BitterSweet...

Kicking out the enchanting summer, came in the Colours, for now I was thinking yet another wonderful summer came to an end...
and the depressing winter, more dark and less light days takes in the pride dominating all the sunshine :(

But then the Autumn is a complete mood lifter - which gives me the sense of some happiness to enjoy the fall - the colours, where in all the trees like maples and oaks undergo a seasonal change...they are bright and ripened and before they wither away...!
Yes, indeed, its such a delight to see the golden, pink, orange red... the subtle colours of maples and oaks...blushing and smiling and giving away the last love for the year...

Everyday I walk down the streets from home to office, I admire in awe, the beauty of these trees and their adaptability to save energy during winters when there is less sunlight... for me who loves both science and colours,
this definitely made me happy and smile with glee... And then decided to vist, "Westonbirt Arboretum" before the winds roar high until the leaves fall off and the tree stands bare in the dark...

"Westonbirt Arboretum" - ranks number 1 place in Britain to visit the Autumn colours... This National Arboretum is managed by the Forestry Commission and reading the reviews about this place on net and also seeing the pictures on Facebook, I could not really wait long to go there...
It showed about 2:30 hrs of journey from where we live, its situated in Gloucester near Bath Road... but no matter the distance, I wanted to witness the heap of colours...and the very thought of it made my heart to rejoice!

So we started on a weekend morning by 10ish, reached there by 2 in the afternoon... within sometime managed to get into the arboretum , following the map we could see hoards of colourful tree... Started gazing deeply, could see the divinity in the trees...I was seizing every moment to capture the colours, really could not stop myself from engrossing in this fantastic beauty..! Words never make justice... I say, one has to really feel it by seeing it!

One particular path called, "Circular Colours" or something was spectacular...There were so many trees all of them unique and beautiful - Acer Glade, Japanese Maples, Birches, Oaks etc...
It was just colours and colours everywhere... As if God painted them Gold, Red, Pink, Gold... :)

If colours were one side, the other side was boulevard of tall huge trees... a really mind-blowing view... all I did was to stand there and let my eyes n heart have the fun!
There were loads of fallen leaves, loved (as always) the soft walk on these fallen Autumn leaves making rustling and crunching noise and loved the way it felt like -  a bit of cushion :)

In the midway we stopped, rested on a bench-chair had our home made wraps and the amazing home made Indian chai!!! definitely added and elated our trip of Colours, a complete treat to eyes!
Managed to cover about 60% of the reserve by the end of the day, as its very huge could not really capture it completely, but this is one of the best places I have visited so far, If you like colours, the smell of woods, the sound of crunching leaves - then this is the place!

Autumn is BitterSweet indeed! :)

Hearing Sita’s Silence

A very interesting article on Yahoo News - could not stop myself from posting that here...

Draupadi screams for bloody vengeance and we valorise her. Sita bears the brunt of Ram’s rule-following and she makes no sense to us. But Sita is not a victim, she is a sage. Take her away and there is no Ramayana. 

- Devdutt Pattanaik

I once asked my sister if, given a choice, she would marry Ram or Krishna. Her reply was predictable: “Krishna, of course!”

But he would not be faithful to you, I warned her, reminding her about Radha and Satyabhama and Rukmini. 

“But I don’t want to marry a man who throws his wife out of the house because people gossip about her faithfulness,” she snapped. 

But what if he never married again, remaining resolutely faithful to her despite family pressure, I asked. Is he not the only heroic god to be given the title of ekam-patni-vrata, ‘faithful to a single wife’? This made my sister pause and think. Finally, irritated by my championing of Ram, she said, “I don’t think he is the ideal man at all.” 

Who said he is ideal, I asked. “Well, everyone,” she replied.

That got me thinking. Ram is called maryada purushottam, which means ‘he who follows the rules perfectly’. He is not merely purushottam, or ideal man. That qualification of maryada is important to distinguish him from another purushottam, leela purushottam – Krishna, he who ideally plays games, referring to Krishna’s ability to bend and even break rules with a smile.

