Walking-The-Road-Writing-The-Way

It was our day to Mt.Titlis.  We had to take the Swiss Rail from Lucerne to Engelberg from where we could go up Titlis. As expected, like the immutable fact of every second and every hour, or more like Swiss clockwork, there were trains leaving for Engelberg, as we had been tonelessly informed by the man/boy behind our hotel desk ’ at every hour, 10 minutes past the hour ’. We were on time to take the next one leaving in 20 minutes.  We walked all the way down to board one of the carriages at the farther end of the platform. We were keen to give a miss to the noise and crowd of Indians who were  travelling in groups and in joint families. Bad combos both.  We expected them to fill into the carriages nearer the beginning of the platform. Well, we were only partially successful, but even then, it was a relief. Ok, I will stop this typical national self loathing of the travelling Indian and get on to the encounter or rather the connection, that happened. The train glide...

All of Life is Yoga A journey begins much before the first step is taken. It begins when the first thought about it enters your conscious mind. But at another level it may have begun much before that, when the seed of the journey is implanted into one’s sub-consciousness. This seed is nourished by various circumstances, thoughts, ideas, over a very long period. May be even years. And one fine day, due to some subtle neural connection it sprouts and assumes a conscious meaning. It then takes on an conscious life. After that, it is only a matter of time before the physical journey manifests itself. My journey began much before I actually took to the road. Quite literally. Mine was a journey of inner cultivation. And I had been on that journey for a long time. Subconsciously I don’t know when the seed to this journey was implanted, but I am sure it was a very long time ago. With a lot of reading. Over a lot of writing. After  a lot of self-enquiry. What is the purpose of this life? It...

Dogs cross the road, cattle cross the road, but HAVE YOU SEEN A FISH CROSS A ROAD? Saw an amazing thing today morning when I had gone for a jog. I saw a small fish wriggling in the middle of the road. Even before I could figure out how it could have landed in the middle of the road, it oddly seemed to be wriggling towards the other side with purpose. I was amazed at this sight but doubt-fulll about whether this could be true. I started taking the video with my mobile but I could not do a good job, especially at the end. You watch it and figure out whether the fish was fully aware of what it was doing and was purposefully crossing over. But even then, I wonder how he wriggled out of the puddle on the other side of the road in the first place! I had to help it into the puddle at the end. It was very slippery and heavier than I had expected. It went in with a splash and in a flash it was gone. :-)

If ever there is a story of wild living spirit set in a cold wilderness, then this is it. “ A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness - a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild - the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.” With this, Jack London immediately plunges the reader into essence of the cold wilderness of the north.  But the effect is not one of being dazed or numbed by it’s cold or remoteness,  but rather the opposite, one’s senses are excited to a sense of a thrill. He then proceeds straight into the deadly  pursuit of humans,...

In a dark moonless midnight, two exhausted men, harnessed to each other, grappled below an icy peak, with just an ice axe holding them from a fall to death in an icy abyss below. Their mind dazed and hallucinating due to lack of oxygen and the air freezing their tongue when they opened their mouth to gasp for breath. Boulders of ice broke off above and hurtled past them as they shuffled and dodged weakly. They knew it was a matter of time before a ice boulder would knock them down. They had given up hope long back. They prayed silently with bowed heads to the mountain goddess. She answered soon. An ice boulder or rock knocked on the head of the lower man and batted him off the snow. The weight of his body on the harness peeled the man above from the slope. Both men hurtled down towards the black darkness of the icy abyss below. They wondered on what they had done to get the mountain goddess so angry. They wondered on how they could have got themselves into this...

Capt. Ramsey : You do qualify your remarks. If someone asked me if we should bomb Japan, a simple "Yes. By all means sir, drop that fucker, twice!" I don't mean to suggest that you're indecisive, Mr. Hunter. Not at all. Just, uh... complicated. 'course, that's the way the Navy wants you. Me, they wanted simple. Hunter : Well, you certainly fooled them, sir. Ramsey :  [chuckles]  Be careful there, Mr. Hunter. It's all I've got to rely on, being a simple-minded son of a bitch. Rickover gave me my command, a checklist, a target and a button to push. All I gotta know is how to push it, they tell me when. They seem to want you to know why. Hunter : I would hope they'd want us all to know why, sir. Ramsey : At the Naval War College it was metallurgy and nuclear reactors, not 19th-century philosophy. "War is a continuation of politics by other means."  Von Clausewitz . Hunter : I think, sir, that what he was actually trying to say was a little ...

Physical Pain A way to true penance I can remember being aghast, seeing the rows and rows of devotees hanging by their backs. They were all suspended from a leaning pole, by hooks pierced on to the skin of their backs. Face down, arms spread, and in an angle as if ready for flight into the skies. I can remember the images of devotees with small spears pierced through their cheeks. They all seemed as if from some other planet. I can remember the images of devotees pulling the temple-chariot  by the ropes tied on to the hooks which were pierced on to their backs. As a kid I remember feeling shocked and numb. These images of self-crafted pain became imprinted on to my memory undelibally. Over time, these images somehow became a part of my inner imagery of this worldly life itself: images of living that I had encountered in my life for which I had no answers. To me these images of pain, became a part of a collage of images that symbolically represented life and its sufferings that...

