Many Dawns, Dusks & Deaths: It's Diwali

Diwali. It’s festooned all over buildings & baristas, billboards & boulevards. It’s blinking out of neons and nearly brazen with indifference. To? We won’t pick on the obvious – Delhi blasts; or that shake from Hell a month back. Thousands killed, millions homeless and perhaps a few in Uri, who still live on hope of recorded messages having reached their relatives safely in Kashmir, since most of them have never used a telephone.

……Still there are many other battles raging, scathing, seething, scorching the insides. All brain, no belief.
All purpose, no prayer.
All sanity, no stupidity.
All matters-of-fact, no madness.
All useless weight, no lightness of being.
Lightness of being…… it’s of moments that we desire. And with time, they become moments we need. So badly.

And when it gets too much & the need slouches too heavy on shoulders, burning the eyes into yawning dry rivers, miring the mind, layering on us, the layers of cold brick, deathly, getting heavier with every little sweep of that thing called Survival….When all this gets too much, ‘the moment’ breaks in. Finally. Cutting all the maze of tiredness.

But somehow, this season of joyousness has let those moments pass by. First in the devastation and cries of millions, screeching through the blaring speakers of the 35mm... (News Channels, they make such a mockery out of a tragedy!)

And then as the light of hope started coming home, the death of loved ones broke all false inhibitions of joy, we all tend to romanticise so much about. One a dear old young Friend who drove into the Jaws of death, lived a promise of happy life ahead and cut it short just for the thrill for speed. And the other a dear Grandpa, (closest to me after my own Nana) who made movies and spoke of the passion of Film making all while teaching me to spread joy. Lived the last few days of his famed life in utter inexistence.

Joy…. Is it somehow seeking in to find true peace or struggling with pain to emerge a survivor through it all? The Monks tried hard to drum in the Zen philosophy of balance; but somehow sadness wells in deep and struggling to fight peace is not the fate of Human Kind.

Still there is hope and peace in this world, which through all that sly, saline, scepticism seems to rejuvenate itself somehow with the fading of each autumn and arrival of each spring. And it comes in the faintest packages possible. The Quiver of a brook, the abandoned laughter of a child, the bloom of a rose, the shake of the chestnut shoots, the smell of the wet earth after a water swept wind raped the sand, the renewed moss after a raging forest fire…..... And then a faint smile on those lips, a lighter beat in that broken heart, a hint of a twinkle in that sordid eye.
Stepping back into the arms of Hope. Into the lightness of being. Into the arms of Diwali inside.

One step out and the world’s still zipping down alleys, turning all Corporate and Shopper, busy announcing: ‘Light candles, hey make it orchid & jasmine, & lit up diyas, let there be light.’ Yes, bring on the lights. Bring on Diwali. For whatever is inside.