When the day seems hardened
by mechanical work, deadlines
and tough choices…
When you’re forced
to give your all to the present
with no time to revisit old memories…
When pauses leave you
feeling guilty and you fail
to see in them a gift of reconnection…
When your day is made more efficient
with the shortest route suggestions on Uber
and AI thinking, reading, and summarizing for you…
Remember a song.
Remember its lyrics and revel in its melody
Forget deadlines and efficiency. Live.
When you build a home
Is that all you build?
Or, in building it
Do you also build perseverance
And discipline, and character?
Do you finally find your faith
That thing that religion
Tried to unsuccessfully teach you
Through indoctrination…
Books and institutions that deliver knowledge
Are designed to bring forth the past to the present.
So that you may build your future
On the foundations of wisdom.
However, building a home
Teaches you lessons in real time.
You learn to create rhythms instead of systems.
You learn that love is presence
And that presence is work.
When I talk of building a home
Know that I also mean
That whatever you build is a home.
In building it, you come to fully live.
In it, you encounter your fears
In it, you realize your strength
In it, you understand
That identity is what you may gather
But your self is what you will find.
If one
Gets only half a rupee worth
For every rupee spent
What is being lost
Is a real value in favour of a notional one.
You wonder why
You’re dispensable even where you contribute
Or why your voice gets drowned in echoes
Or why change- once life altering
Has been reduced to the prostitution of trend.
You question why
You should bother with setting high personal standards
When public standards have fallen to an all time low.
Or why the qualifications required to build a life
Make cleverness more important than integrity.
You can see
That all of humanity is now subsumed
Within the logic of the economy.
Value has moved from what you possess
To what you’re able to acquire and gain.
We perversely celebrate
The destruction of human values as progress
The notional as the real
The machine as the master
And enslavement as freedom.
What are you testing through life?
Whether what passes as truth
Is indeed true?
What if what you seek as knowledge
Only remains a theory… a pleasing perspective?
What would it take for your search to wane?
A health scare? Financial troubles?
Loss? Boredom? Purposelessness?
What if these are not as trivial and as fleeting
As an inspired perspective often makes them out to be?
What if despite being false and unreal
They are more powerful than your own weak faith?
What if this grand quest for truth
Is nothing but a false hope framed by the very
Premise by which you have framed the world?
Is truth something we find?
Or, is truth a realization we arrive to?
Let your frames- worthy as they may be- crash and shatter!
See what remains.
The uncreated and the undestroyed must be true.
It comes as no surprise that we now crave
Slowness, real connection, fulfilment and meaning
Even as we work the grind for all the artifice we’ve created–
Modern myths of success, networks as social capital
And speed and efficiency as competencies and calibre.
Somewhere along the way we corrupted our logic
We misconstrued freedom as unchecked liberty.
Power as that which usurps authority by ‘rules’.
Leadership as that which pushes and shoves.
And discourse that is shaped by dogma and dishonesty.
We’ve now reached the end of civilization as we know it.
A future awaits the directions we must take today.
We are fated for a destiny we have carved for ourselves.
We must ask ourselves: what are we upholding?
What are we sustaining? What are we creating and why?
Not because we have the power to change the course of events
But because in deliberation we are empowered to sustain the good.
We pause. We wait. We listen. We slow down.
We allow ourselves to be recreated;
To be redeemed and reformed.
The collapse we are anticipating- will it bring us relief?
Or regret? Or will we feel a sense of retribution?
Will we be affected or liberated?
What lessons will we learn
From the transgressions and hubris of humanity?
In order to learn the new, we may have to unlearn the old.
We may have to unplug from the virtual reality of the world
And relearn how to exist- simply, faithfully and irrevocably.
We may have to learn that reality exists, and it needs to be read
Not via thought, but in and through meditation.
As humans, we are challenged everyday.
We live in a world where it’s easier to learn
Lessons of disrespect, domination and control
Than those of kindness, love and compassion.
Power today has little authority
And is vested with the obnoxious.
We’ve begun to believe
That humans are despicable
An inconvenient cost factor in a world
Where everything is evaluated
In terms of profit and loss
And as such, must be managed and controlled.
Our intelligence has narrowed
And so have our hearts.
We refuse to feel lest we be perceived
As being weak and fallible.
We merely function in the world today
We have forgotten the art of living.
The world is no longer free
Humanity has delusionally fragmented itself
And needs unsustainable wealth, power and control
To save the few at the cost of all.
We’re enslaved by our beliefs and conveniences
And by the false promises we’re sold.
We’re no longer a globe of wonder and myth
We’ve reshaped the world into infrastructure
That serves agendas of domination.
We’ve sold our dreams to this nightmare of reality
Where fictions have their basis in fact.
Numbers, I’m told, do not lie.
The memories
Of the desires I carried
Are still vivid in my mind.
But memory is a ghost
That can no longer
Engage the present.
It just lives on
Like the relic of an entity
That once was.
One can remember it
Perhaps even taste
Its bittersweetness.
But in order
To live and love today
I must be free of my yesterdays.
I must ask
Do I still want now
What I had longed for then?
And I must have the courage
To step out of a story
That narrates my life to me.
I must close the book
I must reclaim my authorship
And write what remains unwritten.
And what after you became
Who you had dreamed of being?
Did the dream become your reality?
Or did it insist that you must remain asleep?
One has to awaken to Reality.
It doesn’t move along the road
Of your dreams and desires
It was. It is . It will be. It doesn’t become.
So all that grand standing…
All that effort to change… to achieve…to acquire…
All that energy consumed by your ambition…
What happened to it all?
Did it convert to meaning?
Did it give you the reins to your joy?
Did your commanding stature work in the face of sorrow?
Did you experience contentment and bliss?
Did your work free you from delusion?
Did it liberate you from your thoughts?
Did you find love in youth and beauty?
Did you find true friends in fame and power?
We strive to become
Because we don’t know how to be.
That which is simple is made complicated
Because we refuse to live with Reality.
What absences do you feel?
What do you feel
Is missing from your life?
What presences are you ignoring?
What are you refusing to see
That patiently awaits your attention?
While life must be lived
And its pains and pleasures experienced;
Life’s beauty lies in being read
In being noticed and beheld.
Knowledge is a gain
That comes to those
Who sincerely seek it.
Books hold stories, theories
And philosophies.
On their own
They’re not knowledge.
Experiences too,
Are granted to all
But on their own
They don’t yield knowledge.
Knowledge is an invocation.
For knowledge to enlighten
There must first be
An awareness of darkness.
There must be acceptance
That one does not know.
There must be a question…
There must be wonder…
There must be the recognition
That Existence is the greatest teacher
But to Existence one must go.
She will not come to you
At a scheduled hour.
Have you ever wondered
What the trees know?
Or the wind?
Or waters that travel
Fearlessly across lands
To reach the vastness of the ocean?
What knowledge do they hold?
What knowledge holds them?
And do they ‘know’ about it?
Or is their knowledge of a different type?
Must knowledge be about mastery?
Does its value lie in its saleability?
What value does understanding have?
Must we know how to survive above all?
Or, must we know what it means to give
And how to sacrifice, and how to die
For the sake of something greater?
That is what is worthy of seeking
How the ordinary is so rich
With promise; seemingly simple
Yet so phenomenal.
So self-contained and yet so giving.
So weak, yet so strong.
Knowledge is important
So that you don’t waste your life becoming
That which you never were.
Wit. Wisdom. Wonder... 