To try and understand Ram without Krishna is like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle without all the critical pieces. In fact, to understand any god or goddess in Hinduism, we need the rest of the pantheon. The idea of God, for example, cannot be explained without the Goddess. They embody not masculinity and femininity as is popularly imagined, but rather the mind and the world outside the mind – in other words, humanity and nature. Each complements the other. Every character and plot is a metaphor, and this web of metaphors creates a narrative fabric that reveals what we call today Vedic or Hindu or Indic thought.

 Most people, like my sister, prefer the rakish and charming Krishna to the stoic and distant Ram. But to me, as a mythologist, this seems odd because they are not two different people. They are both avatars of Vishnu, two forms in two different contexts behaving differently in response to two different situations. 

Ram belongs to the Treta Yuga and is the eldest son of a royal clan, obliged to uphold the rules of the kingdom. Krishna, however, belongs to Dvapara Yuga, a later, more corrupt era, and is a younger son of a clan that is cursed never to wear the crown. So we find Krishna defending kingdoms and serving as kingmaker, but in temples we rarely see him as a warrior: he is worshipped as cowherd and charioteer, lowly servant roles that, considering the caste hierarchy in India, are neither accidental nor insignificant.

If Ram stands as champion of the varna-ashrama-dharma (code of civilized conduct determined by social station and stage of life) that defines Vedic social engineering, Krishna challenges it from within, subversively, without openly confronting it (open confrontation is left to another avatar). Thus Vishnu is prescribing a system and at the same time warning one against it. This escapes the eye of those who are too busy worshipping Ram and Krishna, but it does not escape the eye of those who seek patterns in the many plots of the epics and the chronicles.

Vishnu is described as preserver of social order – the order that Brahma creates and Shiva destroys. All orders are based on human rules and values, and Shiva as hermit mocks human rules as unnatural, since he prefers nature’s way. But in nature’s way, only the fit survive, and the unfit have no hope. Social order is about the human attempt to create resources, to help the helpless and to create a world that does not favour only the strong. Hence, rules.

But rules have a dark side. And the Ramayana reveals it. Rules force Ram to go into exile so that his father, the king, can keep his word to his junior queen. This is best brought out in the line from Tulsidas’ Ram-charitra-manas where the father says, “Do not forget the great tradition of the Raghu clan, son: better to lose your life than go back on your word.” 

This tradition weighs heavily throughout the epic. Later in the forest, Lakshman draws a line around the hut where Sita resides. This line, which is mentioned in later regional retellings of the Ramayanaand not in Valmiki’s Ramayana, is a powerful metaphor for rules. Within the Lakshman-rekha, social rules apply, and Sita is the wife of Ram. Outside it, she is just a woman for the taking. Within, Sita is safe. But then comes a hermit asking for food, and the rules of hospitality demand that the guest’s wishes be fully satisfied. So should Sita worry about her own security and stay within the line, or should she do what is expected of a royal princess and feed the guest? Sita chooses the latter and pays the price for it. She is abducted. 

Later, the rules come to haunt Sita again. She may be pure of mind and body, but her reputation has been tarnished. Can she still be queen of Ayodhya? No, say the people. And so Ram abandons her. Rules that made Ram the ideal prince, the ideal king and even the ideal son, fail to make him the ideal husband. Or so we think.

The plot is even more complex. The rules demand that a king must have a wife next to him during the ritual of yagna. The people ask Ram to remarry; he refuses. He abandoned the queen, not the wife. He would rather have a golden effigy of Sita beside him than marry another woman. So he demonstrates his love for his wife, in a way, and becomes the ideal husband too, one who never looks at another woman except his wife while being true to his position as the rule-upholding king. Such fidelity for a wife is unseen in mythology.

Krishna breaks the rules. When he plays the flute, wives of other men flock to dance with him at night outside the village. And yet, this is pure. Why? Because it is all about others, and not the self. He does not seek them for his personal pleasure; he seeks to make others aware of their ability, and freedom, to have pleasure, despite the burden of rules. His focus is not tangible action that can be misunderstood, as in case of Ram, but of intangible intention.

