Mehfil and Finale

The Mehfil and Finale

It's time to leave, the concert over, the music still.
The notes we sang, still carry the echo on the wind.
There will be concerts evermore and they will
still vibrate with memory we leave behind
of amazing songs of the music of angels and demons,
of love and hate, of rage and anger, pathos and the passion
all creating and merging
into a fugue of the themes, the humanity sang for eternity.
The seasons of blossom will come again
With shimmering dewdrops on their wing
The summer will go in search of our signs
in the familiar haunts, taverns, and inns,
but we the vagabonds will not be found
anywhere in the precincts of the town.
Slowly, the season will forget us
but the songs will never cease.
And love too will blossom again, opening ever new avenues
of passion and rage, carrying their tales on the wings of time.
Undying love and undying youth
will surge and recede with the tide,
and the ebbing time will leave on the shore
little trinkets we wore and cast away.
The seasons will continue to amaze the autumns
with untimely rains and tears of heaven,
and the dewdrops will shimmer in the fragile dawn.
Bubbles of water will form on the fevered brows
to comfort the sorrows
of implacable seasons of droughts.
Somewhere in the heart of time
we will have our niche and rhyme,
may be audible to the ear of the night,
silent in the lap of the warmth
that is gifted by the parting sun to the shivering night.
We will watch from a different place
the caravans moving, the way we moved
Thousands of caravans and thousands of miles,
and thousands of destinations will be calling men,
yet again.

A Pause

A Pause

I wandered in my garden till the darkness fell.
Logs of wood stored for a later day,
tools of all sizes to do odd jobs when needed,
tin pots and tin sheds to be used some day;
in the gathering dusk
a window opened
and let the moon in.
The versatile moon in a rather bleak sky,
waiting just a little longer to say a goodbye.
"I have been waiting long in this desolate sky
for you to open the window and look at me.
Take a little pause to look at me;
your garden can wait, but not me.
Everything is waiting for a pause
and everything lives in the pause."

Voice of Light

Voice of light

Wrap me around in the warmth of your silence
and take the earth and the sky out of my view.
You are all around,
right before me,
and yet I cannot prove
that you exist to me.

Peace and Nothing Else

Peace and Nothing Else

Park under the empty sky.
There is endless space
and you alone.
No need to hurry, no need to sparkle.
This is what I hear
when I listen to the sound
before the notes die.

The smiles on the face I have not seen
would perhaps be speaking like these.
There is pleasure in singing for you alone
and I would go on singing endlessly.

The melody does not fetter me.
The words are absent to free the space;
there is peace and nothing else.

Omitted Preface

The Omitted Preface


Dearer far than anything dearest to me,
Yajnyawalkya,
I tried to relate and bring your voice down
to fall on the empty silence
of the buzz of sounds.
I knew how futile the effort was,
yet I tried, because I thought of hope
hiding somewhere beyond smoke.

I see no light;I see no hope
as I near the end of the horizon.

To sing was all I could and all I knew;
for I could never assimilate
the lessons and secrets of the marketplace.

Like an orphaned child I may leave you
to find your way and go;
though I still do not know;
who will be orphaned, me or you?

Points of Integration : Pages out of the Indian History

Excerpts from ‘The Shade of Swords’ by M. J. Akbar

The Sufi

“If Islam spread in India it was not because of the sword of Akbar, but because of the power of his Sufi mentors, mystic-saints like Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti.  An emperor bowed to the saint. Monarchs could not demand obedience from a Sufi; his, or her, obedience was only to God.

Sufi derives from ‘saf’, an Arabic word meaning wool; for the only possession of these inspired men and women was a piece of coarse woolen cloth.

The first Sufi to reach India was Mansur al Hallaj, a saint so controversial that he lost his head, literally. Ha crossed the limit of the ‘ulema’s endurance and stepped into unacceptable blasphemy when he equated himself with truth. He was executed on 28^th March 913.  In India he traveled through the lands conquered by the Arabs, Sind and Punjab, and became the ultimate symbol of love in the popular poetry of the region. However, the true impact of Sufism began with Khwaja Muinddin Chishti.

The Path of a River

The Path of the River

The river we watch from the different spheres
of space and time afar
is flowing still
and silently.
The moon has waxed and waned
and vanished silently.
Women have offered gifts of light to the river
flowing silently.
Worshipers of Shiva know in their hearts ;
"Futile" is not what we say
when our prayers go unanswered.
The light we offer to the river of Shiva
is our answer in silence
that his marks are there
in the flow of the river;
the marks which show us
the path of the river
till the point it bends and disappears.
The lights too, will disappear and vanish in the breath of the wind.
Still, nothing is futile; it will be carried to the end.

1/8/2015

A Prayer Again

Kostas Michalis originally shared:

Judgement : Je suis Charlie

Elias Canetti: “the very first things I recognize are the fears, of which there was an inexhaustible wealth.”

Auto-da-Fé
Crowds and Power
Torch in My Ear

'The word “terror” and its variants occur with notable frequency in this first volume of memoirs, whose title would seem to recall not only Canetti’s growing command of language but perhaps also, in a macabre way, his inauguration to fear.' ( New Criterion / R. Kimball)

"He steps right up close to me, halts, and says: “Show me your tongue.” I stick out my tongue, he reaches into his pocket, pulls out a jackknife, opens it, and brings the blade all the way to my tongue. He says: “Now we’ll cut off his tongue.” I don’t dare pull back my tongue, he comes closer and closer, the blade will touch me any second. In the last moment, he pulls back the knife, saying, “Not today, tomorrow.” He snaps the knife shut again and puts it back in his pocket."

Every morning, we step out of the door . . . and the smiling man appears .... That’s how the day starts, and it happens very often."
( Tongue Set Free )