Anniversary

A soft knock... hard knuckles
Who is at this hour?

Wait , my loaded mind

one more year is put on the pile

faithful time loads its bricks

comes like a midnight guest

to pack my years

with restless nothings.

Years come rolled out

like carpets of designed fear

no time to sit or walk

to appreciate the artwork

makes one run to a doc

for a piece of prescription

of pills and tonics like

love lyrics to a cripple.

Anniversaries increase

the quota of pills and doses

we wake up with pills

sleep with tablets of dreams

rise again to be peeled and patched.

Yes, this is  what I am

what you are or will be

knocked out by time’s yearly push.

Life is time’s arithmetic

count as many as they come,

adding futility to your dreams

fly soar shine and fall

time will gather you again

with a number on your chest.

Sabita Sahu

Anniversary

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Time is an indivisible, impalpable dimension of our reality. The ancient Indians thought time was an endless cycle of kalpas and yugas repeating itself in terms of divine eternity. Indians believed that space divides but time unites in its eternal flow everything that happens. Indian culture did not have time-awareness hence there is no sense of history. The Vedas are a vision, a speculative meditation of ‘seen reality’, the world of sight and encounter with space. But later Indians thought of time in the calendar sense. Months, days, tithis and lagna divided time for social use. But mostly we follow time as a vast calendar after Anno Domini and calculate time, record births, deaths and other events. To remember events of the past anniversaries are observed. But no one celebrates the birth anniversaries of the earth as it is an irrelevant given for human drama. We observe anniversaries of national events – Independence, War victories, Nation builders. Personally we observe anniversaries of birth- marriage-death and other events which remind us of joy, pride or deep sorrow.

In the modern world we celebrate almost everything of man for we are now in an assertive phase of human history. Women’s day, Mother’s day, Yoga day have become familiar anniversary celebrations globally. But at the personal level we mostly celebrate birth and marriage anniversaries.  Death anniversaries too are observed but those are a low key affair.  Since life has expanded to embrace a vast reality of organized governance everyone tries to seek his own salvation by his ritualistic practices of living. Each occasion is celebrated, even the anniversary of a disaster. Hiroshima observes the atomic extinction of its population every year on a sombre note. Since joy and sorrow, achievement- disappointment are the two unavoidable binaries of life each occasion is remembered with appropriate emotional involvement.

But generally birth and marriage anniversaries are celebrated with snobbish extravagance. To remember the day you saw the first light is definitely a great feeling. Most people observe this day as a thanks giving day. They visit religious places or relatives dressed in new clothes and other fineries to show they are alive and happy to beat the challenges of the morrow. Those who are rich and so called celebrities they make their birth day bashes media events as if the nation participates in their good fortune.  Glasses are clicked, bottles get emptied and tons of food supplied by nervous liveried men and women in star hotels are swallowed in riotous revelry. Cakes of all sizes, shapes, colours and designs are cut by birthday boys /girls to the chant of happy birthday to you… and thunderous clappings drown the bands. But there are also some ‘ashamed to have been born’ cynics who dissolve their shame in alcohol in lonely dark rooms. The poor too celebrate, austerity and ostentation go on simultaneously in arhythmic beats.

In England any day could be the Queen’s birthday. To award and honour talents in different spheres of life Queen’s birthday is celebrated in traditional royal fashion. Some political hot heads show off vainglory in Saifai fashion like Mulayam Singh and Mayabati wears thousand rupee garlands to match the dazzling diamonds on her person; while some other leaders celebrate birthdays in remote villages alone or with family to show how austere and noble they are. In the bullock cart days of aristocracy some feudal lords celebrated the birthday of their pets –cats and dogs as if a new age of royalty has just dawned on their pawned kingdoms.

Anniversary of any memorable occasion or event is definitely a positive aspect of cultural attitude. The birthday of Gandhiji, Father of the Nation or India’s Freedom from British rule call for national celebration. Similarly personal birthdays or marriage anniversaries are certainly occasions to remember, however, miserable the post- birth, post- marriage days might be. What is needed is sobriety and love of life. Life is nothing but a memory making process. What better memories can there be than birthdays and marriage days? Man comes to the world to live a life, to build and create a world of his own; to create a private sub-system in the larger system over which man has no control. What matters is the satisfaction to have lived to remember the mile stones (not the mill stones) and to carve out a destiny using the past memory for future achievements.

