Summer in Solitude

Almost two months have passed since I’ve been home. The life is very relaxed here. I m always seated with a novel or am watching movies of the world. Just a peep outside my window gives me immense pleasure when I look down at the green lake which is sometimes glittering in the sun or is covered with the haunting fog. The green mountains can be seen all around. Now that the monsoon has arrived, the place seems more enchanting than ever. The fog filters through the mountains, covers the lake, it even approaches me in my room if the window is open. I call my room ‘A Room With A View’. Whilst I am seated in my bed or chair I keep on admiring the beauty of my large room with carpets and candles and bookcases and classical paintings.
Then the words of true wisdom reverberate in my mind, ‘there shall be no attachment to the worldly things, for clinging to them will bring no good’. I see all my books scattered around me, some in the bed many in the big bookcases. I feel elated but again a voice calls from within, ‘this knowledge is good, but understand your inner wisdom, understand your Self’.
In these summer vacations away from the heat of Delhi, in the sylvan surroundings of Nainital, I have again lived a life of inner ecstasy. When my old pals who also reside in Delhi tell me that they like Delhi better than their hometown, I am baffled, am awestruck. I wonder how they can like that life which is so far away from the natural world, which is having all the gross elements of the material world.
These holidays were spent by me roaming with an old friend of mine in the woods of the hills of Nainital, the Tiffin-top hill and the difficult climb of the Camel’s Back hill. In these walks again I was lost in marvel and wondered at the spiritual nature of man represented by the beauty of nature. This all is within us. Other than roaming around I have been reading the Russian novels and Roman history and Greek mythology and have been watching some really beautiful movies. I saw ‘My Fair Lady’, (what a lovely movie it is), Shakespeare in Love, and among others the adaptations of various novels and books.
The Russian novels enchant me more than anything. They are so poetic, surrounded by the natural world of snow, of woods and at the same time a study in human nature, especially Dostoevsky’s literature. The merriment and the winter, so very unique and so very charming. I read the Father and Sons by Ivan Turgenev and also his short stories A Hunter’s Sketches. Almost 20 days have passed and I have not been able to finish Tolstoy’s War and Peace, it is over thousand pages long but still one never feels tired while reading it, one wants to go on and on with it. The characters Pierre, Natasha, Prince Andrei, Princess Mary and so on are all very life-like and appealing. Half of my day I am in Russia and half in Nainital. Besides these I have been reading Vivekananda and An Autobiography of A Yogi of Pramhansa Yogananda.
Now as the time is approaching of my return to Delhi, I am feeling more and more reluctant to go back. But one can’t help it can one? Time will come and go and it is fleeting still. One knows not what life has in store for him. With the grace of god everything goes on, whatever we may think, and in whatever way it does that’s the best.

SHAKING HANDS WITH DEATH

BY—AKSHAY GURURANI
4th November, 2009.

Delhi at night is not a safe place. There are thieves, murderers and all sorts of criminals aboard. If you are roaming around alone then there is a greater possibility of your coming across them, in this city of highest crime rate in India. Not only that, there have been some very mysterious occurrences here. Once a very strange giant monkey-like creature was haunting the whole city in the night, and one day it disappeared as mysteriously as it had come without any trace. People today wonder over the ‘Monkey-Man’s’ case and think was it true or not?
If you go and sit in the dead of the night on the banks of polluted river Yamuna that flows through Delhi, which you will rarely do for it is neither a scene of beauty nor pleasure but you’ll be greeted with the smell of stench and human waste. One foggy evening in the winter Arvind, a student of Delhi University in his depressed state pursued to go down and end his life by jumping in river Yamuna. He was tall, lean, dark-skinned fellow, in his third year of Physics honors course. He was getting lower and lower grades and knew in the upcoming exams he would fail and added to this tragedy was that his girlfriend had deserted him for his best friend. He felt really done with and decided that living this life was of no use, he should die, but death would not come on its own you will have to invite it. Everyone knows death knocks at one’s door when uninvited and it rarely comes with an invitation.
So such was the condition of our dear Arvind, he in half dazed, half conscious state continued to move ahead towards the sacred river in his motorbike. As he approached the bank of the river he parked his bike and moved silently contemplating about the step he was going to take. He had lost his father two years back, he had no siblings and his mother was living alone in a small town in Bihar. He thought about her, but to him his condition seemed to be the worst in the whole world. He now dropped himself in the wild growing grass in the bank. He closed his eyes and sat for a few minutes like that, without any thought in his mind. Then he opened his eyes and saw the swelling river few meters ahead of him.
He heard wailings from somewhere nearby, where was it coming from why should he care? But it seemed to grow louder; he got a shudder and stood up walking as if in a trance towards the sounds. Then as he moved ahead he saw a small cluster of people sitting nearby, a body of a man lay near them who seemed to have drowned, there was a woman and her two children sitting there huddled together, all crying. The woman was wailing loudly and beating her breast, Arvind on seeing the situation dashed towards the body he saw a little life in man, forgetting his own condition and himself and as he knew how to save a man in such condition, being the student of science, he bent over the man and pressed his chest again and again and blew air in his mouth. He saw the man coming to life, his limbs softening, water sprouting out of his mouth and his opening his eyes and looking around as a new born baby. Arvind saw the woman crying out with gratitude and hope, the children jumping on their father.
The man staring from one to the other and then taking them all in his arms, he cried profoundly. Arvind realized the depth of the deed he had done. He looked at them and silent tears flowed freely down his cheeks. The man with the new life, the woman too with a new life and the children with hopeful futures looked up to him with such gratitude and divine eyes which made him feel proud. The man embraced him with full strength that was left in him and sobbed; the woman gave him all the blessings of the world for a bright future and happy life. Life struck him as lightning. His own condition in his life didn’t seem anymore as a scruple; it seemed to him that he was in a fairly good position after he listened to the account of the man, whose life he had just saved.
Everyman either thinks he is the worst or the best. He is never able to see his true self, never. He is always living in delusion.
The Story of The Man