In the Mahabharata, the kings of the land abuse the rules by upholding them more in letter than in spirit, and so not a single nobleman raises a voice in protest when a woman is being publicly disrobed – not Dhritarashtra, Bhishma, Drona, Karna, or the Pandavas. Everybody hides behind rules. This is what makes Krishna break the rules, for they fail in the primary objective of society – to help the helpless. A society that favours the mighty is no society at all. It is worse than the jungle – a warning given by Shiva in the earliest stories of the Puranas, when he attacks and opposes Brahma.

Hindu philosophy is all about outgrowing the animal within us. We can civilize the world around, but dharma is about civilizing the beast within, that predatory instinct that makes humans territorial and dominating.  Ravana displays this animal nature when he breaks rules and claims rights over another man’s wife, despite her protests. Duryodhana displays it when he upholds rules to gain access to the body of Draupadi. Ravana is a rule-breaker like Krishna, yet he is not worshipped as God, for he submits to the animal within him and is unable to show compassion for the weak and helpless Sita. Duryodhana is no Ram even though he upholds rules, because he is a pretender who upholds the law that benefits him and enables him to exploit and abuse Draupadi. These complex narrative structures
tend to be ignored, or even denied, in the pursuit of simplistic explanations about God and religion that were popular in the 19th and 20th centuries.

We valorise Draupadi as she screams for blood and demands vengeance, and not the quiet Sita who bears the brunt of Ram’s rule-following and decision-making. Draupadi makes sense to us, not Sita, for we live in a society where we want to be heard but forget that we also have to hear. So we scream our point of view and refuse to listen to anyone else, like the wounded Draupadi. (In the end she gets her justice but loses all her children.) 

Sita does not do that. We forget that she is the daughter of the sage-king Janaka, patron of the Upanishads. This relationship is not accidental: Valmiki is telling us something important. Sita is no ordinary woman. She is not just daughter, wife and mother. She is also a sage. She quietly watches the toll that cultural rules and values take on her husband. She watches how Lakshman expects his elder brother to follow what he considers to be ideal conduct. She watches how Surpanakha cannot handle rejection and crosses the line of propriety, and ends up playing the ultimate victim. She watches how Ravana turns his sister’s humiliation into an excuse to satisfy his own lust. She observes how people judge her silence as weakness, not the patient and affectionate acceptance of people’s shortcomings that stems from her confidence that they need her, while she does not really need them.

Sita hears her husband and herself and realizes Ram is Vishnu, the dependable God, while she is Lakshmi, the independent Goddess. She dutifully follows Ram when he goes to the forest, patiently waits for him in Lanka, and finally, quietly accepts her fate when he kicks her out of the palace. She has the capacity to bear the burden of all consequences. She is like the earth from which Janaka ploughed her out.

Culture, by default, is not fair. It feeds on nature, destroying ecosystems to nourish itself. Cultural delusion prevents us from recognizing this truth. No matter how hard we try, every society will have rules, and rules will create a hierarchy, and hierarchy will have its oppressor and its oppressed. To imagine a society without this hierarchy is like imagining a forest without a pecking order or a food chain.

Brahma struggles to create a perfect society but eventually succumbs to his animal side, provoking Shiva, who destroys his creation. Between the creator and destroyer stands the preserver, Vishnu, as Ram and Krishna – upholding and breaking rules, fighting wars with Ravana and Duryodhana, hoping that people realize that if they act too smart, disrespect Sita and Draupadi, fail to recognize the power of nature represented by the female characters of Hindu mythology, the demure Goddess will turn into Kali, spread out her tongue and consume the world whole.

What I liked the most were these two paragraphs below:

Ramayana is not the story of Ram. It is the story of Ram’s relationship with Sita and, through her, his relationship with the humans of Ayodhya, the monkeys of Kishkinda and the demons of Lanka. Take away Sita and there is no Ramayana. 

It is when she follows Ram into the forest that the gravity of the situation emerges. Sita reveals that actions can be provoked not just by desires or rules, but also by affection. She wants to be with Ram so that Ram is never alone. She reminds him that he is part of an ecosystem. His actions impact this ecosystem and all the events in this ecosystem impact him. Without her, he cannot demonstrate his dependability. Without her, he cannot demonstrate his sacrifice. Without her, he cannot demonstrate his love. It is she who completes him, makes him God. That is why she is the Goddess.

