When I saw her!

When I saw her!

n     By G. Manjusainath

          The grief of losing my father, who passed away in 2010, remained intense even after two years of his demise.

          Having never faced a situation of losing any near and dear ones, this death had shaken me to the core and compelled me to dive into the oft-asked pertinent questions about our existence and exit from the world.

Why are we born and why is God so apathetic to the sufferings of people in their final stages of life journey instead of just sucking life out of their bodies were some of the questions I was grappling with.

          All these questions would ultimately converge into one big question, “Is there any God in the first place?”

          I could not just dismiss his existence and turn atheist, for I had seen his miracles happened in my life. However, I had started drifting away from the Hindu ritualistic way of worshiping and inched towards believing in one unseen God, which was identical to the Abrahamic monotheism.

          But the destiny had something else in store. Probably, the Supreme Soul did not appreciate my approach, as was indicated in an incident occurred sometime in March 2012.

          One night in my dream, there appeared a fair girl, seemingly three to four-year-old. She wasn’t so chubby but cute enough to attract anyone with her nice facial features and attire.

          Wearing a green colour Lahanga-Blouse, made of silk with golden brocade, the girl was riding a tricycle at a stormy speed. I could catch her glimpse only once before she rode at an incomprehensible speed all over the house.

          As I wondered at the stamina and energy of the girl to ride the tricycle so swiftly like a whiff of air, I noticed my father screaming and asking me, my son and daughter to stay away from her.

         Saying, “Don’t touch her! Don’t go closer to her! Come this side!” he dragged the three of us to one corner of the room.

        Remember that it was just me, my late father, my son, daughter and the little girl in the dream. There wasn’t my mother and my wife in the ‘vision’.

          Baffled, I got up abruptly and noticed that it was already about 5 am. I then shared the dream with my mother, wife and children in the day. No one could decipher anything. It was finally concluded that it was just another dream with no meaning as such.

          A week later, my daughter Bhargavi returned from the school complaining about a small boil in her palm below her thumb.

          To me it appeared like a chickenpox, which I expressed explicitly only to get an earful from my wife and mother for speaking something ‘unspeakable’!

          In India chickenpox, smallpox and measles are addressed as ‘Mother’ (‘Mata’ in North India and ‘Amma’ in South India) because these epidemics are considered as a symbol of fury of the Goddess. In olden days, 'smallpox' used to wipe out villages after villages. If the patient survived, he would live with unpleasant scars all over the body. Thanks to the medical science, the vaccine has led to its extinction from the Indian subcontinent.

          However, the fear of 'Mata' prevails so much to date that every year in almost all the Hindu villages, sacrifices are offered to village Goddess, which can either be goat, sheep, poultry birds, buffalo or some vegetarian items.

People contracting chickenpox are treated with highest respect and are offered food and drinks with cooling effect to calm the Mother.

          The next day, Bhargavi got a few more boils around her palm but strangely, it did not exceed beyond her palm, not even at the back of her palm!

          Two days later, when my son Sudarshan too contracted it, my wife and mother conceded that it was chickenpox and again I found myself at the receiving end. They squarely blamed me for inviting the fury of the Goddess with my irresponsible utterances!

          A week later, chickenpox took me in its grip. Mine were big boils, somewhat like smallpox.

           My mother and wife were spared from the contagious disease.

          It was not difficult for me to understand what the dream meant but why was my father so rattled in the dream after seeing the cute little girl?

          Apparently, way back in 1966, almost eight years before I was born, when our family lived in the Railway quarters in Chhattisgarh’s capital Raipur, my father had a very strange experience.

          Once he was sleeping next to the window facing garden, when in the dead of night he woke up to a conversation between two women in Telugu right next to the window inside the garden. (Our family does speak Telugu and Hindi besides our mother tongue Kannada because we are Kannadigas from Andhra Pradesh who had migrated to Madhya Pradesh about a century ago!).

            He told us that he could not see them but he clearly heard their conversation.

          “The first woman asked the second one why was she there. The second one replied, ‘I am here to take away two people’,” my father had told us.

          It was neither the time nor any occasion for them to be inside the garden of the Railway quarters, he had pointed out.

