Poems and Books

Great Tamil poet Subramania Bharati wrote: "We will learn both scripture and science We will explore both heavens and oceans We will unravel the mysteries of the moon And we will sweep our streets clean too"

The above poem was quoted by the President of India in his address to the nation on August, 14.


Nobel prize winning scientist Prof. S. CHANDRASEKHAR wrote a poem in 1993  titled "Gods", the poem starts:

"Secularism has only been on our lips.

In its most modem form,

It says not what it does

And does not what it says."

and ends with the following lines

"Man’s collective consciousness

Runs riot when stripped

Of reason, and at journey’s end.

When culture is consumed at religion’s crossroad

In the name and altar of righteousness."

What he says in between are the lines about Gods.

Author Gurcharan Das has listed books which are important to read in some or other ways to recount the India and other narratives. The list is here.

Author and writer Aravindan Neelakandan has listed seven books which will change your views about India's of last seven decades. The list is here.

The man’s nature of nature

• An attempt is found in ancient literature to describe personality by invoking an indigenous construct, the Probabilistic Orientation. A poet by the name of Kanian Poonkundranar, who lived in Tamil Nadu during 4000 BC, has rendered an account of this description in his poem and the poem is found included in an anthology of four hundred poems in Tamil titled Purananooru (Four Hundred Poems on Non-Subjective Aspects of Life).

• The construct used to differentiate people in their personality is labelled, for want of a better term, the probabilistic orientation. The term connotes a set of beliefs and convictions regarding the probable nature of events. The probability characteristics of events owe their origin to an ever evolving Nature which is set in evolution. The reality one can experience is of a transient fleet of events unfolding themselves as programmed by the evolutionary nature of Nature. Evolution determines the probability distribution of events through stochastic principles.

• An individual has neither absolute freedom nor is bound by an holistic bondage. A dynamic friction is exerted by forces within and forces without in every action of men. Individual efforts can motivate one’s action. But, the limitation of its effect is determined by the probability of success stemming from the stochastic process governing the forces involved in the action.

• Poetic expression of the construct: Given the perspective just above described, an individual is bound to develop in himself a set of behavioural consequences which shapes the perspectives that ultimately lead to the typical orientation of his personality. The poem attempts to present this orientation as follows:

All places are my abodes dear,

And every one is my kith and kin;

Good and bad are caused by none,

Sickness and convalescence are just but natural;

Nothing is new in death,

Rejoice life as sweet we do not,

Nor despise it as sour;

Since,

Convinced are we through the serene vision of the seers,

That,

Along with lightening pour down cold drops;

The Mighty river rolls down the stone

Into pebbles with constant noise, lo!

The Boat sails in the river.

Likewise precious life has it’s course

In the course of Nature.

Hence, We do not wonder at the great

Nor look down upon the small.

(The probabilistic orientation of personality by S.Narayanan and N. Annalakshmi)

But on the subject of personality my favourite and much deep in thinking is the following from Rabindranath Tagore's book Personality published in 1917.

• We are face to face with this great world and our relations to it are manifold. One of these is the necessity we have to live, to till the soil, to gather food, to clothe ourselves, to get materials from nature. And we are always making things that will satisfy our need, and we come in touch with Nature in our efforts to meet these needs. We are always in touch with this great world through hunger and thirst and all our physical needs.

• Then we have our mind; and mind seeks its own food. Mind has its necessity also. It must find out reason in things. It is faced with a multiplicity of facts, and is bewildered when it cannot find one unifying principle which simplifies the heterogeneity of things. Man's constitution is such that he must not only find facts, but also some laws which will lighten the burden of mere number and quantity.

• There is yet another man in me, not the physical, but the personal man; which has its likes and dislikes, and wants to find something to fulfil its needs of love. This personal man is found in the region where we are free from all necessity, — above the needs, both of body and mind, — above the expedient and useful. It is the highest in man, — this personal man. And it has personal relations of its own with the great world, and comes to it for something to satisfy personality.

• The world of science is not a world of reality, it is an abstract world of force. We can use it by the help of our intellect but cannot realize it by the help of our personality. It is like a swarm of mechanics who, though producing things for ourselves as personal beings, are mere shadows to us.

• But there is another world which is real to us. We see it, feel it; we deal with it with all our emotions. Its mystery is endless because we cannot analyze it or measure it. We can but say, " Here you are."

Many-sided polymath

80 years later, Russia recalls tryst with Tagore

Happiness or pleasures

I use to read regularly the weekly coverage of 'the third EYE' in the Indian Express. The last question is always asked about the 'happiness'. When the Senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyer was interviewed he answered which is absolutly a fair answer than expected from a hardcore Marxist of himself than the CPI!

Unfortunately the link is not available.

Anyway what Benjamin Disraeli poem take us through:

“Happiness doesn’t occur by itself

You cause it to happen or not,

Yours is the choice to be unhappy in life

Or to be content with the life you’ve got.

How you relate to life’s events

Determines your joy and misery,

Whether your feelings are mean or kind

Your attitude to life is the key.

