosquitoes to be swatted away by us, except for the occasional nonchalant flinging of a coin. When we use private transportation, we hardly come in any close proximity with them except for the occasional troublesome rendezvous at traffic signals. But, when we use public transportation, we have lot of opportunities to look at them into their eyes. It helps one tremendously to reflect upon the nature of reality they are witnessing and one cant but feel lucky about all the wonderful luxuries one takes so much for granted. This provides ample opportunities to develop the sensitive part of us, our hearts, for without such a well developed spiritual heart, we are as good as a corpse. When this heart develops, even a little, we start asking vitally important questions such as why there are so many underprivileged people in our society. These questions will come from our heart and we will hold ourselves accountable. We will ask ourselves about when was the last time we gave a starving urchin Rs. 100?

It also helps us to notice the state of vast majority of us. While taking personal transportation, we are mostly concerned with the chatter in our heads, almost totally in an unaware fashion. But, when we travel by public transportation, we come in touch with the external chatter that is going on all around us. The triviality and banality of most of these conversations becomes such a stark reality that we just cant escape them. What more, a little bit of honesty can immediately showcase to us how we also indulge in such banal discussions all the time. This can be a great transformative process. Another fantastic thing one notices is how people so desperately try to avoid eye contact in the buses. Why are we all so insecure? Why do we wear so many masks? Why are children able to look straight into the eye? There is benefit even in not listening to the rest. If we do get a seat, we can sit silently with our eyes closed but awake for the entire journey and that in itself is a fantastic meditative experience.

Coming to the yucky parta, public transportation in India is indeed over-crowded. Smelly arm pits and posionous gases, going by the name of perfumes and deodrants, will certainly make a big onslaught on our olfactory system. Not to mention the glares of fellow passengers when we stamp their feet accidentally. Nevertheless, its a fantastically transformative process to observe how our minds react everytime we are subject to even one such minor inconvenience. Most people who can avoid public transportation justify it to themselves on how inconvenient it is. But we fail to recollect that inconvenience is really a learned habit and can be unlearned easily (remember, for the ambanis, anything less than Antilia may be inconvenient).

Try this as often as possible!

Besides all these personal benefits, not to mention the lessening of personal stress due to cessation of driving in this mad Indian traffic, humanity as a whole stands to gain tremendously every time we take public transportation. Our precariouus civilization is totally dependent on oil and its supply is fast running out. When oil actually runs out, there is bound to be a period of total chaos, for we are dependent on everything from food to medicine on oil. Thereby it is extremely important to minimize its consumption thereby buying time for a more gradual shift into another way of living. In the meantime, it is very important for us to explore alternative lifestyles and livelihoods that are lighter on the planet, in terms of oil consumption and the concomitant pollution, and that are less violent by not supporting violent regimes around the globe even inadvertently (we do have a little bit share in the responsibility for autocratic and violent regimes in gulf countries as our oil guzzling life styles supply the oxygen to these regimes). In addition, one also contributes to the lessening of congestion of the roads in our cities. There are certainly such fantastic advantages to taking public transportation.

I totally understand that this is the perspective of a young and reasonably fit adult male in the Indian society who has the luxury of taking private transportation at will and whose livelihood does not depend on taking private transportation. The feeble and women certainly totally dont have it easy in Indian roads, especially in public modes of transport. Obviously, I am not suggesting everyone should immediately adopt what I am suggesting. The problem is primarily in our hearts as we dont take up responsibility for all of creation. When that changes, external change will commence as soon as possible, subject to external realities of course. The choices may appear hard and totally nonsensical at the outset. But, all transformative processes are like that. Consider the case of pregnancy. Its a lot of hard work for the woman - cutting away from favorite foods, lot of physical pain, many nights lost sleep, dependency on others etc. While a woman may crib at these things, a mother will not. When the woman looks at her kid smiling, all these troubles vanish into thin air. These difficulties are simply minor irritants along the path of the tranformation of a woman into a mother. Similarly, there may be irritants along the path of spiritual evolution, but for the individual who sees the worth in it, they will all be trivial. A simple change of taking public transportation can thus tremendously assist the all important transformation towards completion!

Friday, February 18, 2011

சிங்காரக் கண்ணனின் அற்புத சிரிப்பு

சிங்காரக் கண்ணே உன் அற்புத சிரிப்பாலே,
இறுதிப் பிரிவின் துயரையும் தீர்த்தாயடா!
ஒப்பாரி ஓய்ந்ததடா, புன்னகை மலர்ந்ததடா!
சித்தாந்தம் தீர்க்காததை, சித்தார்த்தன், நீ,
உன் ஓர் குரலில் தீர்த்தாயடா!

Oh loved one, with your miraculous smile,
you've cleansed even the pain of separation by death!
Laments have ceased, laughter has returned!
Where philosophy failed, Siddhartha,
your babble did the job!

