Cogitation

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...