Connecting the dots

While in Palolem, in Goa I saw a man one day practicing with a bow and arrows, on a target made out of a tree stump. As our eyes met, he did a Namaste and asked me where I was from. That's a question not many outsiders ask I thought and I smiled wondering if he would understand if I told him from where I was, or where I was not and if at all it would make a difference. To my surprise he elaborated you see India is a big country and every part has something to add to the whole picture. I asked him where he was from & he said he was from Norway, staying in Goa for 6 months now, trying to find himself and his God and practicing archery while at it. He says that here, in spite of being so many or perhaps because of being so many, you have not lost your way..

I mused to myself and told him that while, outsiders often come here looking for God, for a way, many of our young have lost that way and in fact look at the west for 'upgrading' themselves. He looked at me quizzically and said "perhaps in this haze of drugs, of spiritualism, of diverse people, I shall find something..or maybe when that haze lifts..it shall be emptiness, till that time I shall try."..I asked and said, "like your arrows trying to break the block of wood to find more wood?"..he smiled and said, " See, you are one of the dots that join & it is precisely for this, I am here"..Spooky, Philosophy, ..India?

( Image courtesy Google)

The pursuit of knowledge..

The pursuit of knowledge, of desire seems to be bizarre in its very wanting, in its madness, considering the thirst that it brings about. And yet in some strange way it makes you let go of everything that you have learnt, accumulated over the years and hoarded thinking they were milestones, that were the guiding lights of your life. And yet often this very urge makes islands out of you from those very people to whom you have been clinging all you life..in whom you have seen relations, love and normalcy. Then what is it you would say, about this thirst that makes you do the wildest things that you didn't think yourself capable of..that you had no idea existed within you. This total surrender to something so powerful that it is like a macabre..a slow dance of death awaiting the light of dawn when one is to be killed having had one’s fill of knowledge, power and sustenance thus. I remember an instance when I watched the sea from very close quarters at night, something about its eeriness struck me as fascinating.. while I did like the sea during the day, at night it was all pervasive, strong and overwhelming. I decided to walk towards it, to feel its waves engulf me and talk to me, to hear what its depths had to say. And yet I knew that if I entered I might not be able to swim back, indeed I could not. I did not enter the sea that night, neither did I walk towards it, I sat there looking at it. It brought to me shells, sick things from different shores. I guess I sat all night dissecting them, wondering if it would bring about that elusive something that I so desperately sought, that I knew was in store for me. And then I felt a foamy caress..of the mighty sea itself..it was dawn, the night had passed..the sea seemed to say..'in me lies all that you need to find and more..but don’t drown in me, I hate corpses..I shall give it back..even throw it back on land and then you shall lie there and be eaten by the crabs running hither and thither and be sniffed at by dogs and men at night for experiments that I know not of. Look for in me the wise-ness of the centuries and feel in me the impermanence of the now..life is but thus.' I went home wet, tired and somehow satisfied..I had become an island unto myself and yet not.

© 2011 Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury

( Image courtesy Google)