The other side

I hated going to my grandmother's house when I was young. One reason was I hated travelling in bus, the other was my uncle. He got angry quickly and that was vented out on the hapless cattle and the dog. He used to beat them mercilessly for no reason and I would cry imagining the pain the animals underwent. He even used to scold us children for every small mistake. My mother told me he was mentally weak because when he was in the 7th standard, he was seen by a Brahmarakshasa residing on a tree in a playground where he went to play. Well, I, mentally a scientist even then, didn't believe a word of it but just nodded. I saw his fits, the eyes shot up, white froth oozing out of his mouth and everybody rushing to him so that he wouldn't fall off the chair till the spasms went away.
As I grew up, I came to know of mentally challenged people and the way they behave. Though I acquired knowledge about his behaviour, I couldn't understand his sudden tempers, mood swings and cruelty towards animals. I thought mental illnesses were no excuse to a person's behaviour towards the innocent. I knew he was spoiled by his family who thought that by giving him all that he wants, they can cure him of his problem.
When I was young, I also saw my mother clutching my baby sister and rushing off to the hospital whenever she acted strange. Then I came to know that she suffered lack of oxygen to the brain at birth and had high fever at times and spasms. By the time I reached the age of understanding it, she was cured. But the agony our family faced whenever she fell ill, which was as often as twice in a week, and the constant fear that it may return, were unforgettable.
All these things came to my mind when I visited Sneha Kiran Spastic Society and saw the children there who needed support all their life to perform even the simplest tasks. I re-lived the agony of the parents who see their children with deve-lopmental disabilities and non-progressive disorders, collec-tively called Cerebral Palsy (CP) every day and remain insecure themselves their entire life.
There, in a shed-like long hall, children were kept in special chairs and taught to move their hands, legs and other parts of the body which were on their way to becoming disabled if left untreated.
These children, with intelligence in their minds and ability to learn what is taught to them, were being stopped by their own body from doing what they wanted to do. They felt trapped within their own body. Their voluntary muscles failed to respond to the instructions of their own brains. It is moving to see kids, who should be outside playing and enjoying with other kids, sitting silently staring at people, not much knowing what they were doing there and not wanting to know.
They looked like living statues sculpted by an amateur sculptor who didn't know enough to fill-in life equally to all parts of the body. These children could move their body parts; but without therapy, the body parts had the possibility of being useless. The good part is that by practice — which should start at the earliest — they can fulfill their basic needs. When I saw these kids, I felt there are some things worth worrying about beyond our own frustrations and anger, desires, love and hate in this world.
We all hear of special children, read in newspapers, watch in TV, grumble that nobody in India is interested in doing anything worthwhile to help them, forget it the next moment we get something else to sympathise upon, and move on. What about the parents or the guardians of such children? They obviously cannot ignore their children and move on like we do. They live in a constant hope that their children too will come out of their physical, and sometimes, mental prisons, and enjoy everything the world offers them just like others.
What I saw made me feel that we are very lucky to have been bestowed with the capabilities of doing what we want, when we want, without begging someone else for help and waiting for that person to do what we wanted. I saw the therapists, volunteers, helpers and the mothers there who have so much of patience to teach such a child. I watched a woman—a mother or a therapist, I don't know— telling a small girl again and again to pick up a blue building block and a red one; to distinguish between the colours. The child simply picked up what she wanted to pick up, or sometimes sat simply, staring. I saw a boy whose wrists and legs were bound by heavy cuffs so that he can move his hands and legs which would otherwise be limp. There was a 24-year-old girl who didn't know much more than a five-year-old. Disturbed to see their innocence, I wondered how they will manage to live in a world full of desires and deceit.
Being short-tempered, I would surely have gotten frustrated and angry that they cannot learn quickly what is taught to them and wouldn't have remained there even for one whole day. Those who work in such centers ought to have so much of love and patience towards children. Patience, isolated from love cannot remain for long. They taught the same thing again and again, for hours together, telling the child gently, till the child learnt to do what is taught. It is in such places that we find humane faces, not in a pub or a club, where people frequent now-a-days trying to find happiness.
Now, seeing those children, I realised my sister was very lucky to have escaped serious damage to her brain and my uncle to have managed to live without the help of others for the simplest of tasks.

Silence

One of his students asked Buddha, "Are you the messiah?"
"No", answered Buddha.
"Then are you a healer?"
"No", Buddha replied.
"Then are you a teacher?" the student persisted.
"No, I am not a teacher."
"Then what are you?" asked the student, exasperated.
"I am awake", Buddha replied.

