Monday 20 August 2012

On my morning walk today, thoughts slipped into the technique involved in judo. It is based on being alert, agile and ego-less. You have to know what meditation is to excel in it. I have not had the fortune to learn it, but I can understand its principle. It is about being calm and quickly adjusting your position within any storm of aggression from outside, so that you act as the fulcrum turning the very same aggressive force down. And you do it without any emotion. There is no anger. If there is anger you lose your alertness and agility and you cannot quickly adjust your position to be the fulcrum. And if you do not come to that position at the right moment you will get hurt. You will lose the match. Then you are not a good judo player. If you do not know meditation you cannot be good at judo. Even a frail man can bring down a giant if he is alert and agile. You have to be a nobody to be alert and agile, because, when you are a 'body' with all the involved ego, you have a certain amount of mass, which is an impediment in being alert, agile and quick.

*****

Thursday 16 August 2012

silence

all sounds exist in this silence.

the kingfisher
blinking
into the pond
the wind swishing
the rain rushing
the feet
pounding the path home
the breath pausing
for breath
and the bell and the bleating
of the goat, the cawing of the crows...

*****


Friday 10 August 2012

Parameswaran

Venu—reading a book, understanding just a little of what the writer had conceived.
Venu—brushing his teeth, enjoying the sprinkle from the shower, soap in the eyes.
Venu—having his breakfast, upma with mango pickles, saliva sprouting.
Venu—driving to work, flowing with the traffic, keeping safe distance, seeing everything…

I feel so alert today, hovering a few feet above myself and watching
what I am doing, like watching a person not myself
negotiating a world in which I have no part and yet
someone by this name I know is playing out a role and I see his emotions
those are not mine
and feel how he feels when the wind blows on his face and hear what he hears
when they honk the horn…
—this person who is not me…

This takes me to something I had noticed in a childhood friend. Parameswaran is his name. He has this habit of referring to himself in third person only.

“When Parameswaran was in the town today, a sudden thought struck him. Why not buy a kite for Venu,” I remember him saying once, giving me a kite.

He is some 10 years older than me.
It is said that when I was a very small kid—just beginning to walk, perhaps—I had urinated in a glass that was there on the kitchen floor.
And Parameswaran took a good gulp of it thinking it was coconut water, emptied into the glass when mother broke coconut for use in the kitchen.

“Parameswaran still remembers the taste of Venu's urine,” he would say whenever we meet, even after many years. It is not he, but someone by the name Parameswaran who still remembers that old incident.
It is always someone else, a third person, who is experiencing everything.

I remember him once falling from a tree and spraining his ankle badly. Other boys playing with him surrounded him and started trying their crude methods at setting the sprain right, holding him by the toe and shaking the leg and twisting the injured ankle this way and that.

He howled out, writhing in pain: “Hoooo-hooo-huhuhooo…you will kill Parameswaran! Please leave Parameswaran alone!”

And he was also giggling with merriment over Parameswaran’s plight, laughing, even as he was screaming out in pain.

*****