Note to myself- Boredom has hit, yet again.
So while I spend my time listening to Eric Clapton and digress the
consideration of objectivity or the lack of it through variety of readings
(short stories by Nikolay Gogol is keeping me interested these days), the fact has
cultivated that abstract and intact are my ongoing relentless struggle with
benign boredom. Now, on one side there are people who make me distraught with
their endless talks of grandiloquent ambitions and sensational career pursuits;
the other side is filled with my assimilation of spiritual garbage that has
lost my enthusiasm and has brought me to a point where I have started asking
the concreteness of all of it.
I have grown up in a land where your credibility
is measured by degree with no consideration of the fact that a certain dog food
goes by the name “pedigree”! You need to grow up in India to understand this
paranoia with having that xyz college brand while having no idea what that
education is all about. It’s the fame derived from clearing some preposterous
entrance exam so that your mother can have a smirk on her face when she talks
about you with her social nest and your father can carry some significant ego
about it. Maybe, I am not a very
ambitious fellow and I certainly do not see the point of going through all this
unnecessary torment when whatever you would like to study is freely available
on Internet or for a modest subscription of a nearby public library. That
implies the only reason you want to have that price and glory tagged education
is because you need a job to sustain yourself. Well, if the whole idea boils
down to that then wasting day in and day out discussing just that is a sheer
waste.
Let’s refresh ourselves and move on a bit
to the spiritual side of life. Here’s a quote from George Harrison (lead
guitarist of The Beatles):
“Krishna actually was in a body as a
person ... What makes it complicated is, if he's God, what's he doing
fighting on a battlefield? It took me ages to try to figure that out, and again
it was Yogananda's spiritual interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita that
made me realise what it was. Our idea of Krishna and Arjuna on the
battlefield in the chariot. So this is the point—that we're in these bodies,
which is like a kind of chariot, and we're going through this incarnation, this
life, which is kind of a battlefield. The senses of the body ... are the
horses pulling the chariot, and we have to get control over the chariot by
getting control over the reins. And Arjuna in the end says, 'Please Krishna,
you drive the chariot' because unless we bring Christ or Krishna or Buddha or whichever of our spiritual guides ... we're going
to crash our chariot, and we're going to turn over, and we're going to get
killed in the battlefield. That's why we say 'Hare
Krishna, Hare Krishna', asking Krishna to come and take over the chariot.”
So anyone who
has not yet read a book by Paramhansa Yogananda should definitely give it a
try. More than anything it’s a treatise on faith and how faith itself is the
miracle. For the last 5-6 years I have underwent a tumultuous ride where my
mind has quizzed and questioned variety of spiritual perspectives. The problem
being that I always wanted to reach somewhere through these self debates
whereas the whole spirituality has been focused on making you contented in the
state you are. To make the state you are in right now a joyous state. The whole
act of surrendering to God or a divine idea or a philosophical ideology is to
rest your mind at some place when its flooded and tired in solving a complex
problem of life. When the mind has rested for a while, its faculties are
renewed and the problem is solved, either through the acts of the renewed
faculties or because time has healed the problem. Hence, the various interpretations
of psychological time. I have come to conclude something- the more one intellectualizes,
the more one moves in mind’s labyrinth. Maybe there is an end, maybe there is
none. But the journey itself is ardently complex leading from one
disappointment to another. In India, there is a lot of emphasis on searching
for a spiritual guide. It is a great phenomena in itself to be in close proximity with a Buddha or a
Krishna but in my own search I have come across none. What I have come across
is poor children standing outside the heavily adorned temples while rich hold
their strict license on God through generous downpour of wealth. None of these
religious facades have been able to address the issue of malnourished children
and acute hunger of that old man sitting calmly in a corner. So what kind of
God are we discussing here? A tyrant one? Well, there’s another option that I
have seen most of the Indians I know have chosen- insensitivity. Blame it on
Karma and endless life cycles and move on with your life to chase that dream to
drive that fancy car or to put on the music and air conditioner and shut the
semi tinted windows in case you already possess a fancy car. Or better still,
not even chase a career but be delusional and believe to be spiritual and
distinct. I have lost the point for such spirituality. I am going to take some
break from that sweet word. I am sure I will re-visit it again.
As you can
see I am at an interesting crossroad where a new direction at the intellectual level is sought. Perhaps,
even that new direction shall become stale once that path would have been
traveled. Perhaps, that’s life- you try to make it interesting everyday while
your own mind makes it boring in few days.
Since we have
had a hard discussion, let’s unwind with this beautiful Beatles song sung as a
tribute by Eric Clapton to George Harrison. Here are two related beautiful moments:
After George
Harrison's death , Dhani Harrison, his son, participated in the Concert
for George on the first
anniversary of George's death. The concert was organized by Eric Clapton and featured some of George's friends and collaborators,
including former Beatles bandmates Paul
McCartney and Ringo
Starr as well as Clapton, Billy
Preston, Ravi
Shankar, Jeff
Lynne, Tom
Petty, Jim
Keltner, and Joe
Brown. Dhani Harrison played backup acoustic guitar
for most of the concert. Before the finale, McCartney relayed to the audience, " With Dhani up on stage, it looks like George
stayed young and we all got old"
On 14 April
2009, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce posthumously
awarded George Harrison a star on the Walk
of Fame. After Olivia Harrison (his wife) gave a short speech
about her late husband, Dhani Harrison uttered the "Hare
Krishna" mantra
