Poseidon's Darling

Prafulla kumar Mohanty

I was in a 'boat house', that is an upturned boat raised on the fore, sides covered with plastic sheets propped by bamboo sticks. Often fisherman hit the sack there to go early to the sea for fishing. I had to run into an empty boat house as the Rain's fury increased after 9 A.M.I was determined to spend the night alone on the shore to watch the Bay of Bengal at Konark last Sunday. I was away from the usual haunt  of tourists by almost a mile , almost to an abandoned part of the shore. My day was spent in the temple  watching the filigree on stones, the time eaten, saline wind licked, noseless, handless damsels imagining their pristine forms and fantasizing with them somewhere beyond Eden. Watching the sea in the dark starless night and the beating drops of rain mocked by the roaring waves through a small opening in the boat my face and hair were drenched almost to blindness. But this stubborn me refused to withdraw from the scene to my own endless fantasies. Time was withdrawn from my dynamics. Only dark roar, dashing waves and long withdrawing rumble of  the waves and the lashing rain were my focal points. May be after what  seemed like a millennium, the rains relented to a steady drizzle. My tired body's message was signalled to my eyes, the lids dropped only to open with a start. But what did I hear! Some sound like shoes on wet sand, soft rhythmic but smart, accomplished by the mild splash of water filled shoes ! Who could it be in this witching  hour of rain soaked night! Then materialized a shape, the shadowy figure was shapely advancing towards the sea just about ten yards away from my houseboat which in the meantime was flooded. She held an umbrella. Was she real or a hallucinatory deviation of  my fantasy!

Has someone, a gilted lover or a life- frustrated women come to put an end to her life? I was disturbed. But when she stepped back to avoid the rushing flow of the wave  I was reassured. Why should someone come with an umbrella if death is in her mind? Is she alone or others are with her; other romantic companions? I tried to see in either direction. No, no one is with her. She is  alone, on her own. Is she an Indian or a foreigner ? Such fancy to enjoy the rain lashed sea  at the dead of night is not very common even with our elitist mod, fashionable women. May be she is an exception. Yes, may be...but but what's she doing? She kicked off the shoes as if kicking the drizzle happy heavy air and stood barefoot. Then she folded the umbrella and dropped it on the sand. What! will she strip next I was bemused despite my condition. She opened her wet hair. Watching from behind I could faintly notice her figure, not slim or plump but like a hyphen between them. The wet pyjama-kurta clung to her body and she looked in good shape. Her broad shoulders, plum buttocks, pillars of legs, the v of her back and the pinnacle of bushy  hair  fired my imagination. Then she raised her arm over her head and said something which I could  not decipher. But in a namaskar posture she turned 360 degrees muttering something . And I saw her frontal figure when  she turned towards me. In that split second I saw her oval face closed eyes and beautiful body move away in a stance of prayer. Was she praying  for some dead soul? My guess was wrong...

She again turned towards the sea. This time she almost danced. What she spoke I can't say but I imagine she said:

"O' mighty ocean, O 'Baruna! Am I not your paramour for eternity I was your first lover Euronemo like I emerged from the eternal space to envelope you in my passionate embrace. You swelled , widened and became large to accommodate my for I am vast whatever  be my shape. You are my life element  I am your lover  for without you I have no life. I am your lover in all ages and climes. And you could not hold me in your arms and released me to the gods, demons and men. Since then your complexion is dark , blue , green and you roar in agony for me . I come to you everywhere. I am your essence, beautiful, graceful, songful, lifefull but I too am nothing. You roar away your agony but I cannot even whimper. I swallow my tears and my stomach rumbles with love. Can you now embrace me? Can  you hold my elegance in your heart? No you can't move for if you do you will destroy life. Be there and see me. I have come to kiss you wild...

When I returned from my closed -eyes monologue I saw only blankness. She was gone, Was she my lost love or Poseidon's? Only she knows.

Freedom

Are you not happy  I am away

you can't taunt me with your jibes

at my non participation in your

god forsaken banal fantasies

riding the Pegasus of your dreams.

I am not chained by the ebb tide

the repetition of forward backward

which I have watched at midnight

pitying the sea's tight routine

I am free on the sands away from

your frowning lessons on every thing

free to move in the lord's precincts

without your overlording fancies.

I am free of the demands of others

their frowns of disapproval of my ways

I dance stepping out to marriage parties

eating at will dreaming of all

who made me cloistered toy

now I know who I am undefined

I am myself in gods territory.