He was the Buddha. He achieved the awakening without the help of temples, only through meditation. Our temples too, once upon a time, served the purpose of awakening the most common of men. A man could be a Buddha if he listened hard to the silence within a temple. A temple served not only as a place for strengthening the beliefs but also as an entrance to a different, ethereal world where one could understand the silence and contemplate on it.
The vast, high ceilinged interiors, the darkness, many chambers one within the other- the temple may seem so easy to build- but has a vast significance as it is intimately connected to the elements of earth. Osho, in his book Hidden Mysteries, beautifully describes the relation between the elements and the temples. He says the domes in temples are built to resemble the sky so that they will rebound or echo the mantras we chant. The temples also resemble the caves, he says. And the ancient yogis used lightless, airless caves for meditation. We find that even those who sat for meditation in open air had, after a few years, had anthill (hutta) surrounding them resembling the privacy of caves.
Now, I avoid going to temples as they look like hospitals to me with tiles used in hospitals and bathrooms, wide windows, square buildings and lit up like a carnival. We won't find peace, let alone god in the modern temples. I have not felt like folding my arms and bowing my head to the god there. I feel my inner peace and the personal relationship I have with god is destroyed. I feel my privacy with god has been violated.
The temples are so modernised, I think they will have air conditioning, lounges and restaurants in no time, with a separate chamber for mobile users so that the other devotees (!) won't be disturbed. There are very few stone temples standing in Karnataka. Most beautiful temples have turned into ruins. Some like Belur, Halebidu temples have become only the objects of photography for tourists destroying its sacredness and the places where ancient statues can be plundered for money.
Someone has said the temple of our purest thoughts is silence. But, according to me, a temple of silence too helps in giving birth to the purest of thoughts. This wisdom of silence has been lost to the devotees who come to the temple with the sole purpose of praying to the god without and not to listen to the silence within. The silence found in a temple, mixed with the mild chanting of mantras, the burning incense, the occasional gong which reverberates through the temple and the minds of the people, is the most effective form of therapy for a disturbed mind.
I found a Vishnu temple in ruins near Sode Mutt, Sirsi. I don't even remember the name of the tiny village it is in. I had seen numerous temples until then. But that was the temple I somehow liked, felt close to my heart. Then I discovered the Kanchi Kamakshi temple. Even though most of Tamil Nadu's temples are on the way to becoming commercialised, this was different. I fell in love with it at once. For the first time in my life, I cried standing at a temple, looking at the vastness, feeling lost in a strange yet beautiful universe. I still don't know what was so special about it.
Now, the temple is just a place for a prominent politician or a celebrity to visit before a major undertaking, a place where annual festivals are held so that more revenue can be collected, or a place where something so miraculous happened that the person responsible for it needs to be worshipped. Even celebrities have temples to their names. The very concept of a place called temple has been lost. People visit temples like they visit picnic spots.
A temple's sanctity and original purpose is in its manifestation of a godliness we cannot perceive otherwise. We cannot successfully think of nothingness as a god, we need something solid and life-like to worship, to surrender ourselves and our weaknesses.
Man, despite the corner of the world he lived in, has built temples in every form. He needs to be constantly assured of godliness, of some being above him to protect him so that he does not feel alone in the universe. A child is taken constantly to temples since his birth so that it becomes an integral part of his life. But, a temple and its significance will so well merge in his life that he will cease to think of its importance long before he attains adulthood. He starts seeing it as a place where one has to visit periodically to ensure god's grace on him, his family and a place where special occasions can be celebrated.
Westernisation has destroyed the architecture of a temple by introducing large, brightly lit halls, square rooms with gleaming tiles and painted with different hues destroying the nature of stones, with which they were built earlier, which brought us closer to nature. The western concept of a place of worship has also created an assumption in the minds of people that they ought to visit a temple only for a specific purpose. The purely Indian quality of doing something just for the sake of doing it is now obscure thanks to the concept of time management exotic to our country. Earlier, we were the citizens of a unique place who did any job without any strong reason to do it, including eating, sleeping, working. Now we do everything for the sake of a gain. If there is no gain, we will refrain from doing any task. This concept the so-called 'utilising time' has affected people who simply went to temples, sat there for hours and left when they wanted to. Then, it was called ' finding inner peace' and meditation'. Now, it is called 'laziness.'
Francois Gautier, a writer and journalist, has argued that Mughal emperor Aurangzeb ordered the demolition of many temples including Kashi Vishwanatha temple, the most sacred place of worship to followers of Vedic religion, thinking that once their centre of faith is destroyed, they will be weakened morally and spiritually. But it was not to be so. The invaders wrongly surmised that destroying an icon will eventually destroy its purpose in the minds of people. The temple survives, albeit in a less spiritual form, serving the same purpose it did a few centuries ago, of increasing our losing faith.
The tradition and culture of temple survives in a child who is taken by its parents to the temple and taught to touch the first step with reverence, to bow its head before the deity, in the innocence of a child when it follows its parents in every ritual. The inner meaning of a temple may have been lost forever but the culture still remains.