          Months after the incident, he lost his eldest daughter due to extreme arthritis. He had opted Ayurveda over alopathy. The rigid dietary restrictions took a toll on her appetite and eventually her weight too, which culminated in her severe illness and hospitalisation. One day the frail girl collapsed on my father's arm in the hospital.

          Before my father could recover from the shock and sorrow, another tragedy hit him six months later when he lost his second daughter to smallpox.

          Now, coming back to our story. It took about a fortnight to completely get rid of chickenpox.

        Our date with mysteries did not end with our recovery. It took a fortnight to get well and days later we had another experience.

         One night I had a dream that I was having some food in a leaf bowl or ‘Dona’ under a tree sitting next to my wife. It looked like a tamarind tree due to its leaves. I could vaguely remember some temple around.

          Morning there were more surprises in store for us. My wife too reported a similar dream where we both were having some food beneath Peepal and Neem tree.

          Joining our conversation, my daughter said she had a dream where she saw the huge face of a Goddess right behind the school in front of our house, almost the size of a three-storey building!

          We all concluded that it was a call by the Divine Mother herself for leaving without harming anyone of us and wanted some offerings from us.

So, we decided to make our offerings to ‘Kabbaalamma’, the village deity of Turahalli in Bengaluru where we live.

          We performed special prayers to her and offered her Prasad but the dream returned a few days later.

          There was another Goddess Temple around one-and-half km away from our home, which we thought could be a call from there.

          This time I decided to check whether there was a Tamarind tree there but I could not find any. We did make our offerings but as expected “the Goddess was not satisfied”. The dream recurred again a couple of days later.

          One fine morning, my brother-in-law, who stays in the close proximity to our house, called us to join him for a trip to Goravanahalli in Tumakuru district, about 100 km from Bengaluru.

          When we were discussing whether to go or not, he was right in front of our house in a Tata Sumo to pick us up.

          It was his sudden and unexpected plan without any preparation, and the place he had chosen to visit was a Lakshmi Temple in Goravanahalli, which we had never been before.

      With little time to start, we left home unprepared soon after taking bath and decided to have some food somewhere midway. But we either missed seeing any good hotel or did not find any suitable eatery.

          By the time we reached Goravanahalli, it was almost afternoon.

          As we were already in the temple complex, we decided to pay our obeisance first and then go for food though I was as hungry as a bear.

          Inside the granite rock temple, there seated royally on a grand silver throne Goddess Lakshmi, the deity of Goravanahalli. The black stone idol had the eyes, throne and weapons made of silver.

          She was decorated with garlands of flowers, Tulasi, vermilion, turmeric and sandalwood paste. The interior of the temple was full of fragrance because of the burning incense sticks, flowers and the sandalwood paste.

(Pictures taken from internet)

          The Goddess finds place in many folklore in the area for the power she wields and the miracles she had exhibited.

          A cold shiver ran down my spine as I faced the Goddess. Her piercing eyes were striking.

After paying obeisance to her, we came out where just at the exit gate, the temple authorities were distributing Prasad, much to the delight of us hungry souls.

          After searching for a decent place, me and my wife finally settled on a platform and started feasting on the little Prasad given in the leaf bowl.

Suddenly I looked upward only to find that we were sitting beneath the leafy branches of Peepal, Neem and Shami tree. Shami has leaves similar to tamarind.

          The trees were bit away but their branches had extended to the place where we were sitting.

          I nudged my wife to look upward. As she raised her head, the astonishment on her face was palpable.

         I had always maintained a reverential distance from Devi or Shakti Upasana or worshipping supreme being in the Goddess form, for the stories about her volatility scared me and restricted me from even venturing closer to her.

         Also, in some remote corner of my mind, I had an apprehension that Shakti Upasana was related to Vamachara or left-handed attainment (black magic in crude terms). But this incident slightly changed my views towards Devi Upasana.
             We left the place after paying our obeisance to the Goddess again. The dream did not return, for the Universal Mother had conveyed to me that I should not get into the debate of whether she is with or without form.

          The Lord of the Universe also communicated to me that it is as much a ‘She’ as it is ‘He’.

