Cogitation

 Just saw a video of a dog and remembered cruelty man metes out to trusting animals. Another video from some years back, of two doctor interns throwing a dog down from a building top. The one I just saw was of a black dog with her mouth duct taped...cruel!  Why do people commit such heartless acts? What delight can there be in that?  We have dogs. Having them for fifteen years has brought me closer to them and I realise how noble they are. An animal is noble. Personally, my dogs have helped me become slightly more accepting, a tad kinder and sympathetic to other life-forms. I have come to realise that we are all one family. My dogs taught me that. And they respond to kindness with all their liveliness. They dance the joie de vivre! Perhaps they are here only to speak the language of kindness, but we don't always understand that language.  Sometimes kindness and mercy have shape and form that are difficult to fit into our notions about those noble sentiments. If the...

"Wish I could hug her for one last time" "Yes. But You are far away. I'll do it for You. She'll understand... hopefully" "I'll do it for You" "She'll understand, hopefully" Are these things we tell ourselves or to one another when there is nothing You can  do to stop someone from dying? Dying, the final departure, is as momentous as birth of a child. Then all there is, is memory: the time we spent here on earth, made our little history. And then one day we say goodbye ourselves.  We bade goodbye to Lily yesterday.  I am happy that she doesn't have to suffer her blindness, her traumas, her many physical difficulties, her pains and aches. But something wrings at my heart that I will never be able to hug that being in that gossamer poodle body.  It had been decided that our fifteen year old poodle, Lily, had had enough of earthly existence. She'd got bad treatment in the pound before she was one year old, She survived four su...

Freedom is...  freedom — " to establish the right to dare anything ". It is an outcry of some dreamer.  Law is, in the final analysis, a flawed aggregate of what at a given time is considered to be the structure which is conducive to harmonious co-existence between people. It works more or less but in order to make it work, the individual freedom is curbed. Absolute freedom, if there be such a thing, is subjected to a conditional provision that is allowable only in proportion to the tenets which are believed to be the best suitable structure of Law. Jurisprudence itself is subjected to reasonable objectives & given principles and they are listed in a Constitution of a nation. Whatever falls out of its purview is deemed unconstitutional or illegal, therefore punishable. However, Freedom under the threat of punishment is not freedom at all! However, this pattern (ideally) extends sympathy to the weak. Law professes to provide equal right to all, equally. But it can only pro...

My screen showed a W'app message. I checked. It was from a near–forgotten mate in college. It said that a person known to us had died. He was not exactly a friend yet not just an acquaintance, a fellow pretty senior to us. He had died today. Let's call him 'D'.  The last time I passed his quiet presence was when he had taken a vow of silence. He, I was told, had stopped speaking to people on a whim. He was a lecturer at my old college, The Goa College of Art.  I wondered how he delivered his lectures what with the VoS. That, they told me, he does just as fine as he did. That was a relief!  I knew his family a bit - his always smiling mother, his monobrowed sister & his older brother.  One day his brother simply left home, leaving his two children, wife and parents. No one knows where he went.  I had met his father when the old man was alive. A brahmin, he used to practice astrology. They were not well off.  So not jeopardizing his source of regular earn...

 My understanding of fidelity and idealism is increasingly blurred. Heretofore my understanding of it was that it was most visible when everything around you seemed to rise in your face like a tsunami and you stood there, empty handed, with no other defence except your conviction. Tact & diplomacy lost importance in the hour of a non negotiable need to speak out. You are an idealist precisely when You cannot afford it! You have a noble cause and no will to compromise. That to me was what being idealistic was. I'm not sure if it holds true anymore.  Today adaptation seems to have replaced idealism. Compromise appears to be the safest option if we want to live in our insane society!  Of course, everyone has some cause or other that he cherishes. But when that cause is merely to survive , you rest assured that the spirit of man is breaking. If the ultimate sense of living is to wake up and go about the business of gathering food or means to acquire food & shelter. Th...

 August has a peculiar feel about it for me. Perhaps not every August but this one did feel like a descent from high, down. Like a Ferris lifts you up to its extreme vertical point above, the tipping point, and then the descent begins. At this juncture there is a perverse sensation of a jumble of feelings ––of thrill, fear, excitement and what not! This feeling is both the cause of attraction and a dread of the ferris wheel. It is so undescribable that till today I am unable to say whether I am attracted to the wheel or repulsed by it.  Well, this August was like a jumble before a descent.  August 15th is a reverent date for me. India, my country, finally could determine the course of Her destiny having shaken off the Yoke of the British administered mis-rule. 15.08.1947. I believe that the phenomenon of freedom of India from the colonial clutches is one of the best things to have happened, not just to the people of India but the world. There are two conditions which need...