We too are celebrating the First Anniversary of our blog savimuse.blogspot.com today to review what we have left undone and to plan out to do more for the intellectual entertainment of our dear readers. Our Anniversary too is a call for sober confrontation with our emerging reality. Celebrate with us dear readers, we promise to reach your hearts and minds soulfully.

My Muse

    

My muse is in love with god

she offers truth, beauty, rhythm

her ethereal prayers echo

in the darkening void of my heart.

I played with the waves and clouds

prayed for the gas cylinder to be cheap

spread the sheets on the cold beds

brought groceries from daily market

drank coffee at past midnight.

One day my muse woke me up

threw songs and letters at random

I spent the night searching for them

but in the morn I read on my cheek

love god, love life , love poetry.

I laughed aloud and washed it off

washed it from others' plates

all mundane crumbs into the sink:

but poetry came from the gas stove

lyrics rose like incense in the air

I bowed down to my Muse and lo!

I have completed my worship

celebrating love and beauty

I am here after one full year.

Sabita Sahu

Cleanliness

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Culture is a behemoth defying definitions.  But we understand culture both as the life of the body and life of the mind. The pattern of life constituting a society as well as the ideas and imagination expressed in a manner or style comprise culture. But, however, we read culture the most important thing in culture is undisputedly cleanliness. If the life and living of a society is dirty, shabby, or the activities of the mind are prejudicial to accepted values we call that culture unclean. In short, cleanliness of body and mind defines a culture and highlights the refinements of a society. In the context of the Indian society before the foreign aggressors occupied our country and the present day attempts by the government to reintroduce the inherited culture, I may ask how is it this great culture did not emphasize cleanliness? Yes, they wrote the greatest works in philosophy, literature; the Vedas, Upanishads and also the great epics Ramayan and Mahabharat. The Indian mind is universally acknowledged as the most profound of its time. Indian culture had completed its cycle of maturity before the European culture was awakened to a life of the mind. Why then cleanliness was not focused as the primordial foundation of culture?

They built temples, massive architectural masterpieces. They spoke of man’s transformation, plurality, multifocal reality, created myth-magic- mystery of creation but don’t seem to have emphasized the physical cleanliness of man. Can spiritual cleanliness be a realizable essence in an unclean environment? After seventy years of freedom and democratic self rule we still argue-‘ Ganga is dirty but pure’. Can purity which involves the spirit exist in an unclean body and shabby environs? I’m not sure.

 Go to any temple in Beneras, Puri , Mathura, Ujjain or Gaya you will see filth, flies and fluttering litter. Go to any river you may not feel like washing your hand in it, leave alone taking a bath. Go to any village you will see at early dawn and dusk illiterate, half- literate and even educated women go in small groups for stealthy defecation after suppressing the urge for hours. Men, however, prefer to go for open defecation without a slight sense of shame. Families which can afford to build latrines or toilets would argue that going out for morning ablutions serves the purpose of a morning walk and also breathing free morning air. The village roads are usually meant for the defecation of cattle and other quadrupeds whose epicortex is almost nonexistent. Fakir Mohan Senapati’s  Asuradighi  the only tank for the villagers (in Chha Mana Atha Guntha) is meant for all unclean practices of the body and mind. How is it such a great culture and primordial civilization did not have a sense of hygiene - one really wonders. And when you think of ecology or environment consciousness illustration are too few to write home about in our culture.

My Dream

For god’s sake leave me to dream

never scan nor shock them

with your dark realities.

My dreams are cloud flakes

float and travel to far away skies

where stars come to hold hands

and dance fancifully to create and bless.

My dreams illuminate my world

small, dark and crowded

lift me to silent meditation

where beauty and order reigns.

My unsung hymns tune up

the omkar of my heart

my dreams play the symphony

on notes and pitches of soul.

My dreams never fade or dissolve

my desires stuff my undying  dreams

to carve out and accomplish

a creamy morn of new hope.

I never desire Eden

where the first sin threw man

down to suffer and die

I dream of a bright day

in the thoughts of my loved ones.