         The event made me perceive that devotion is more important than the deity or the mode of worship. It is her choice how she wishes one to worship her and she will find her ways to lead us in that direction. Maybe sometimes she wishes a particular person not to worship her ever and remain atheist forever!

         Five years after this incident, I came to know for the first time that the Goddess in the form of a little girl is known as Bala Tripura Sundari (Literal meaning: The childhood form of the beauty unparalleled in the three worlds).

          Her pictures show her wearing silk made Lahanga-Blouse with brocade. Her painters depict her well decorated with ornaments.

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Feel free to plunder

If there exists something called afterlife, then Rajkumar Dhruv must be watching the developments unfolding in India with pain and horror. He would be wondering whether his crime was so grievous that he got capital punishment without trial.
This tribal youth from Suhela, about 100 km from Raipur, the capital city of Chhattisgarh, never returned home after the local police picked him up on a fateful night way back in 2004. The Suhela police had beaten him to death and buried him clandestinely.

His crime? Police suspected him that he had stolen diesel worth Rs 300 from a tractor. A public outburst ensued against the custodial death resulting in torching the police station. Tragically the incident could not find any space in any of mainstream English media and TV news channels, which rarely reach such remote places.

The youth in some celestial world must be lamenting at his foolishness for being a petty thief. Had he plundered the national resources, he would have been the most respected citizen of the country receiving salutes from the same policemen who had killed him without trial. He might have enjoyed all luxuries, fought elections and later became a lawmaker. Even the judiciary would have thought twice while trying him.

In this election season, when there is a growing outcry for probity in public life, clean candidates, measures to check corruption and criminalisation of politics, the so-called leading political parties of the country continue to have their way. Statistics provided by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) show that till March 13, the BJP and the Congress had announced 204 candidates and 265 candidates. Of them, 40 BJP candidates and 44 Congress candidates had criminal cases against them. Further study by the ADR reveals that the 20 BJP candidates and 16 Congress candidates carried serious criminal charges.

Irrespective of public outrage, the major political parties have again fielded candidates facing charges of rape, murder, attempt to murder, cheating and forgery. If the BJP has fielded Karnataka B S Yeddyurappa, who was jailed on corruption charges, the Congress too did not think twice while giving ticket to Pawan Kumar Bansal and Ashok Chavan of Adarsh fame.
The message that has been conveyed by these parties to the public is very loud and clear- petty theft is unpardonable but plundering the nation is rewarding. 

AN EXECUTION SCAM

A N   E X E C U T I O N    S C A M

How can we be so inhuman and breach our age old principles of 'Atithi Devo Bhava'? 'He came, he saw and he conquered' Mumbai on November 26, 2008. While performing his duties in the land of 'Karma, Dharma and Marma (compassion)' he committed some excesses, for which execution was too harsh a punishment.
It is quite evident that Dharma was not followed by a government which believes in it so stoutly that it allowed 2G scam to happen for the sake of 'Coalition Dharma'. For Dharma it facilitated Warren Anderson, a convict in the Bhopal disaster case, to flee India.
What surprises me the most is when many people are in the death row, how come the queue was breached and the privilege of going to gallows was bestowed only on Ajmal Kasab.
I have a belief that Ajmal Kasab has not been hanged. (Some people say people like Ajmal Kasab do not die. They only change their status- from single to the company of 72 virgins). It more seems like an attempt of a scam-tainted government to divert public attention from its misdeeds and put to rest public ire against it. There are many loose ends in the execution story. Reports suggest that there was no noose man to hang, so the capital punishment was given by a senior jailer. There is no information where the body was buried later. To raise more doubt, there are no photographs or videographs of the body.
In 65 years of our history we have attained so much of expertise in executing strangest of the strange scams that you should not be surprised to know that an 'EXECUTION SCAM' has taken place.

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A Banana Parade

          --By G Manjusainath

Things seem to be going awry these days. While the market is on fire due to inflation, banana prices have simply sky-rocketed.

“Rs seven a banana,” the local fruit vendor gave a curt reply to my query on banana price.

I know this vendor chap for the last five years. I still believe that he is very familiar to us. Earlier our conversation used to start with the exchange of greetings paving my way to bargain. But for the last one year his behaviour has changed dramatically. These days he gives very terse replies as if he is a very busy man. Probably he has sensed that friendliness with everyone hampers business prospects.

