Tuesday, December 26, 2023

On meditative stillness

So I was trying to find some good writers to read. Reading is an investment of time, presence and effort; hence you have to choose carefully as if your life depends on it or else do not read, go for a walk or hang upside down, just don’t degrade yourself by reading mediocre nonsense that forms much of writing these days. Crass stampede to get attention, they demean the medium as also devalue humanity. Your presence is important to life don’t disregard by participating in the orgy of degradation, the sickness that invades the soul if you are not discerning and vigilant. Your attention is precious to your being. As I was meticulously flipping through website to anchor on to the best of writers I was in presence of remarkable human being and a brilliant writer. I really haven’t heard of Harry Martinson before, and so here I was trying to find more of his writing. Harry Martinson was a Swedish writer and poet. He was an orphan who had a tough life, while a teenager he ran away from foster home and picked up odd menial jobs. He eventually got a job as a stoker labor, shoveling coal into the boilers firebox to power the engine of the ship -the same that was used in steam engine of railways that some of us have seen in old movies. This one of the poems that I happen to read:  


The Cable Ship

We fished up the Atlantic Cable one day 
between the Barbados and theTortugas,
held up our lanterns
and put some rubber over the wound in its back,
latitude 15 degrees north, longitude 61 degrees west.
When we laid our ear down to the gnawed place
we could hear something humming inside the cable.

"It's some millionaires in Montreal and St John
talking over the price of Cuban sugar, and ways to
reduce our wages", one of us said.

For a long time we stood there thinking, in a circle of lanterns,
we're all patient cable fishermen,
then we let the coated cable fall back
to its place in the sea.

His poems reflected deep humanism and care for nature. One of his noted works is an epic poem, a profound science fiction titled Aniara -a spacecraft in which people are escaping to mars from a destroyed earth and is knocked off course into deep space oblivion, it has been adapted into opera and recently a movie. What is remarkable about this poem is profound ideas of science and technology into human frailties and a prescient understanding of life. What is much more remarkable is that Martinson was self-taught, didn’t have much schooling nor stable childhood, indeed after working in ships -that took him to far off  places, he suffered from lung problems and had to abandon his job and ended up living as a vagabond on country roads, he was even arrested for vagrancy. That he was able to produce high quality work of evolved sensibilities points to not only his remarkable resilience but also the context of society that nurtures best ideas and expressions despite worst of circumstances.

Meditative stillness is unique evolution of human mind and relatively rare communion of society. It is not chance or providence but unique characteristic that is patterned in ideas, freedom and expressions that leads to stillness, a deeper involvement with life. Political and economic stability plays a significant role but isn’t the defining. Ancient Greeks and Egyptians are examples in its varying and unique expression of thoughts and aesthetics that survived in unique strands to emerge as and when society stills and individual meditates. Societies were not egalitarian but majority enjoyed spaces that had access to meditative stillness. This stillness is not satisfaction but absence of crave. It is inquisitive awareness of human condition necessarily hinged on compassion. Primitive societies survive on fear and crave, they herd to exist. Even with material comfort and economic security they are trapped in their pathetic life of want and control. Individual minds remain putrid pits while society becomes sinkhole that attract the worst. Much of world is trapped in this vicious state, and any number of opportunities of modern technologies and egalitarian options is wasted. Their occupations are daily struggles of negation of life and possibilities. Their crude expressions and stale ideas nurture crass entertainments of want and inspiration for crave.  

Much of framework for human enterprise and progress stems from meditative stillness that seeps into all forms of human expressions and thoughts. It needs constant strive to reach this luxury of stillness. For hundreds and thousands of years nature provided this stillness for life to thrive. This created brilliant expressions of biodiversity. With consciousness human mind reach meditative state. Very few regions of the world have achieved this evolved state that a self-taught man living in worst of condition could produce such astounding expression of subtlety and finesse. Such spaces are precious. Ofcourse in the last few years virtual world has created such spaces that is accessible from all across the world. 