Chandrayaan

I, as an Indian, was proud of our ISRO's mission to moon-Chandrayaana. May be I was too proud and on the clouds so I was naturally shocked to find out that nothing is more humorous to the rest of the world that a land of snake-charmers, mystic gurus, illiterates, religious and ethnic riots, a land where people and pigs co-exist peacefully on the roads, dreams of aiming to the moon.
When India first announced Chandrayaan, various websites published responses from around the world, especially from the 'highly civilised and cultured' West. Someone wrote: This is a good reason to stop sending them their annual handout. Another went a step ahead to declare: One earthquake or monsoon and the begging bowl will be shown to the Western world.
The writers might be exempted because their belief of themselves being a superior race is hundreds of years old and the efforts to change it will be in vain. But what of Indians? We, who should have believed, tried to hide behind saucy observations like the one by the Guardian's South-Asian Correspondent in India Randeep Ramesh. He scolded a moon-struck country for its vaulting ambitions in space like a child is chided for its naughty tricks.
Though the 'superior race' has no right to deride us, we deserve the scorn. We may pride ourselves to be in the forefront of technology, education and much more. We may even have contributed many millionaires to the world. But these are not the contributions of a united society, it is the fruit of the back-breaking work of a few individuals. If a few educated intelligentsia could make a country so proud, be it in science, medicine, technology or literature, what is the power of a society where most of the children get the modern basic necessity of life — education. We could send many such Chandrayaans, we could be the forefront in the world economic scene. Unfortunately, even education alone does not suffice according to India Labour Report 2007 which says 53% of employed youth suffer some degree of skill deprivation. Modern education has turned out a mass of unemployable youth who cannot do any work that has not been taught in the classrooms.
As a people, we have failed in lifting around 220 million citizens about the poverty line. Around 860 million live on Rs. 20 a day because all that is missing is after all the basic infrastructure. Britain, as a 'kindly' gesture, will spend 825 million pounds in the next three years to 'lift hundreds of millions of people' of India above poverty. Is there anything more contradictory in this country of contradictions?
Dreary statistics apart, India ranks 120 in the 'Ease of Doing Business' by the World Bank. It means setting up a medium business in our country for a layman is next to impossible. One has to get 40 approvals and 'satisfy' every person linked to the Government where he wants to setup a business. It simply means being an Indian in India is detrimental to your future. In contrast, multi-national companies (MNCs) get free land of their choice, loan at cheaper rates, government counter guarantee, tax breaks.. and the list goes on.
When we are a disillusioned society who tries neither to change ourselves nor others, it is no wonder the Western media hunts India for juicy news. Nowadays its success rate is high because anyone in India who hurts even his toes other than a Hindu is the object of worldwide mercy. The non-Indians have caught up the racist amnesia blaming us ignoring the darkness beneath their lamps. The unexplained deaths of Indian students abroad go unnoticed everywhere and even in India because we don't care. Small wonder we are the bulls' eye for every religious fundamentalist who has a voice to speak. In that context, we are the most indifferent people popularly indifferent alike to bomb attacks and attacks on our own identity.
Thus I was not surprised when I read the results of a survey by a newspaper on Independence Day this year. As part of the survey, some basic questions were asked to our brilliant citizens, or atleast a part of them. Even the most cynical Indian would not have expected the answers, which though are not so serious in nature, unravelled the indifference of our fellow Indians to all that is Indian, grave or otherwise.
To the question who is the President of India, the answers or rather guesses ranged from APJ Abdul Kalam, Mulayam Singh Yadav, L.K. Advani, Mayawati to Sheila Dixit. The colours on our National Flag were magenta, baby pink, maroon, orange and yellow. All but saffron, white and green,
I was not much shocked, Maybe I too am an Indian, a true Indian, an indifferent one.
-shwetha

Pen folio: Women, the other sex

The world is engrossed in Obamas, bomb blasts and high profile people whose modus operandi is to make news. In fact I too was, comfortable in my cocoon of imaginary comfort, until I happened to see some disturbing news in the media. Some years ago, I thought of feminism as a waste of time and feminists as people who had nothing better to do in their life, people who had enough to eat and had no idea of hard work. But now I agree for a need for some strong voices to be raised against what is happening to a seemingly small number of women in a small part of a large world who are being apportioned their just share, as some would like to say.

Pen folio: Chandrayaan

I, as an Indian, was proud of our ISRO's mission to moon-Chandrayaana. May be I was too proud and on the clouds so I was naturally shocked to find out that nothing is more humorous to the rest of the world that a land of snake-charmers, mystic gurus, illiterates, religious and ethnic riots, a land where people and pigs co-exist peacefully on the roads, dreams of aiming to the moon.