When I poked the vendor to know the reason behind steep rise in banana prices, he started opening up.

“Sir, God only knows what has happened to the Congressmen nowadays. They are on a banana buying spree leading to a huge gap between the demand and supply. As a result, the banana prices have spiralled like never before. One thing is for sure, their new-found love for banana has got nothing to do with the festival season.” Almost after a year I heard him uttering so many words in one go.

My quest to dig more on the acute shortage of banana led me to Kelamal Aamchandani, a wholesale fruit merchant, who is said to be a distant relative of Balkrishna Sadvani (name changed for obvious reasons).

“Kelamal Ji, why are people buying banana in bulk these days?”

The wholesale dealer corrected me, “It's not the Aam Admi  - the so-called common man -, but the Congressmen who are on a buying spree. I prefer calling it panic-buying.”

“But why?” I asked.

“To prove the first Jeeja G of the country right. You may be aware that he has come under fire for his Facebook status message, 'Mango People in Banana Republic',” said Kelamal.

“So?” My astonishment increased.

“The Congressmen are consuming banana in bulk, feeding the fruit to the poor and needy people, hanging it at the entrance of their houses and offering it to the Gods and Goddesses. These exercises are meant to prove India a real Banana Republic,” Kelamal explained.

He declared that the banana prices will shoot up further in January.

I was baffled. “What's the January connection?”

Kelamal elaborated, “January 26 will be celebrated as Banana Republic Day, this year.”

My anxiety increased. I asked, “What will happen that day?”

“It will be a very special day for India, way beyond eating, feeding and hanging bananas. The annual parade will see 'Men in No Uniform',” Kelamal chuckled only to increase my curiosity.

“But what's the need? We will be a laughing stock across the globe!” I screamed.

“Cool down my dear. There is more to the story, which, I think, you will be keen to know,” said Kelamal adding, “The historic parade this year is to strengthen our belief that we are a Banana Republic as declared by our First Jeeja G. For a change, the theme of all the tableaux that will pass through the Raaj-Path this year will revolve around the banana instead of our military prowess where we used to display missiles and tankers. Also, the parade leaders will not hold sword or baton this year but bananas only.”
******

Corporate Spirituality: A mirage in the cruel desert

-- G Manjusainath

The Swami, in his mid-fifties, ambled along amidst his devotees sitting in the rows at an open amphitheatre in his sprawling Ashram in Bangalore. After displaying all his soft skills, he then sat on the throne.

In this management era post liberalisation, the buzzword of soft skills has come quite handy for this Corporate Swami to hide his feminine behaviour.

From the dais, the Swami roared in his mellowed voice, “Today is a historic day as people from across the globe converged here to eradicate poverty. We formed several kilometre-long human chain to send out a message to all the governments across the globe that poverty shall no longer be tolerated. It needs to be eradicated.”

But still there was a section in the crowd which was not convinced. It wanted to know how the poverty can be eradicated from the village in the backyard of the Ashram, let alone the world, by forming a human chain. Actually, the scepticism should be blamed for the absence of a vision to look at things in the right perspective. The atheists ignored the fact that these means had helped eradicate poverty of the self-declared seer. The grand magnificent and palatial ‘hermitage’ of the Swami, which is spread over hundreds of acres of land, is big enough to give complex to emperors and business tycoons of the world.

The event instinctively reminded people of former Prime Minister Ms Indira Gandhi’s call for ‘Gareebi Hatao’ (remove poverty) in the late ’70s, which had helped her return to power. Those, who still question the prevalence of miseries in the society many decades after the popular slogan was raised, actually turn a blind eye to the riches of those who were among the Granny Gandhi’s confidants.

You need not have to bang your head too much to know why poverty and spirituality sell like a hot cake in India and the Swamis mushroom here. Visit any government hospital and you will realise that God along can save people here. Take the case of Vani Vilas Hospital in Bangalore. In literal terms, the name of the hospital means ‘Rich in Speech’, which sounds very apt for the century-old government hospital in view of the acute shortage of doctors, paramedics, medicines, equipment and also sanitation workers. This scene is prevalent in almost all the government hospitals in India.

