Note to self

Since I landed the new job, I have been meeting interesting people. I have met an ex-pickpocket who told me that in their trade the thumbnails are grown slightly long for that extra grip; a gang of boy-thieves who rob travelers trying to grab a wink or two in the grounds off CST Terminus and who all unanimously lied to me that they were planning to go straight; a man who had been written off for dead by his relatives to grab his land in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh and who then struggled his way back to life and then started an association of dead people; a girl who has a genetic disorder which is trying to kill her but who is refusing to give up no matter what despite a brain surgery and a liver transplant; a man who had been abused for a decade as a child but now uses that trauma to do acts of kindness expecting nothing in return; a tribal woman from Gujarat who saw a pamphlet and then took a train to Bihar where 100 people were walking 100 kilometres in the state’s interior and in which I was one of them…you get the drift. What concerns me is my inability to empathise with any of them, of being a party to that human condition which they are all experiencing in the full. All I feel is curiosity and that is enough for the journalist, but for the writer, curiosity will take him nowhere near the truths that he must reproduce in the worlds that he should create. I find myself near such truths and completely unable to comprehend it, much alone reproduce it, much alone create worlds with it. Note to self: send imagination for servicing.

As is said, has been said and always will be said: every seed sown will sprout and at some point, in that ground where it germinated, there will then be a tree with branches, trunk, roots, fruits and leaves. If you have sown that seed and then watered the soil, that tree will come up. Once the mighty tree is before you, it is pointless to repent that this was not the one you wanted, that you erred in the sowing, that that was ignorance, that that was youth, that that was passion, that that was a delusion of the mind, that that was not you. For you did plant that seed and once you unleashed cause, what could effect do but follow. You will never be forgiven for it. That is truth.

Beware, therefore, of what you sow. You plant a seed every infinitesimal moment. Seed a weed and you will get desolation. Seed a queen-of-the-night and on some distant day, you will sleep amidst calming fragrances. That is the redemption which flows from your present. That is the only redemption given to you.

grace

Grace is man in his piety, given unto him not by god, but by that core in his soul, which he willed out from the storms which were unleashed unto him and which, instead of evading, he befriended and fostered because he knew that these were ordeals let loose, not to test him but to break him and that was something he would not do: to bend and to suffer in vain. From that unbending will he wrote his redemption and then his salvation. Man became free and in becoming free he gave grace unto himself.

Man began first and in the beginning he was one and there was no another, man alone in the wide tundra of nothingness, impregnable though inky blackness enveloped him from end to end. To left and right and up and down and east and north and south and west, there was nothing, except him and barrenness but he would not give in unto that desolation. He carries that loneliness in his soul even today but into that loneliness too, he has not given in and from it too he has conceived grace.

Man then created the world. He cleaved open his self and unfurled the elements and then split them, from which fission universes exploded and then there were galaxies and stars and planets and many suns blazing from whose light he harnessed energies and then used those furies to breathe life into planets. He watered the primeval pool from which sprung acids and bacteria and amoeba and plants and fishes and reptiles and mammals and animals of many complexions and lengths. Life after life after life he went on enumerating and making, until, like god before, he had to do nothing and could remain at a distance watching with deep compassion as the many wondrous things he had made fertilised and replicated themselves. Worlds unbidden sprung up within worlds and benign and benevolent man evoked his grace and gave it unto each of his creations and this grace was reflected onto him too.