Ganga Galoshes

Two consecutive mornings spent at the currently under renovation Mahendru Ghat in Patna instilled a peculiar and uncharacteristic plethora of stark realization inside me...about something...or someone...Ganga...

From time immemorial Ganga has been subjected to endless tests of time. One of the very few rivers of the world which has stood the test of time. But I would place Ganga far above all d other rivers…
I m a big skeptic.
I dun buy theories far fetched and with blurry details.
I never believed that there was anything special up with this water body, which, like all other rivers of the world. is in a state of continual decay and falling day after day into gallows of disrepair…nor did I ever believe that Ganga held any special powers instilled in it that prevented it from doing so..

But a stark realization hit me as I spent my long, sunny and semi-religious mornings crouching on the ghat and observing an endless string of devoted public streaming like a line of ants into the seams of the great river and the many mystic powers it is supposed to hold….as I observed scores of masses pour their daily arghya-milk into the depths of Ganga…as I mundanely looked over as the washermen(and washerwomen) converted the hour old “pooja bedis” (wow…what a pun!!!) into dhobi ghats (again!!) and washed away all the dirt scrounged by cheap washing powder into this river (which, incidentally, brought back one more highly memorable photograph from the book “Countries Of The World” depicting the much famed dhobi ghat of Agra-the one underneath the railway bridge-that’s supposed to be one of the chief stereotypes of north India, but that does not really matter as the river in question there was the Yamuna, and goddess-ly it may, but it stands nowhere as compared to the decay-resistance potential of Ganga…my dear Delhi-wallas and wallis will only agree to it full-heartedly), and also I looked over, rather guiltily, at those unlucky lot, whose tight-pinched pockets could not even afford sanitation at their abodes, taking bath, ironically with water purer than money could ever buy…I looked over “desperate housewives” fighting to wash their utensils headfirst with the same water, blissfully unaware of  the capers being caused with the same tide mere meters away, and also the cattle behaving strangely humanely very much dissimilar to the cattle residing at places where I resided, Rajasthan, where even mud-baths for the buffalos are a rare treat…
One may argue that all these vibrantly different needs this river caters to are no different than what the other rivers, other more politically important rivers, in this fateful country render themselves to. I would debate with an otherwise non-sufficient argument, that I myself would have subjected to a series of cacophonous disregard, had these mornings and this insight not happened…this is Ganga…and it exists, very much unlike the almost extinct Yamuna or the long-extinct Saraswati...Ganga, that continues to maintain its integrity inspite of tolerating the brunt of time from time immemorial…
Speaking rationally, Gangajal does NOT decay with time, a yet undefeated feat for any other river water till date...and funnily, scientists sorta’ know why!! Ganga is supposed to originate from a place that is climatically ideally poised to exemplify such behavior…
That bit about Ganga soaking away all the sins of the bather is still a bit unclear to me…but that hardly matters…the realization itself is magnanimous that such trivial overstatements hardly seem important now…

Ganga, whenever flooded any banks, any locality or community, has always made it sure that she gives back more than she took away…if it taught the sufferers what is distress, it has inspired in a much more dire approach, how to recover from serious afflictions…how to make a new start and ultimately a better end…the gift of the magi…The gift of precious Silt…

I started to momentarily believe that the greatness she so modestly exhibits was well-predicted…looking at the way Bheeshma Pitamah turned out to be…chaste, epitome of justice, the influential pawn, the Brutus of Mahabharata…his procreator would have been as immortal, as pure, if not more…when the absurdity of my thoughts struck me. Some people would not call it absurdity (my mom didn’t, for example, reveling in the glory of her daughter’s newly sprouted religiousness)...But why to mar the credibility of the chastity and the immortality of the river by bowing down to such irrational reasoning…

The future implications of the greatness of this river is what our whole society unquestionably relies on…the reliability is so annealed into the mindsets of us commoners that we simply, optimistically mock at the idea of its extinction, its absence from the grounds of our existence…so be it…
Hail Ganga…

bachpan ki bakwaas...

Oh mighty tempest, thy conquest
Today will be put at test!
Will thou be thy best, or
Cuddle up to rest?

Thou on whose suave veneer,
Swims stowed supremacy,
Thou today will be quizzed!
Of thy power, might and strength.

Though the crystals of love
And betrayal are spread throughout on thy surge!
Thou brace thyself!
Today to strike at prime dirge!

The embers of thy thought,
The cinders of thy condole,
May today be ignited!
The remnants of thy beauty!

Day and night, morn and eve,
In thy time, thou tremble the earth and fell the leaves!
Thou lift the water, thou drop the seas!
Thou portray thyself and thy comrades on their knees!

