THE LONER

If love had become the path,
Many paths would have sprouted,
To many loves,
And flowers would have paved them,
Hedges of hitherto un-existing plants would have come up,
Sprinkled with the water of
love.

The path uphill still waits,
Bearing the Gulmohar trees
ablaze with blossoms,
They see, but don’t wait for
the strangers who walk by them.
They wait for someone
Whom,
The sky, the air, the pebbles,
Even the grasshoppers know.

One who sits and stares absentmindedly into the horizon,
And the world inhabited yet unknown
So near yet so alien,
One, who sits with heartful of emptiness
With nobody to share
Yet the one
Like whom nobody holds the universe
To his being,
One who loves the mango orchard beyond the railway tracks
And its unknown grounds
same way as the unfamiliar faces in a crowd.

As the dusk touches
the skin and the breeze tell it’s time
To go back to
The world of duality,
The legs pull themselves up
And the lip stretches into a smile,
A sigh of unknown truths escapes the being
And freedom readies
To enter into the joy of
Living, amidst
Revelations,
Of accepted bondages,
And of immense realizations

PLANNING TO RE-READ? THINK TWICE.

Recently I happened to read Sanjay Shipahimalani's blog The Joys and Perils of Re-reading and to my awful perception I had also had similar experiences while re-reading a book and had found out that it could be a very demystifying or disappointing experience. But it is not that it happens the same way with all the books. Rather it is worth finding out why it happens with some books and why it is the same wonderful feeling with some other books. For reference; the first time I read the famous Oriya litterateur Prativa Roy's very well known JAGYANSENI (On the life of Draupadi, the lone wife of the five Pandavas from THE MAHABHARAT), I was held mesmerized and enthralled by the understanding and sensitive imagination with which the author had portrayed Droupadi's character. I thought it to be a path-breaking and wonderful creative peace. But, to my dismay, when I read it a second time, five years later, I couldn't go beyond six pages. The writing seemed to be labourious, dragging and full of unnecessary and exaggerated emotional outbursts. But take the example of Arun Joshi's THE FOREIGNER and some of the likes. At least lovers of literature like me can go on reading and re=reading it without the book losing any of its magnetism and romantic charisma.

Sometimes I ponder over the probable reasons to this variant experiences. Most probably some of the books answer or pose some of the eternal queries or touch upon the universal aspects of human existence. So, they invariably speak truths only. And truths cannot tire you because they are what they are, forever. They answer some callings beyond our mundane existence and touch us very deep inside where we rarely reach as worldly being lost in the mad race of life. Those books remain beautiful forever and draw us towards them now and then, and the experience is always like meeting a beloved with love and tender excitement.