A hospital, which itself is ailing, cannot offer anything but lip services (Vani Vilas) to its patients somewhat on the lines of Adi Guru Shankaracharya’s famous work ‘Bhaj Govindam Moodh Matay’. The devotional song in Sanskrit underlines the insignificance of memorising the principles of grammar in the twilight of life and emphasises upon invoking the name of God all the time.

A general observation is that when government fails, God, Godmen and their missionaries come into play. Another Swami in Bangalore only strengthens this notion. He is known for offering quality treatment at his five-star kind of super speciality hospital at a hefty price. It will not be out of context to say that spirituality is a family business of this Swami as all his near and dear ones are some or the other Swamis serving in his luxurious hermitage and enjoying their share in the hospital and education institutions.

Not many people can afford the Medical Swami’s blessings, which come for a hefty price. For such lot, a new seer has emerged in India, Nirmal Baba. Too many things have been written against him but his quackery at a relatively cheap price has shot up his popularity graph leaving his competitors far behind. Among his hundreds of ways of offering ‘relief’ to the ailing humanity, one has become a grand hit.

“Eat Samosa with green Chatni and ‘Kripa Aane Lagegi’ (You will start getting the grace),” the Baba had said at a seminar.

You would wonder that there is a price tag attached with the Samosa Chatni remedies too. You need to deposit at least Rs 2,000 in Baba’s bank account to attend his seminars. People say the Baba has been exposed because of media’s sustained campaign but those who cannot afford Medical Swami’s blessings and are afraid of going to sick government hospitals, Nirmal Baba and other godmen like him continue to be their guides and mentors. The distressed masses knowingly overlook the fact that these Babas and Swamis are only a mirage of oasis in the cruel desert.

Poorna- The story of zero by a cipher

Poorna- The story of zero by a cipher

By G. MANJUSAINATH

ॐ पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदं, पूर्णात पूर्णमुदच्यते.

पूर्णस्य पूर्णमादाय, पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते.

-- इशावास्योपनिषद

Om poornamadah poornamidam

Poornaat poornamudachyate

Poornasya poornamaadaya

Poornamevaavashishyate

-- Ishaavasyopanishad

“That is infinite. This is infinite. What has come out of the infinite is also infinite.
When the infinite is taken out of the infinite, the infinite still remains infinite.”

Other than ghosts and demons if something would scare me during my childhood days it was mathematics. So much aversion I had for this subject that the very mention of it would cause me a kind of nausea but my maths-loving dad was hell-bent to churn a Ramanujan, a CV Raman, an Einstein and finally a James Watt out of his frail little child overnight.

But, as fate had it, the son turned out to be a paper-tiger. Before making my way into the journalism, I had some six years of meandering after my father finally stopped hoping against the hopes and allowed me to go stray just like a bull with trident mark, grabbing green groceries in the market. It was during that course of time when I developed a fascination for astrology and a subsequent realisation that I missed many things by ignoring mathematics. I must confess that I have seen merely a few droplets of the vast oceanic maths. While studying astrology I stumbled upon the above-mentioned verse from Ishavasyopanishad and simply fell for it. I have no hesitation to say that next lines are cipher’s shallow claims of deciphering zero.

To my mind, the first verse from Ishavasyopanishad is revolutionary in a sense that it is responsible for the development of modern mathematics and science. The verse which speaks about the nature of omnipresent God, said to have had inspired the seventh century mathematician, Bhaskaracharya-I, to translate it into mathematics. He devised a new number called Poorna or zero with no face value but great place value to make the mathematical numbers infinite.

Bhaskaracharya chose a circle to denote the nature of God because it is neither a line with a head and tail, nor a triangle with conjunctions of lines. An unending loop, the circle represents the immortal nature of God.

The number zero completely fits in the definition of infinite God as described in the above-mentioned verse. "If you add zero to zero, the result remains zero and if you subtract zero from zero, the result again remains zero." However, zero also signifies ego and desires, which have no value as such except for creating vacuum in life and keeping a person busy to run after something which does not exist! For example, the variety of numbers is only between zero and nine but after nine, ‘one’ comes once again to run behind the vacuum called zero and gets the name Ten to head for infinite.