Harry Martinson also happened to visit Bombay (now Mumbai India) in 1920s while his ship was docked for few days. His observation in those few hours that he spent in Mumbai is a testament to sensibilities that I rarely find in Indian writers who spent lifetime in putrid pit lacking compassion or connection with life except as patronizing or self-justifying redemption of miserable life cloaked in blessing. Martinson writes “Sometimes my whole being shudders at the inconceivability of the throng, at the unimaginability of the multitude of sights”. There is poignant mention of his witnessing ‘dancing girls’ on the streets, compassion as he documents his observations. “Small groups of dancers, the youngest of the dancing girls not more than five years old at the most, wild, tormented, ecstatic, most of the time commanded by an old man, continuously shouting and threatening, ugly and repulsive: a sensational and upsetting contrast to the slender beauty of the whirling little dancers” Martinson writes “Bells are ringing wildly on the ankles of the tiny ballet dancers. He, the ugly one, shouts when the dance shall go over into acrobatics, and the tiny ones go backwards on their hands and feet, their bellies pointing up towards the sky. He shouts, as if he wanted to kill them, and they throw their legs up as they dance on, standing on their hands while he, with a murderous expression, plays on a monotonously humming string instrument; with the form of a fish and the appearance of a museum specimen, prehistorically evil”.... “What if John Bauer had seen you, dear little heart. How happy he would have been. John Bauer was our great fairy tale painter. He drowned in a long, spool-shaped lake called Vättern. He would have painted a dark picture of you, deep as a fairy tale. You would be sitting on an enormous lingonberry tuft within the woods of Holaved, blinking with your eyes, as dark as a wood-mere, so that the mere itself would rumble like thunder down in its mud, rumble out of envy”. Martinson pays money to the man to stop the exploitation, and writes that he wanted to hurt the man but avoided such a confrontation as he was concerned for the girls. I could never be that cruel, not even if I was so angry with both the entire Brahminism and the vast constipation of the English lord system”. With this prescient line he was able to put his finger on the pulse of this degraded depraved society that generations of mediocre Indian writers nurtured to control narration lacked in moral capacity. And if you glimpse through the literary awards, you will see this urge to control narration as also nepotism of squatter camaraderie breeding the most mediocre but with high sense of self-worth of blessed gift. Like everything else most Indian writers are embarrassment. That they couldn’t sufficiently appreciate writers of caliber, like say, Mohd Basheer speaks of beggar minds haggling for next meal while stampeding for power and connections. Here artists are cheapskates who create slum cakes while marketeers define art. Mediocre nurture crass to justify itself.        

Sunday, December 17, 2023





Rain dance

All the gods are dead and dying
They murder each other in astounding spectacle
Collections of stone tools to silicon tools
Array on mourning scenes
The shifting facts and fictions
Folklore don’t hold the sensible
Bushman writhe in pain
His skin burns with koalas
His legs scorch into bones of kangaroos
It doesn’t make any sense
The dead and dying
Puebloans raise to dance
They thump their legs in great rhythm of the lives
They invoke the gentle dead in rain clouds
They rise through the trees
To keep the world safe.

Friday, December 08, 2023

condolences

 Immense loss


....
The race industry is a growth industry.
We despairing, they careering.
They're looking for victims and poets to rent.
They represent me without my consent.
...
They take our sufferings and earn a salary.
Steal our souls and make their documentaries.
Inform daily on our community.
Without Black suffering they'd have no jobs.
Without our dead they'd have no office.
Without our tears they'd have no drink.
If they stopped sucking we could get justice.
The coconuts are getting paid.
... 

("The coconuts have got the jobs" Benjamin Zephaniah)

This interview clearly points out vast world of difference between african immigrant/black refugee to UK and south asian feudal/caste cannibal migrant to West.

Thursday, December 07, 2023

A minor news

 

This is a minor news that I happen to read among many such minor news that happens across the primitive society -in most cases it may not lead to death but severe debilitating injury, or deep humiliation and profound dehumanizing response, for what seems to be minor mistake. Unimaginable worst atrocities have happened for decades while cunning castetva forces created template to morph these as insignificant law-and-order issues, desperate to classify these as personal skirmishes without anything more to it. India was already a british authenticated beacon of nonviolence, and with effortless ease -indeed entitled, moral compass to the world with gandhi, and clinging gandhians, awe the world with beatific smile and ethereal contented bearing as they sharpen the technique of using common people as fodder for highest moral ground.

