In search of divinity

  In my dream I knew I was dead and found myself in a hall. As I looked around I found myself surrounded by people in white sheets. When I looked closely I recognised them as my friends from my boarding school. When at the age of 9 I had spent my first night in unknown surroundings away from my parents these very friends had clustered around me offering me companionship and affection. Now there is one thing I can't do in real life, and that is sit squat legged in Padmasana. I had lost this art in school since it was run on British pattern and we rarely if ever sat on the ground.  A thought struck me that if I was dead perhaps I would be able to do it now. I found that I was able to sit in Padmasana quite comfortably. I started chanting the 'Maha Mrityunjaya Jap' which seeks liberation from the cycle of birth and death.  Seeing that there was no perceptible change in my circumstances I started looking around the hall. I noted that the wall paper was rather tacky. I said to m

                      The recent Jaipur Litfest was graced by renowned Indian authors such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Vikram Chandra and Amish Tripathi, ex ambassadors Hussain Haqqani, Robert Blackwell and Shyam Saran and Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen and Harold Varasmus. It made for a fascinating intellectual feast and one was hard pressed to choose which session to attend. Finally, we evolved the tactic of visiting sessions at random and in the process stumbled into   a presentation by Jim Al Khalili, a Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey.      We learned that  Jim Al Khalili has  written the book, ‘Black holes, Worm holes and Time Machines’. His session was infused with his passion for physics so much so that faint memories of physics classes in School were rekindled. Newton postulates  that time and space are constants and are the foundation on which his Laws of Motion rest. Much of the physical world was explained by him and he is credited with being the harbinger of the Industr

Do Dogs Have Souls? This question bothers me. And this is why. Zeus was the pick of the litter – a bouncy, chubby, six week old Labrador for whom the basket I had carried all the way from Delhi turned out to be too small. He seemed petrified at being away from his mom and by the sights and sounds at the railway station and quietly puked – a white yoghurty substance. When I took him inside the rail compartment he took one look at me as if to say ‘Let us sleep over the problem’, turned his face towards the backrest and curled up to sleep. Not for long though. An hour later he woke me up asking to go to the bathroom. Two trips later, I just spread newspapers over myself put him on top of me and told him to use it whenever he felt the urge. And he did –throughout the night. My 11 year old daughter was at home waiting eagerly for her birthday present. Much like Draupadi this present was soon shared by our whole family. But he was closest to me for a variety of reasons- he was too bi

The Sea of Consciousness             There is the Urdu song 'Faza bhi hai jawan jawan'  from the 1982 movie Nikaah. It's about the second honeymoon of a young lady where everything is the same yet different. And so it was with me during my second visit to Kailash Manasaravor. I had made the visit in Aug 2017 (for an account of the visit see http://chiragdeep.blogspot.in/2017/09/a-visit-to-kailash-manasarovar-part-i.html ). And here I was doing it all over again. Why was I doing it again? When Edmund Hilary was asked why he climbed Mount Everest he simply replied that it was because it was there. What was unsaid is that the mountains especially the Himalayas are addictive. Was that my only motivation? Not really. A gradual process of inner transformation had started after my first visit. On my father's urging, I first stopped eating eggs. The next habit to go was alcohol.  Meanwhile,  various synchronicities led to my getting initiated into Kriya Yo

    The Heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.... Blaise Pascal      ‘Tell us the one unforgettable experience of your life’ was the question thrown out of the blue by my seniors. It was fresher’s night at the Dept of Electronics & Comn Engineering, IIT Kharagpur. I was a little old for a fresher but I had been there and done that having been to war torn nations, swept away by a Himalayan Stream and so on. However, to my surprise I  found myself responding , ‘The day the pretty girl in my Class who I was in love with all the fervour that only a 15 year old can have, walked up to me  and said ‘Do you have last year’s question papers?’’.  That night the moon was rounder, brighter and the cool night breeze carried a fragrance that I still can’t forget.           Now I am a lot older and wiser – and yet still long for the unbearable sweetness of existence when I was in love or infatuation or whatever you want to call it.  From where did it come? How d

‘I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;  I fled Him, down the arches of the years;  I fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind ……. ’.           This poem by Francis Thompson describes my existence from the ages of 12 to 37. I consciously tried to avoid God all my adult life, starting from when I was 12 years old  and ironically just after  my Sacred Thread ceremony. I denied him totally and absolutely as I got fascinated by Science and reason and logic. All the rituals just made no sense. At the age of 20 I was on top of the world having secured a good respectable job but still felt a strange sense of uneasiness, of having missed out on my true potential.  Now it was the turn of my brother to undergo the Thread ceremony. Perhaps, the Head  Priest could sense my cockiness and doubt. During a lull in the proceedings he casually asked me if I performed the Gayatri Jap every day. I told him I didn’t believe in it.  To which he replied,’You will never succeed unless y