You can make up your mind to be happy

Life will be more rewarding if you do

For happiness is a state of mind

Developed and controlled by you.

Don’t wait to be happy until things are just right

Don’t let life’s little annoyances get in the way.

You can be as happy as you decide to be

And you can decide to be happy today.”

From Bureaucracy Today, August 2010, P.50

Absolute Khushwan and Omar, Ghalib and Tennyson

“You may or may not doubt the existence of God, you can’t doubt the certainty of death”

Excerpts published from Khushwan's forthcoming book:

Omar Khayyam:

“Into this Universe, and Why not knowing
Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing...”

and,

“There was a Door to which I found no Key
There was a Veil through which I could not see
Some little Talk awhile of Me and Thee
There seemed—and then no more of Thee and Me.”

Asadullah Khan Ghalib:

Age travels at galloping pace; who knows where it will stop
We do not have the reins in our hands nor our feet in the stirrups.

Tennyson:

“Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea...
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness or farewell,
When I embark.”

I believe in the Jain philosophy that death ought to be celebrated. Earlier, whenever I was upset or low, I used to go to the cremation grounds. It has a cleansing effect, and worked like a therapy for me. In fact, I’d written my own epitaph years ago:

“Here lies one who spared neither man nor God
Waste not your tears on him, he was a sod
Writing nasty things he regarded as great fun
Thank the Lord he is dead, this son of a gun.”

India after Rabindranath Tagore

Sumit Mitra writes:

• India is not yet quite clear about Tagore’s status in public life. He surely can’t be the Poet Laureate as that’s indeed a government job, or a “stipendiary poet”, as Edward Gibbon described it when he identified Petrarch as the first to hold that title. But is Tagore India’s National Poet, in the sense that Neruda is of Chile, or Shakespeare of Britain? In popular discourse he is indeed one of India’s several ‘national poets’, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Subramanya Bharathi being among the others. But none of these men, Tagore included, is held by popular acclaim as representative of the identity and belief of India’s national culture.
• In fact, to many in Delhi, Bharathi is not much beyond the name of a prominent road, despite the Tamil poet having spent years in Varanasi to appreciate India’s cultural diversity. And poor Bankim is remembered outside his Bengal as the man who composed the ‘rival’ national anthem, ‘Vande Mataram’, his more material identity as the father of modern Bengali prose being relegated to obscurity. In India’s babel, if Tagore is best recognised among his fellow National Poets it is because of him being the composer of Jana Gana Mana, the national anthem. Linguistic division has turned India’s national culture into a mere phrase. It is rather hypocritical, therefore, to claim that Tagore occupies a similar place on the mind of the average Indian as Cervantes does with the Spaniard, or Kazi Nazrul Islam with the Bangladeshi.
• In strictly political terms, one wonders if there were more disagreements between Washington and Moscow in the height of the Cold War. Gandhi, it seems in retrospect, was not quite familiar with the evolution of Tagore’s works, from a sectarian and nationalist phase when he was under his father Maharshi Debendranath’s (died 1905) influence, towards an internationalist outlook and an infinitely more tolerant view of the West than Gandhi’s. He no doubt coined the term Mahatma for Gandhi and possibly liked him too. But Gandhi made the blunder of taking him for a swadeshi supporter. Gandhi was the messiah of Independence but Tagore saw its dark underbelly and left its vivid account in his novel, The Home and the World, which was made into a gripping film by Satyajit Ray in another age, in short stories, poems, and in an essay poignantly titled, ‘The Cult of the Charka’.

Ideas, society and men in between….

The more I learn about society,

I realise, there is fewer cooperation among men.

The more I learn about nature,

I realise, there is imperfect cooperation among them, but they alone live,

No matter how dispersed are they.

***

In the society, everybody represents somebody on,

Some or other things at some point of time in their life,

Independent pundits who observes man’s action and nature’s impact at different ends,

Could tell you who represents whom in a society and for what purpose.

***

Long ago it was invented and is now universal truth that the human action is purposeful,

Children faculty are often said immature and it has no capacity to conceive ideas or anything and react purposefully, Vivekananda asked “who taught the children to suck out mother’s milk after birth”

Alas the adults are also on the same line in most of their life!

Fewer cooperation arise when men conceive by different means,

But by forgetting their common (end) goal- the freedom,

The word freedom represents two things- the best alternative in a given ideas, and that best alternative itself make best choices for human needs which will enrich them like anything!

***

What men learned from nature is abundant,

What men learned among them is fewer, even primitive!

What The State learned from society is fewer,

What The State learned from nature is fewer.

***

These are not collected from anywhere but for long mused within myself. Indeed, often I talk to myself on these lines.

Tell me what you think!!

"You Can't Blink"

I like the “you can’t Blink" Poetry of Sarah Palin

"You Can't Blink"

You can't blink. You have to be wired In a way of being So committed to the mission,The mission that we're on, Reform of this country, And victory in the war, You can't blink.
So I didn't blink.
(To C. Gibson, ABC News, Sept. 11, 2008)

India uncut Amit Verma likes "Outside"