 

Source: Yahoo News

Image Courtesy : GRIST Media

Author: Devdutt Pattanaik 

This is a gist of his new book, 'Sita'

 

 

Perk, Kit Kat, Dairy Milk and Munch... yes! Gobble them up!

Just two lanes away from where we lived, was a a super store called "Anu Departmental Stores"...
I grew up in that area buying something or the other from that shop... the moment I made an entry, I was lost and was always fascinated to see all the items neatly and nicely arranged...

If somebody needed something from that shop, I'd always volunteer to go, just to seize the opportunity to gaze at the stores and especially the chocolates... they had a separate chocolates section...but of all what I loved the most was a medium sized glass box which had chocolates in them, where the opening was towards the shop keeper.. :(  I know! LOL
whenever somebody wanted to buy a chocolate, the shop keeper would open it so gracefully and slide the bars to the customers... I wish I could buy as many chocolates I wanted,... it was my obsession then, loved all of them and especially, "Perk", "Kit Kat", "Dairy Milk"and "Munch"!

Ha Ha ... I know, love for chocolate as a kid! can't be explained :)

This being the case, it was not just me, all my cousins were equally so addicted and loved chocolates...
There were times where we all cousins had tuff time to deal with moms when they forcefully shoveled their not so tasty foods into our mouths...
Horrendous used to be the scene, with great difficulty after completion...we all used to discuss, why can't people give us a plate full of Perk or KitKat you know as breakfast, Lunch and dinner
and we would happily eat with literally zero fuss!

No worry about the diet, no worry about the fat, nor the sugars! It was just the innocent love for chocolates!

One day afternoon after lunch it so happened that, as most of the weekends would, we all had gather around grandpa and were pestering him to narrate stories, (he was an amazing story teller...
everything from his mouth were like Golden lines for us! we all loved him!)... he then asked all of us, okie what would you like to do, if I made all of you kids invisible!?'

We were amazed by the idea!, (we were all within the age band of 10-11 years old)... there were zillion thoughts across all our brains... we were busy thinking, suddenly something sprang up to me!
I was so excited and thrilled to tell to grandpa what I would do... and I started saying,

Me : "Thata ( Grandpa in kannada), I will say first, what I would do...

Grandpa: Okie, will you tell us first my dear, okie go on...

Me: I'l become invisible, hmmm...I want to become invisible only at nights when parents are fast asleep...
And then, I would wanna go to "Anu Departmental Stores" through the closed doors...

Grandpa: with a confused look, (as why I wanted to go there) and then...

Me: Eat all the chocolates in the store until I get tired and also put the remaining in all the pockets and also in a bag and silently come home and sleep... and distribute the chocolates to everybody
and we will not have to have aunty's bad dosa... 

Grandpa had already started laughing at my idea.. without any more further discussions, he went to his room, fetched a 100 Rs note from his shirt pocket and asked us to go and get as many chocolates as we wanted :)!
We all were so over joyed, and super excited...
all of us wanted to go to the store... all 8 of us hurriedly went on to the store and really bought whatever we wanted...

Our joy had no bounds! we were truly a bunch of happy kids for the rest of the week!

Once when we were done with the quota of chocolates for the day, Grandpa called us all for a story telling after the dinner and said,

"So you did have what you wanted, now the lesson... remember, don't ever dare to commit a mistake knowingly, thinking that nobody sees or notices you, there is always a person who sees what you do and thats none other than you,
Don't cheat your inner, when you know something is wrong you should never do it!, however small or grave the mistake is.. mistake is a mistake once committed and could cost entire life...." 

and something more on that lines, which I don't remember very well...

Now when I recollect this, its so true what my Grandpa said...
I see the innocence in me(in my cousins or another kid in general) - as a kid...

But how adulthood with maturity and modesty teaches or imbibes so many other side effects,
probably if such a question was posed to an adult...I don't know how bad/selfish/greedy the answers would be! really...