TAKE 5 Take a break! The world has turned topsy turvy Life seems reduced to a senseless ritual Man seems to have  turned against man It seems a pure jungle. There is an ignorance and perversion that seems to have permeated every moment and space of our existence The very air we breathe seems polluted with this ignorance and perversion. 'Society' has failed us, 'Government' has betrayed us, 'Civilization' seems to be leading to some perverse reality, 'Knowledge' has only pitched and divided man aganist man 'Relationships' have lost meaning, leading to estrangement 'Religion' seems dogmatic 'Philosophy' seems escapist. The only assured thing seems to be an inglorious and sorrowful end as ‘innocent victims’, at best to some natural calamity, or may be to some ‘human-error’, or most likely  as victims to the wantom perversiveness of man against man. Man against life. Is there any hop...

To all Bird / Nature lovers, I would like to recommend a book, 'The Rites of Autumn' by Dan O'brien- #theritesofautumn. It is about how a peregrine falcon born in captivity is nurtured and prepared to get back to wilderness and survive on its own. It is a poignant story of man, a bird and the landscape.  I think it is a book that will also be therapeutic to the malaise of our times  :-) (noisy-world-on-our-face kind of malaise.) I first read it more than 20 years back and I am re-reading it again since I desperately felt the need for the therapy myself. It is a very old publication and is available on amazon.com. If anybody is interested in buying and reading it I request they dont read any other review since I feel it might lessen the impact/feelings that would come from the full reading of the book. I assure you it is a great book for nature lovers. I think it is available free in PDF also - but with the caveat that PDF would spoil the special charm of this st...

My MADurai-  Temples, Vadais' and blaring speakers !!! “enna ooruda ithu ! che!”  A typical Madurai morning morns to blaring speakers..for some godly festival or to an inauguration of some tea-kadai!!! Nothing new, this happens almost everyday. -Something is celebrated everyday, and everyday the speakers blare somewhere in the neighbourhood. That’s the only way this city knows to celebrate. Sound. Noise. “enna ooruda ithu ! che!” Correction - Madurai is no city, just a bursting, bumbling, over populated village. And this place has got temples in every direction you see, and in all sizes. This place is not just ‘a Temple city’ as it is traditionally known, but truly a city of Temples. And the Gods revel in blaring speakers.   Today it is goddess Saraswathy, tomorrow it may be the street-corner Mari-amman, and the day after that it might be one ‘muni-samy’. I think that all the Gods that might have been conceived in the entire universe in its entire history...

Information vs Knowlegde 10.33 pm 16th Saturday 2013  The actual real experience of getting to know any information was the experience of gaining knowledge. So if a person had information then it meant he had gained some valuable knowledge and a perspective on that information and in a way on life too. That was before the Internet and the flood of information pouring out of it. Now everybody and anybody has any rare and all information easily available to him. The click and tap being the only effort and experience by which that person gets that information. No knowledge, no valuable effort put forth or experience gained. Just information on which he/ she has no perspective or insight.Sad, in a way.

Chapter I Walking - The - Road Writing - The - Way  Introduction & Overview Walking - The - Road is both what it literally means and also a metaphor. It is the ritual of physically walking to a holy place, a pilgrimage, as well as a metaphor for the inner spiritual progress to self-realisation. It is both an inner as well as an outer pilgrimage. Thus It takes us to a holy place on both dimensions. It is a journey between two different dimensions. It begins from a physical place but its final destination is a spiritual one. Writing - The - Way is both what it literally means  and also a metaphor too. It is the ritual of writing about the external journeys that one takes to places of worship, as well as a metaphor for the way of writing or articulating one’s way to inner progress, to new knowledge and to self-realisation. In my case it has been the metaphorical meaning of both the terms that have been my deeper concern and occupation. In fact I could call them my wa...

I meditate, I sit here, think about my day, my life, the day's happenings, the problems, the questions, the doubts, the fears, my wife, my kuttyson, all of this.....and wondering ...changing my perspective and thinking about my past.....it's happenings.......and about everybody's life.......the larger world....the mess, the maze, ......and then turn my mind upward......the skies....the cosmos....the whole universe.......space, light, fire, stars, galaxies, light years, and all that is happening in this enormous, unfathomable space.....all that has happened......all the change, all the movement.....all the stuff, ....and then try to connect myself with these cosmic happenings......am I supposed to be connected to all of that? .....the same stuff....somehow ! .? The same stuff is in me? Runs in me? Moves in me? Made of and from the same stuff ???!!! Mind blowing to imagine ...trying to connect my mind with all that space stuff....so far...so huge.....somehow so so alien !!! ....