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Aurobindo on powerful nations

Some writings of Aruobindo that I came across in the last few weeks. These were written more than a century ago and are as relevant today. Just replace European with modern indian and Indian with ancient indian in his writings!

It is not fear or respect that they awaken in my mind, these civilised superior nations. I see a little girl wearing a new frock and showing herself off to Mamma and all the world, unable to conceal her pride and delight in the thought that never was a frock so new and nice or a little girl so pretty,—never was and never will be! I think of a very small boy to whom somebody has given a very big cane—one can see him brandishing it, executing now and then an exultant war-dance, tormenting, tyrannising over and plundering of their little belongings all the smaller boys he can get within his cane's reach, not displeased if they show a little fight so that he can exhibit his heroic strength of arm by punishing them. And then he adorns himself with glittering Victoria crosses and calls on all his associates to admire his gallant and his daredevil courage. Sometimes it reminds me of an old man, a man very early old, still strong in his decrepitude, garrulous, well-informed, luxurious, arrogant, intelligent, still busy toddling actively from place to place, looking into this, meddling in that, laying down the law dogmatically on every point under the sun; and through it all the clutch already nearing the brain, the shaking of the palsy already foreshadowed in tremulous movement and uncertain nerve. Very true, Europe, your frock is the cleanest and newest, for the present, your stick the biggest, your war-dance a very frightening spectacle,—frightening even to yourselves—with Krupp and Mauser and machine gun what else should it be, you are indeed for a while the robust, enlightened oldster you seem. But afterwards. Well, afterwards there will be a newer frock, a bigger stick, a war-dance much more terrible and a real Titan grasping at the earth for his own instead of the sham.

Aurobindo on human civilization

Some writings of Aruobindo that I came across in the last few weeks. These were written more than a century ago and are as relevant today. Just replace European with modern indian and Indian with ancient indian in his writings!

Was life always so trivial, always so vulgar, always so loveless, pale and awkward as the Europeans have made it? This well-appointed comfort oppresses me, this perfection of machinery will not allow the soul to remember that it is not itself a machine.

Is this then the end of the long march of human civilisation, this spiritual suicide, this quiet petrifaction of the soul into matter? Was the successful businessman that grand culmination of manhood toward which evolution was striving? After all, if the scientific view is correct, why not? An evolution that started with the protoplasm and flowered in the ourang-outang and the chimpanzee, may well rest satisfied with having created hat, coat and trousers, the British Aristocrat, the American Capitalist and the Parisian Apache. For these, I believe, are the chief triumphs of the European enlightenment to which we bow our heads. For these Augustus created Europe, Charlemagne refounded civilisation, Louis XIV regulated society, Napoleon systematised the French Revolution. For these Goethe thought, Shakespeare imagined and created, St. Francis loved, Christ was crucified. What a bankruptcy! What a beggary of things that were rich and noble!

Europe boasts of her science and its marvels. But an Indian cannot content himself with asking like Voltaire, as the supreme question, “What have you invented?” His glance is at the soul; it is that into which he is accustomed to enquire. To the braggart intellect of Europe he is bound to reply, “I am not interested in what you know, I am interested in what you are. With all your discoveries and inventions, what have you become? Your enlightenment is great,—but what are these strange creatures that move about in the electric light you have installed and imagine that they are human?” Is it a great gain for the human intellect to have grown more acute and discerning, if the human soul dwindles?

But Science does not admit the existence of soul. The soul, it says, is only an organised republic of animalcules, and it is in the mould of that idea Europe has recast herself;—that is what the European nations are becoming, organised republics of animalcules,—very intelligent, very methodical, very wonderful talking and reasoning animalcules but still animalcules. Not what the race set out to be, creatures made in the image of the Almighty, gods that having fallen from heaven remember and strive to recover their heritage. Man in Europe is descending steadily from the human level and approximating to the ant and the hornet. The process is not complete but it is progressing apace, and if nothing stops the debacle, we may hope to see its culmination in this twentieth century. After all our superstitions were better than this enlightenment, our social abuses less murderous to the hopes of the race than this social perfection.

It is a very pleasant inferno they have created in Europe, a hell not of torments but of pleasures, of lights and carriages, of balls and dances and suppers, of theatres and cafés and music-halls, of libraries and clubs and Academies, of National Galleries and Exhibitions, of factories, shops, banks and Stock Exchanges. But it is hell all the same, not the heaven of which the saints and the poets dreamed, the new Jerusalem, the golden city. London and New York are the holy cities of the new religion, Paris its golden Paradise of Pleasure.

It is not with impunity that men decide to believe that they are animals and God does not exist. For what we believe, that we become. The animal lives by a routine arranged for him by Nature; his life is devoted to the satisfaction of his instincts bodily, vital and emotional, and he satisfies himself mechanically, by a regular response to the working of those instincts. Nature has regularised everything for him and provided the machinery. Man in Europe arranges his own routine, invents his own machinery, and adds to the needs of which he is a slave, the intellectual. But there will soon be no other difference.