Did you ever wonder why ten comes after nine and not after five, six, seven or eight? You may find it interesting that the objective behind devising a scientific numerical system was to study astronomy and astrology. In fact, in olden days cosmos and celestial bodies inspired people to calculate their movements and the distance between them in view of the prevalent belief system that these heavenly bodies have a bearing on everything on the earth. It is believed in Astrology and numerology that the nine digits represent the nine planets of astrology namely Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Rahu (dragon's head) and Ketu (dragon's tail).

The claim that Bhaskaracharya was born somewhere in the border regions of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, seems to have some basis. The local Telugu populace of Andhra Pradesh, particularly in the regions of Andhra, prefer calling zero as 'Poorna' unlike other parts of the country where it is called Shoonya, may be to immortalise the scientific legacy left behind by the great mathematician.

So the next time if somebody muddies a pristine forum in a rabid and archaic manner only to tell you that your top floor has got nothing then stay cool, chant the above Mantra and say: "Nothing is everything, for I know, Shoonya is Poorna'.

Missing a caressing hand

Just two days before Holi my wife forwarded me a greeting message. Though sent as a gesture of goodwill, the SMS reopened my healing wounds and a spontaneous four-line poem flowed instantaneously in reply –

Jisne Bhara Rang Jeevan me,

Raha Nahi jab vahi sang me,

Holi ne kho diye rang sab,

Bemani tyohar lage ab.

(Now that the one who filled colours in our lives is no more, Holi has lost all its colours and festivities have lost their sheen).

I was coming to terms with the departure of my ailing father in August last year when the message pricked my old wounds.

The party was over and a killing gloominess had descended upon me and my family. I wished I could have clinched the sand of time tightly and escaped with my dear ones to a place faraway from the glares of death. I would argue with the unseen why he did not mend his rule at least for once for the sake of his devotees like me, and spared a life from slipping into the jaws of death.

I could clearly realise that the 24 hours forming a day are not relatively the same every time- Happy hours run away so rapidly that even before you could try to take them into your grip, doom pounces upon you to knock you down.

As emotions ran high, memories played before me a bioscopic view of some festive occasions I had spent with my parents, especially with my father. I could reminisce a typical Deepawali night which taught me to enjoy silence and solitude in the middle of noisy crowd and turbulence.

I was about 13-year-old on that Deepawali night when people were out to defeat the new moon night with festoons, chandeliers and dazzling crackers. I too had great plans to celebrate the moment with a moderate stock of crackers but I could not realise that within an hour they would be exhausted. Celebrations were over and a gloomy sadness dawned upon me.

It was at that moment when I heard some Bengali songs being played somewhere quite a distance away. Though I could not hear the lyrics clearly I could make out that it was Rabindra Sangeet sung by Kishore Kumar. Distance hindered the audibility and acoustic too was a problem but the tune was surely soothing in those silent and depressing moments. The effect of the songs was such that I began to sink deep in silence and for the first time I realised the beauty of quietness and solitude in the dark new moon night from the roof of our house in Raipur. Just then someone suddenly held me by my shoulder from behind. Taken aback, I turned quickly only to find my father standing behind me.

“Baba, why are you standing alone at this dark place? Isn’t your Diwali over?” father asked me affectionately. It took little time to overcome the charm of Rabindra Sangeet. After a brief silence I said, “Appa, can you hear the song? It’s Rabindra Sangeet. It’s sweet, isn’t it?” My father too nodded.

The stroll along the memory by-lane showed me the way to solace. Thanks to internet, today I have a prized possession of a good collection of Rabindra Sangeet like, ‘Amaar Raat Pohalo’, ‘Ami Tomaay Jato Suniye chhilem Gaan’, ‘Jadi Taare Naai Cheeni Go She Kee’, ‘Amar Andhoprodeep’, ‘Purano Sei Diner Kotha’, ‘Amar Bela Je Jaaye’ and, not to miss, 'Jadi Tor Daak Sune keu Naa Aashe...’. These songs helped me wipe my tears and silenced my inner turbulence but disappeared is the person who had caressed me affectionately during some opaque and trying moments in my life and instilled a sense of security.