Thou who betray thy companions!
Of nature and life with thy talons!
Thou who loved thy rivals,
With a red glowing heart!

Thou pity the small, thou envy the large,
Thou drown the ship but save the barge!
Are still seen the dregs thy pity,
O unawares! O mighty!

Today, thou have 3 2 wish from!
2 to rescue, 1 to kill
will thou spare or blow away!
A man, a patriarch, a child!

There lies a drenched, there lies a hollow!
There lies some sward, there lies some thorns!
There lies a beginning, there lies an end, and everything in between!
There shines a light, there pitches a darkness!

There lies a jejune child!
Full of innocence and laughter wild!
Devoid of malice and desires!
Adorned by star sapphires,
Kissed by his mother,
Caressed by the world!

There stands a man in his
Goldy grim age, this
Man is full of desires and wants,
Endures endless tortures, taunts!
To achieve his destiny divine!
He sits and stands and runs and tides!

Autumn of life has approached bequeath,
The mortal here, o powerful!
He was once like u too!
Now worn out by the shackles of worldly pleasures and displeasures!
Surrendered to endless pains and measures!
This autumn awaits its winter!

Decider, O decide! Thou powerful night
Destined r all the 3,
Bolted are they, unlike u, they aren’t free!

Mayeth the wind fall upon whom,
Mayeth the darkness engulf whom?
Mayeth the drenched be crystals or,
Mayeth the hollows be filled?
Mayeth achieve who, one’s destiny?
Who does deserve must?
The chalice, the gold or the rust?

Paneer Puraan

Enjoying the privilege to be a bit narcissistic on this blog for once....
Precariously will rave on about my "paneer puraans" which my peers had to endure owing to one of my frequent deliriums, which, this time involved me turning vegetarian from the past few weeks...

here i m, visiting my maternal ancestral home, and reacting to my strange, untimely and seemingly "foolish" and reasonless berefthood of non-vegetarian cuisine, dearest mashi(and other people of her hierarchy) have tried their best to convert all the prized Bengali preparations, that is sooooooo integral  to the Bengali way of "mehmaan-nawaazi", other than which it is unimaginable how to possibly etch out a way to entertain ANY guest, to their paneer analogical equivalents...exampli gratia: ilishe-bhaapa converted to paneer bhaapa (that typical Bengali preparation involving cooking the hilsa fish by steaming it in a gravy of mustard and curd), tamarind chicken to paneer imli, and mutton roghanjosh converted to paneer something (can’t possibly call it paneer roghanjosh, that will be like calling a spade a club!!!)

And all this only because tofu and mushrooms are things far flung into the future…

Paneer ah paneer!! Our only silver lining amidst the dark(ly yellow) clouds of inedible, slimy (sometimes green) food webs which entangled us in the hostel mess routine… (here too they used to kill the non-veg wale animals in the mess itself which nauseated me enough not to touch their cooked forms there too LL ) ….it was then that it made its way from our stomachs into our hearts…so much so that it deserved…sorry…my blog deserved an all-paneer entry!!!

So here I am…

The above string of incidents actually inspired me to peep into the past…the advent of paneer into the Indian society…and dun the reader dare undermine the efforts I put into this research as this topic is  NOT there on Wikipedia…

The roots of paneer in the Indian society can be traced back to the times when the rajahs and maharajahs of Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and the civilized parts of Madhya Pradesh, ie all the royalties of the then India, which were starkly and dominantly Hindu, the only religion of the world, which forbids non-vegetarian connoisseurs, began taking flights around the world (not literally flights, travels or TRAVAILS more likely) and found it almost impossible to control their taste buds and simultaneously stick to their “religious detrainments” paneer proved to be a plausible replacement, strangely similar to my sad little story!!!:P:P

Ps: gatta and soya bean chunks were then actually far away into the future!!

urs sincerely!!!

sin-cera`
without wax
without faaki-baaji by covering up the loopholes with finely molten wax...
how polite is dat?!!
:P

PRICKLY TRUTHS

when truth stands alone...
raw and nude prick u most!
hen lone peers the dark twilight.
and dark engulfs the light beyond

the light never stands alone
though lone the truth truimphs...
so stars shine darkly beyond
the soul of the penultimate whole

doth no harm the red blood when
blue and white rein the plight
of masses who say"we" not "i"
thus guard the veil of their sight

lost virtuyes of earthen soul
seeking path of tranquil pole!
Alas that adam see inuman foal
vye the distant godly goal...

selfish truth one never says
it plunders"we"; glorifies "i"
and when we learn to say this "i"
its truth that one shall never raze...