Sabita Sahu

Everything Is Fine

Everything is fine
I guess, we all love to listen.

Parents get solace 

when far away children say

'everything is fine'.

Cuts, wounds or chronic

disease is half cured

when the doctor says

'everything is fine'.

Heartbroken lovers overcome

their reckless scars, when

a mellifluous voice whispers

'everything is fine'.

When you feel like giving up

the inside drowning defeat

suddenly ignites the

positive frame of mind

'everything is fine'.

When my  love says he spent

nights in wakefulness

celebrating with shadows

and voluptuous imagination

away somewhere in ecstasy

'everything is fine'.

When my own people

turn their face away

and none calls me for dinner

leaving  me alone in my study

and go away to see a

night show- for me

'everything is fine'.

Sabita 

Inevitability

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Death is an inevitable component of life for  without it life is incomplete. But is birth inevitable? This question is a pastime of a polemicist. He will argue till he goes blue in the face that this earth is meant for life meant for all forms of birth. The amoeba to the Homo Sapien, the grass blade to the beautiful rose, the thorn bush to the snake all are born on this earth inevitably. The earth's ecology balances the sweet and bitter, the calm and the violent, the meek and the wild, the ambrosiac and the poisonous in her display of the creative system. 

Like the full moon and the new moon, light and dark birth and death are inevitable. if this balancing of life and death is an inevitable process of nature we can well understand why we have joy and sorrow, youth and old age , love and separation, laughter and tear etc, binaries of contrastive irresolution, which perpetually engage us with our reality. Man has busied himself right from the first flush of life to fight the contrarian dialectics without finding an acceptable solution. For this reason only arguments never cease, debates are never resolved, sorrow never ends. He fights hunger, disease and death: And how? He launches a never ending war  against all these life denying elements which are inevitably present in the human condition. The fight against death too seems to be an inevitable component of life . Is this also an inevitable built in factor of the entire process of inevitability?

This is the original sin of all our problems : We have to fight this inevitability. who created this inevitability of infructuous fight? Man thought it was God who for his own sadistic pleasure has made nature the vast and beautiful stage for our inevitable acrobatics of all varieties. Restlessly we fight to win our battles against the elements which every moment change the dynamic of our logic. If I love a woman and cannot have her I must elope with her only to cause a Trozan War. If  I cannot muster courage to forcibly take away what I love most for my soul's solace I may have to spend the rest of my life on a hilltop in meditation on futility thereby wasting a  life inevitably. If I desire another's territory I attack, unsure of victory, but attack I must to conquer my inevitable and unseen enemies. If I die people will call me  hero , if I return in one piece garlands will weigh me down while my jealous internal enemies will plot for my fall. Caesar would die saying 'et tu Brute'.  Destiny of man is determined by this inevitability of man's dream to conquer his 'enemies'. The dream is also inevitably born with man for he who does not dream is no man. This dream gives him the energy to fight, at times his own instincts.

Inevitability is recognised by the human intellect as divine determinism. Man is born, some people argue and rightly so, with a pre-determined destiny. This leads often to fatalism and consequent inaction and surrender to forces above. Man's mythic imagination structuralizes a post-mortem world which regulates man's dream and his fighting instinct. He simply atones for his unremembered sins of a previous birth, a life lived somewhere of which he has no memory. He runs to astrologers to know in advance the morrow. Astronomy stems from fatalism and it studies the luminosities  above and their effect on man on earth. Those who believe in fate   believe in a pre scripted life. And this belief reduces the strength of mind to fight against the 'enemies' and dismisses dreams. Man becomes an instrument on which  unseen fingers play a tune. He does not become an agent in the earth which is a theatre of becoming. But the world today has dispelled all kinds of determinism ( except in the world of physics where theories of the Super String are now raising doubts) although the religions still maintain their strange hold on man's free will, the will that denies inevitability.

Nothing in the world is inevitable, except death which completes life. We make things, ask questions dream of absurd things and pursue them with all our energies. If we fail our efforts are to blame. If we succeed our efforts, intellect, tenacity of purpose should be lauded. Man is the cause of all happenings in the life on earth. His fight to defeat death is on, death in all its manifestations. One day the Homosapien will be Homodeus. Man should fight inevitability by his will to make things happen for He is the Maker of Everything.

Nets

Between the Internet and Net

I stand , move around worlds

one real loaded with factitude

the other entangled with truths

but the real is unreal,

the truth is deceptive:

life nets me more I try

to extricate myself, I bind unwinded.