The man Rajeev worked for a company, where he had been falsely accused of fraud by one of his senior staff members. Rajeev knew of a bribery case of that man, and so he wanted Rajeev out of his way. Rajeev’s life was going on fine with full vigour; he had a beautiful wife, two loving children, a fine home. What else does a man seek in today’s modern world? Yes and a good bank balance and a sedan to drive too. But although Rajeev was as ambitious as any man, he was honest and full of conscience, which so few people have remained to be now. On falsely being accused of fraud, Rajeev was hurt to innermost fragment of his soul, he drove back home, silently seated himself on the sofa, and watched T.V. blankly. His wife sensed something was wrong and asked him what was agitating him. He related to her the whole story, in few days Rajeev lost his job and depression was overtaking him. He felt forsaken and lonely even in the company of his family, he lost interest in them, his reputation was gone, his job was gone so one day he decided his life should also go, but he wasn’t ready for that yet, he thought of a mode to die. Poison he wasn’t able to consume as he had heard that the death by poison is very painful, he didn’t had a revolver to fire himself, he didn’t think of jumping down from a building, as he couldn’t imagine his bloodied bruised body lying in front of his wife and children. From within he didn’t want to die but he didn’t want to live this sort of life too.
So one evening when the fog was thick he made his way in his sedan to the river to drown himself, that method of killing oneself seemed fine to him, the current of the water will carry his body to some distant place, at least away from Delhi, where he had come years back leaving his home behind, as so many other people do, to seek fortune and it was a sacred river wasn’t it although now it is more the opposite but it doesn’t matter. His wife saw him leave the house in a gloomy mood she too drove behind him in her car bringing her two small kids along. She knew in her heart he was going to harm himself and on calling his number she found it to be switched off. She was able to follow him to the last point but in the last red light lost track of his car and when she reached the point where she saw his car parked, he was already half wading in the river, she jumped out of the car and rushed shouting to him to stop.
He turned around to see and on finding his wife and children whom he had always so dearly loved, there was a sudden urge from within him to live, to live again, but by this time he was deep in the river and half drowning, it was through the fog and water he made their figured. He tried to swim towards the bank, his family, but water had filed his lungs he wasn’t able to breathe anymore he fainted but as close to the bank of the river. Maya, his wife was able to pull him out somehow, but she saw him to be lifeless, she wailed and moaned what could be done. So much injustice why did they ever live, why were they ever born, so many questions were raised in her mind, her mind had never worked so much before. She was a working lady, her husband had even left her plenty of money, but it all seemed so futile without him. The two kids what about them, so young and fatherless. How dearly had she loved him and how passionately he loved her.
But then while she was in this state of skepticism and turmoil. A man sprang from nowhere and he was doing something with her husband’s body. She wanted to resist him but she let him be. Few moments later her husband coughed and again life was in him. She thanked the lord and blessed this young man to the maximum from the core of her heart and then after a while she drove her husband to the house, and the young man drove the second car following her. The young man slept at their place that night. The two men exchanged their stories and finally laughed out that thankfully they are telling their stories to one another in substance and body or else by now in their ghostly forms they would have exchanged it. Both were happy to be alive. Even on inviting death to embrace themselves it didn’t made them its host.
The End

Rajeev moved back to his hometown in Rajasthan and with his wife works in an NGO that works for the welfare of the orphans and widows. His two children have grown up a bit and love their parents as tenderly as ever. Rajeev is very content with his new life, living among his people and serving them.
Arvind has become quite a spiritual being. He has now completed his masters in physics and is on his way to becoming a college lecturer in his hometown In Bihar, his mother is very happy to live with her only child and in a place of her people and not in some faraway place where she would have been confined to four walls of her house and her son would have become a distant being although living with her. But living between her people there is a belonging which her son also came to realize she knows not how. She has no knowledge of her son’s designs of that night and it is good she doesn’t know. Arvind has never entered in any relationship after that and he firmly believes in arranged marriage, although his views were quite different few years back. And talking about the incident of that night Arvind is not sure whether it was true or not, like the famous case of the mysterious monkey-man.

MY GLOBE

This space is mine now, a globe of mine where i'll post my thoughts and views to share among you!!