System, organisation, machinery have attained their perfection. Bondage has been carried to its highest expression, and from a passion for organising external liberty Europe is slaying her spiritual freedom. When the inner freedom is gone, the external liberty will follow it, and a social tyranny more terrible, inquisitorial and relentless than any that caste ever organised in India, will take its place. The process has already begun. The shell of external liberty remains, the core is already being eaten away. Because he is still free to gratify his senses and enjoy himself, the European thinks himself free. He does not know what teeth are gnawing into the heart of his liberty.

Aurobindo on modern education

Some writings of Aruobindo that I came across in the last few weeks. These were written more than a century ago and are as relevant today.

A very remarkable feature of modern training which has been subjected in India to a reductio ad absurdum is the practice of teaching by snippets. A subject is taught a little at a time, in conjunction with a host of others, with the result that what might be well learnt in a single year is badly learned in seven and the boy goes out ill-equipped, served with imperfect parcels of knowledge, master of none of the great departments of human knowledge.

The old system was to teach one or two subjects well and thoroughly and then proceed to others, and certainly it was a more rational system than the modern. If it did not impart so much varied information, it built up a deeper, nobler and more real culture. Much of the shallowness, discursive lightness and fickle mutability of the average modern mind is due to the vicious principle of teaching by snippets. The one defect that can be alleged against the old system was that the subject earliest learned might fade from the mind of the student while he was mastering his later studies. But the excellent training given to the memory by the ancients obviated the incidence of this defect. In the future education we need not bind ourselves either by the ancient or the modern system, but select only the most perfect and rapid means of mastering knowledge.

In defence of the modern system it is alleged that the attention of children is easily tired and cannot be subjected to the strain of long application to a single subject. The frequent change of subject gives rest to the mind. The question naturally arises: are the children of modern times then so different from the ancients, and, if so, have we not made them so by discouraging prolonged concentration?... A child of seven or eight, and that is the earliest permissible age for the commencement of any regular kind of study, is capable of a good deal of concentration if he is interested. Interest is, after all, the basis of concentration. We make his lessons supremely uninteresting and repellent to the child, a harsh compulsion the basis of teaching and then complain of his restless inattention? The substitution of a natural self-education by the child for the present unnatural system will remove this objection of inability. A child, like a man, if he is interested, much prefers to get to the end of his subject rather than leave it unfinished. To lead him on step by step, interesting and absorbing him in each as it comes, until he has mastered his subject is the true art of teaching.

The mother-tongue is the proper medium of education and therefore the first energies of the child should be directed to the thorough mastering of the medium. Almost every child has an imagination, an instinct for words, a dramatic faculty, a wealth of idea and fancy. These should be interested in the literature and history of the nation. Instead of stupid and dry spelling and reading books, looked on as a dreary and ungrateful task, he should be introduced by rapidly progressive stages to the most interesting parts of his own literature and the life around him and behind him, and they should be put before him in such a way as to attract and appeal to the qualities of which I have spoken. All other study at this period should be devoted to the perfection of the mental functions and the moral character. A foundation should be laid at this time for the study of history, science, philosophy, art, but not in an obtrusive and formal manner. Every child is a lover of interesting narrative, a hero-worshipper and a patriot. Appeal to these qualities in him and through them let him master without knowing it the living and human parts of his nation's history. Every child is an inquirer, an investigator, analyser, a merciless anatomist. Appeal to those qualities in him and let him acquire without knowing it the right temper and the necessary fundamental knowledge of the scientist. Every child has an insatiable intellectual curiosity and turn for metaphysical enquiry. Use it to draw him on slowly to an understanding of the world and himself. Every child has the gift of imitation and a touch of imaginative power. Use it to give him the ground-work of the faculty of the artist. Teaching by snippets must be relegated to the lumber-room of dead sorrows.

Monday, February 07, 2011

Bhakthi

Selfless action is the highest expression of bhakthi!

Saturday, February 05, 2011

Mind in time

Trees sway in wind; likewise,
mind moves in time!
Unaffected,
rest in peace
as the witness; and thereby,
let action flow unattached!

Thursday, February 03, 2011

அனைத்துளிருக்கும் ஒன்று

நாமரூப மாயையில் மூழ்காமல்,
அனைத்துளிருக்கும் ஒன்றை உணர்ந்தால்,
மால் காணா அடியை,
நெஞ்சில் நீங்கா ஜோதியாய் உணர்வாய்!

Not lost in the maya of name and form,
If you see the one inside everything,
The feet which Vishnu could not find,
You may realize as the light within yourself!

Realizing Emptiness

Realizing emptiness is a penetrating insight, not a divine privilege!