Ennamo Vagaiyay Varuguthu Maane

I was prophetic in saying many years ago that authors tend to forget about blogs that they write with no concrete intention in mind. This very blog is only updated in fits and starts, when I remember such a thing existed on some occasion. I think I have come to an important junction in my life and one that deserves to be written out about here. School ended last month. It was a place I found myself secure in. I am currently in that liminal space, where I think we all find ourselves in between big phases in our lives, pondering over big questions, wondering what to make of our lives and what we have made of it already. It's frightening, energising, and enlivening all at once. I have so many things in mind right now—I'm spoilt for choice. I had decided long ago the things I should do once I become an adult—learn to drive, start going to the gym, seek a guru in music. I'm also deciding what to study in college at the moment. I have two broad ideas in mind; one involves a purel...

One may think of this as a continuation of my earlier poem, When the sparrows learned to sing again . He stands in the way of a King. The gulmohar, a foot thick, towering-tall, has promised to speak to us today. Does he want to hear? "Fie," he cries. "Begone, I would hear no such thing, for what does the gulmohar know of the mountains, or the sea, Or the cold that descends unto one in the hills here east." "The tree is no scholar," I say, "but it is to you that he cries. Unto you he calls, confesses; unto you does he bring words of great meditations." He obliges. "What is spring to the land of the axe-wielder?" The gulmohar is enraged. "I spit at your seasons, the four creations of your masters. Here, there is only rain, and no rain. The river is a quiet one, but today, she cannot but tell her children, the waterfowl, of the Malabari spring. There are two, one comes and goes, leaving the laburnums a golden yellow. The second comes ...

Why go if you know what lies beyond? Come, come, come to the shade of the white sky and the canopy. Come, for beside us, rivers run from the mountains into the sea. The water sees us, it wishes us well.  Not a sound does the river make that we do not hear. The canopy is quiet, fear not, it does not have a single secret. Why must you hear everything? I ask. He simply must. To not hear is to go. To go though he knows what lies beyond. To not hear is to leave the shade of the white sky and the canopy, he scoffs. Stay, I say, and hear. These boughs have no stories to tell. The river only wishes and wails. The birds are quiet; They would speak any other day. Only I speak today. And only you hear. ---- I have spoken. You have heard and have solemnly ignored the canopy, the rivers, and the birds. What have you learned? The windows have opened, he says. The windows have opened, and beauty has itself incarnated in your words. Crossing these banks, innumerable sparrows have come and perched ...

Being inside for the past two weeks on account of the COVID-19 outbreak picking up steam in my part of the world, I learned some things I never could straying outside. Among these is the beauty of the world seen from a window. Writing this poem, which is my first one in years, I was reminded of Mirza Ghalib's famous ghazal bazicha-e-atfal   hai duniya mere aage . bazicha-e-atfal hai duniya mere aage hota hai shab-o-roz tamasha mere aage ... go hath ko jumbishen nahin, aankhon mein to dam hai rehne do abhi saghar-o-mina mere aage (My translation, with some of my own poetic elements. I invite Urdu native speakers to correct me.) The world to me is a playground of little children. Night comes, and then day, and their play comes about. My hands are lifeless, but in my eyes, there is a little breath. Leave me be, let the glass and wine come about me. -------- Spring has brought the flowers to bloom, but there is nobody to see them. Outside, a sultry rain has ...

This February, I cooked up a list of resolutions which with great difficulty became  a post on my Malayalam blog . Quite a lot has happened since; for example, I'll admit that my Malayalam was terrible when I wrote that post and that it has improved ever since. I thought I should write a post on how well I have lived up to these "expectations". Expectation I: Take my studies seriously . When I wrote that post, I was indeed another person who did absolutely nothing of relevance between hearing the date of an exam and walking into the exam hall. I think I spend more of my time these days studying. Expectation II: Learn about and do new things . I don't know. I learned Urdu, to read and write Tamil, picked up a bit of Persian, studied music and gained an audience ( gasp  maybe). I also gained some philosophic insight into myself, my religion, and needless to say, my religious fervour has changed from what it was last year. Expectation III: Don't let a...

I have come to conclude that it is the fate of a majority of blogs, diaries, journals, and the like to be written in great detail once the habit starts, and almost entirely forgotten about in due time. This blog, following two lengthy posts written for the sake of writing, has been left without an author since May. It is December now, and the year is drawing to a close. As I do year after year, I have kicked a few New Year's Resolutions up, with absolutely no pondering over their completion. Maa phaleshu kadacana , after all. I have not lost my habits: my sentences persevere to be long, and annoying to most. Perhaps very little has happened, and even less that deserves to be written out on a blog. Or has something happened? In fact, I wanted to script a memoir, an account of my life in the past months. On the reason for my hiatus (as distinct from the conclusion from the first sentence in this post), on what it has been like for Aravind Suresh, and on his continuing journey towar...

सर्वोपनिषदो गावो दोग्धा गोपाल नन्दनः ।  पार्थो वत्सः सुधीर्भोक्ता दुग्धं गीतामृतं महत् ॥   All the Upanishads are cows, and Gopala is the cowherd boy milking them. Arjuna is a calf. Wise men drink the exalted milk, the nectar of the Gita. There are hardly any Hindus in the world who have never been asked, or even pleaded, to read the Bhagavad Gita. The "Divine Song", as it is literally, is an extract of 700-odd verses from the Mahabharata , one of the two great Indian epic poems. Attributed to the divine author Veda Vyasa, the Gita touches on a lot of topics, all centred around the disillusionment of a prince when he was asked to fight his cousins. But once you read the Gita, you will realise why all those people told you to read it. I experienced this myself. Believe me when I say this, the Gita is no different from what our babas and purohits  claim it to be. It is pure nectar, and to know it for real, you've got to read it! I wouldn't probably have said...