Sabita Sahu

April Again

What made Eliot write, ‘April
is the cruellest month’, I don’t know.
April is the burnt out end of spring,
rivers go dry, wells turn hell holes.
pipelines get hot, naked wires
say touch me not like
a coy woman in period.

Buckets , pots , vessels queue up
middle aged women jostle to be first
before street taps oozing drops
municipal tankers move in lame hope
on the tar of parched roads
well dressed men create scenes
before the flash bulbs of media crowd.

At night sweaty faces in candlelit room
whisper prayers for the God of light
newly weds start quarelling
on the colour of the bed sheet.
.

April returns every year
the harbinger of younger brothers
May and June come to char
the last remains of patience.

I now know what Eliot meant
bathed by the sun in halfway street.

News

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

From the horse back messenger to the present day 24x7 news channel man has travelled a long distance in time. There was a phase in man’s evolution when communication was perhaps not even conceived of as a human necessity. But gradually when existence was stabilized and clusters of civilization were formed, social relationship and curiosity to know things grew. Small kingdoms and chieftain territories necessitated information about enemy movements, epidemics, famines, floods and spying activities. All these required collection and transmission of information. The ruling class depended on these kinds of information to protect their kingdoms and also to cover the people. Sending royal missives was an officially recognized practice. The messenger like the modern ambassador enjoyed political immunity. At the personal level people depended on hearsay, rumours and royal proclamations. But these activities never came under the category we call news today.

News, as per the Oxford English Dictionary is to give information about recent events. But technology and the news craze of modern people have made it instantaneous information about an event or situation or statement. Even before the newsworthiness of an event or happening is realized transmission of it is made. Before the electronic media took the centre stage the news paper and later the radio supplied all the news of the world. People waited for the morning news papers and also for the news timings of the radio. Today the reach of the radio is so sweeping that the Prime Minister of India chose the radio for his Man Ki Baat a la the Obama mode. Need for national, global news rises every day. In the rural sector the local news is as important as the national news. As the life shaping, behavior setting informations come from all directions. Advertisements also have great information value. The electronic media, however, takes the cake for size as the television brings the world in all its colours and dimensions to the drawing room. The TV even makes news. The breaking news is like a film trailor creating anticipation. And above all the smart phone in the hands of people vibrates the news noisy world.

But the 24x7 news channels explode all kinds of information in such a loud manner that it is difficult to decide which information is conducive for a healthy orientation of the reality around. Channels have their own social, religious and political bias. The fourth estate is now more than a watch dog of the other three pillars of our democratic polity. In India the freedom of the press is guaranteed by the constitutional government. One may say the Indian news industry is too free to air truth as a self-perceived imaginary without checks and balances. The camera phone in the hands of the common people with uncommon  interest in intrigue often send newsy videos which ultimately shame the media houses to withdraw calmly before they catch the attention of the public.  Often the political parties send fake videos to captive channels and they go viral raising a storm in gossip tea cups. In the name of investigative journalism at times truth is unearthed and presented before the viewers with some legitimate pride. But the veracity of the truth thus unearthed many a time go unverified. The film stars and cricketers are media obsessions. They play a juicy item for almost twenty four hours and more for their TRP. The death of Sridevi, a notable actress, was played by all English and most Hindi news channels as a murder mystery. It was later shown as a natural death. But the Sherlock Holmes’ of media channels came out with evidence-forensic, circumstantial and even supposedly ocular- to present Sridevi’s death as premeditated murder. The Arushi murder case was so messed up by the news channels and the police that the CBI in the end couldn’t find any evidence to prove anyone guilty beyond reasonable doubts.

But the news too has great entertainment value. When TV journalists pursue a case – be it political or otherwise – they create suspense, suspicion and denoument which might earn a grim smile even from Agatha Christie. But the viewer feels he/ she is taken for a ride when the media plays judge, jury and executioner. Media trials often appear like judicial pantomime which reduces the news value to fanciful mockery. Every evening the same faces, the so called spokespersons of political parties and journalists are called for debates on national issues. The noisy illogic and prejudicial statements are an attack on our stoical patience.

But the news channels often find out the truth and the missing links which are glossed over or missed by the investigating agencies. They also reveal facts suppressed by governments and always stay ahead of newsmakers. If some sobriety tempers the noise our news channels can be lauded as true advocates of the mute public.