Indians will know the nuances and all the intricate depravities hidden in the news. Western fattened fluffs will be least aware, the imperial laziness affliction in colonial comfort, and ofcourse squatters have already swarmed their little mind space to interpret and indeed represent, to efficiently suck out the patronizing goodies of colonial angst and victim binary. For last many decades charlatans and their litters have spread out across the west to represent us Indians and accrue immediate benefits, and yes, simultaneously -as a posture of great concern, our local guardians against specially carved out evil forces that we common people based in India are least aware -indeed too low intelligent to even comprehend. They perform their entitled role as some kind of great personal sacrifice for highest morals that keeps the fattened fluffs stupefied to match. It has reached an influx point. We cannot take it any longer. Fattened fluffs-squatter arrangement mutually benefited in an insular world. Moving a*se as sign of debating point discomfort, noting the wonders of turn of sentence, haggard desolate expressions, were how crucial issues dealt, and agreed with orgies and immediate schemes to pass it on to litters. Internet has opened up, and this devious alliance of wasted western fattened fluffs and caste cannibals to contain Indians in a narration for mutual benefit will not be allowed. We are not your fodder.

So, coming back to the minor news, what really happens when “used plate touch” someone? Is the fear about infection? Hygiene? Rest assured it cannot be hygiene. Caste cannibals as a characteristic trait are low on hygiene, but high on purity. Purity has nothing to do with hygiene. It is a squatter tutored mental illness, infection of soul, that is passed onto society. It is the beginning of depravities. It is how caste system works and grades. Interesting word here is “used”; it doesn’t even carry minuscule sense of what it intents in english. Caste cannibals therefore have benefited from this loss in translation, nor could they find reason for a suitable word considering that they gleefully introduced ‘pundit’ and ‘pariah’ with the help of racist colonizer. Alien language lack the nuance to carry complex meanings of the origin. In hindi the trigger word is “jhoota” that can tizzy squatter balanced world of depravities into utter meaninglessness. Words like “jhoota” carry context of barbarian culture hence cannot easily be translated nor understood. The other word that needs attention here is “touch”. Note it doesn’t mention that the food spilled or cloths got spoiled but the ‘used plate’ touched. This touch is where purity line is drawn. Squatter scums had scheme and list of ‘touchable’, and they still squat in sanctum as a c*ntdick right while equally depraved scale highest moral grounds in west into multiculture orgasm. 

So the inanimate object -plate, becomes carrier of demon incarnate appearing to vandalize pure blessed world with its touch -accidental or not -this distinction is meaningless in the context of breach. Purity is as fragile as squatter’s hold on the world and this is passed on to fate driven herd hence the bewildering reaction that is valued in life of hapless man. The beleaguered man working as a waiter -by its very logic is ‘not blessed’, hence further adding to the idea of impuring the blessed people and pattern of caste cannibalised world, furthermore gravity in debilitating incursion into pure blessed world that must be stringently dealt. And like the racist christian nutcase American ready with gun to defend from hallucination caste cannibals pounce with all ferocity on to a likely malnourished harassed man trying to make out a living. They kill him, dump him and move on. Human sacrifice to keep the world pure and blessed.    

Fattened fluffs in west will be conveniently translated to see this as minor skirmish nothing systemic of diseased mind nor caste cannibals complicit. They don’t really matter anymore. They nurtured monster mullahs and caste cannibals and unleashed ecosystem of uncouth under their influence across the world. They will not be allowed to control narration, nor patronize. They don’t really measure up to the challenges of contemporary world.  

Tuesday, December 05, 2023



Bowerbird makes the world a better place 

You must pick words 
Like bowerbird picks blues
Of all shapes and sizes
Nuggets of stolen thoughts, berries of wisdom
Bit of litter to cover the lack
Arrange in short and long sentences
To shelter ideas that connect
And help shift your world into a better place  




Sunday, December 03, 2023

Unethical brands


 A British organisation Ethical Consumers investigated 82 brands of chocolates and found that only 17 followed ethical standards. These were primarily investigated as to whether they ensured farmers were paid enough to live on. About 60% of the world’s cocoa comes from west Africa, and about six in 10 cocoa-growing households in Ghana are estimated to use child labour, with four in 10 in Ivory CoastLast year it was found that 10-year-old children were using machetes to harvest cocoa destined for Mondelēz’s supply chain -which produced Cadbury. Report also states that "buying chocolate from brands such as Fairafric, ’57 Chocolate and Chocolat Madagascar was expensive and could be hard to get hold of but they were good “as a treat or a present”, while Tony’s Chocolonely was widely available in supermarkets and “really trying to change the chocolate industry”

Please avoid buying these brands in case you like chocolates, and yes children must be made aware of these ethical lapse so that they are aware and become responsible citizens and compassionate human being.