Between the image and the event

I stand confused transfixed

unsettled by my desire although

I know not what I need :

when he speaks of love

I stare at him without response

what is love, a mango to eat

or an Eve moment of self deception?

He says I am everything to him

the globe with the canopy of stars

events, truths, words and silence,

I go to the internet to understand

but fall back into the net ,

the key ring gets stuck when

I try to take in his message

I'll break the internet

and make an 'O' of the WWW

I'll cut the net, bite it off :

but will love give me food

and a shelter or the open sky

the green earth to deck myself

with words that bloom like flowers?

What Ails Our Universities !

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Has anyone heard of a new invention or discovery coming out of an Indian University recently or anytime during the last 50 years? But we have heard and seen campus disturbances, teacher's unrest strikes and sine die closures. Jawaharlal Nehru University, Hyderabad University and Aligarh Muslim University were in the news for all wrong reasons. In JNU, a University established by Nehru, one of the greatest Indian minds, for excellence in research and new ideas was  mired in politics of a divisive kind. Certain student leaders  like Kanhaiya Kumar and others discussed with uncanny passion how to bring about the disintegration of India. Other student groups representing opposing political views clashed with the Tukde Tukde gang ( a sobriquet coined by other interested parties) and the great JNU came almost to a stand still. Dalit uprising and leftwing combative politics over the death of Rohit Vemula held the University hostage to activities which are least academic. Similarly the Aligarh Muslim University had its share of contribution to academic confusion over a Jinna portrait. No heartening news about a new book or even a tool or a medicine ever came from our Universities during the post-Independence years. We are proud of our Universities, the  IITS and IIMS and legitimately so. The students coming out of these hallowed institutions have been recognized all over the world. But how are they different from other professionals without contributing to the society's ease of living? Cheap and effective medicines for diabetes,  superior aeroengines or automobile engines or new methods in heart surgery are still imported from the so-called advanced world. I do not want to deprecate the indigenous things available here but our entire defence system is 64 percent Russian and the rest American or French. Even Israel with a population of a few lakhs produces things and ideas with their less number of Universities whereas we have so many technological institutes which merely dispense degrees and certificates.

When prospective employers are asked about our University products, most of them say that  our engineers are unemployable, our graduates are not fit to be even clerks and our doctors are not properly skilled. There was a time when Ravenshaw college ( now university) alone produced good number administrators, poets, scholars. Today all the Universities of Odisha put together do not produce even a quarter of that number. A University embraces all the knowledge of the world as its province and tries  to expand that province by its own contribution. The present brand of politicians ruling the country are proud of the Vedic culture and the ancient knowledge of the epic times. Some say that the Puspak Biman was something like a modern  aeroplane . Well prove it and bring the theoretical content before the world? If Ganesha illustrates plastic surgery of the Vedic past well theorize it properly for the acceptance of the world community. We have to come out of our past fixations for the world  and its values and properties change moment by moment.

The University is the place where ideas are born. A historian or economist should not only discuss what Marx or Keynes have said but think of the present situation of India and the world and frame new questions for further pursuit. How to solve the water crisis in India? - This is not a political question. This question should be asked in the Science laboratories of the Universities. Knowledge is no more mere power in the hands of a few people . Knowledge should be used by the scientists and specialists in the Universities to serve the needs of man in the here and now and in the hereafter.

I admit that the population pressure is felt in all Universities. We have fewer teachers, inadequate laboratories but we must remember that Pencillin was invented not in Cavendis Laboratory but in a small room. Darwin did not work in any great lab nor did the Indian thinkers invent Zero and Infinity in Harvard or in any Ivy League Institution.

The University does not mean an imposing building and well equipped labs and research facilities. It is like an Ashram where the Guru matters for he holds the universe in his palm to show it to the future of mankind. Campus politics is the bane of our Universities, The Universities must now purge themselves of this malaise and start new ways of thinking and looking at things.  The University must take over the authority of power by knowledge, invention and discovery.

Rickshawalla!!

Be it sunny or rainy day

chilly or dusty noon

he forces his feet against

mud stone or rubbish

pushes the peddle to drive

all our weights to our places.

When sits blank waiting

for a customer, lights a bidi

with five rupees in hand

rushes  to the aahar point.

Life revolves like the wheels

he pushes  panting for breath,

takes men and women

the sick and the vain

to homes, hospitals and graves

till his bone gives up

in time's cruel mischief.

He too lives, survives

raises a family loves kids

runs for them from dawn

to midnight without rest

he too is a man like us

only a bit more human

more or less...

Sabita Sahu