Between you & me :
As in childhood ignorance, there is also bliss in knowledge, awareness & understanding that we acquire (and that is more permanent) as we grow up. That gives life its gloss.
My childhood days were so sweet, so carefree. So full of wonder, warmth and love. So much of creativity, so many discoveries, and getting really lost so many times! Simple, yet so mystic and esoteric. So much on the grass lands under a huge blue sky!
Life frowns on us, only when it becomes greedy, selfish, and materialistically too ambitious; when we allow Time & Society to make us their slaves. We allow their 'virus' to invade even our 'boot sector' and change our basic values & priorities. We lose our originality, our tenderness and our bliss. --We deceive our soul!
There are times when we face a larger realisation in life; under some rain cloud, over some grass land. A lonely bird, a wondering grasshopper, a crying child, a smart software, an act of love, a death, an understanding friend, a dumb jackass, a song line, --opens up that inner window, which could not have been opened by the power of the muscles.
The world is fast changing. I can feel, it is changing fast for the better (here I differ from many of my contemporary writers). It gives me comfort in understanding that there are millions of corrective forces which would always be interplaying and acting on it to be better and better, because human soul is basically pure and all that we ultimately and collectively seek is bliss.
Yet there is so much unknown to mankind, and there would ever be so much unknown; -this is what gives life its gloss.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is imported from my website (now defunct) that was launched in June 2002. Even after nine years, I still like reading it myself.
13. Dream date for a holiday ... wild trumpet call in a jungle safari at sunset.
1. My earliest memory...I was 18 months old, -toddling from the bedroom to the kitchen to get my milk bottle refilled from my mother who was busy cooking.
2. Often in my dream I see ... water falling from great height into a blue lagoon; she is sailing away in a small paper boat!
3. A memory so sad ... I was fourteen when my father died.
4. Most pleasant memory ... many years ago, when my school in Calcutta closed in summer we travelled to Jamshedpur; -waking up in the train in the wee hours at Dhalbhumgarh rail station, - greeted by morning breeze made fragrant by rain trees and mango trees, -so much serene, assuring and esoteric; the fragrant memories still linger on.
5. I love doing most ... writings in literature, photography, sky watch, read, observe and think and think and...
6. I hate doing ... wasting time
7. Biggest fear ... misunderstandings
8. My favourite dress ... that breathes and communicates
9. My favourite dish ... Anywhere, - steamed hilsa fish with rice, grilled prawn, and ice cream fruit salad. Anything else, served in candle light with music at a hill station. Oh!
10. Favourite pastime ... dream weaving
11. My hero ... designed by me: an assortment of virtues and vices; a story teller and explorer! (...remember 'the old man and the sea' by Hemingway? Give him a paint-brush, a laptop, a violin; and also a 4-inch telescope; plus a gift of the gab, a kind heart and ready wit ).
12. Places I'd love to visit ... my primary school in Dumdum, dream island Galapagos, Sherpa villages, English country side, Ngorongoro forest, Maldives, Bandhabgarh Tiger Reserve, Luvre Museum, NASA space centers, Moulin Rouge, Jaiselmir, the Valley of flowers, Santiniketan, Holocaust memorials, and...
13. Dream date for a holiday ... wild trumpet call in a jungle safari at sunset.
14. My strength ... my skills, my thoughts, and my family.
15. My weakness ... my muse
16. I am shy of ... asking for a favour.
17. What I like most in a person ... richness of feelings & thoughts and ability of expression.
18. I can't resist ... telling that I love it.
19. I'd love to be a ... mesmeriser!
20. My favourite song ... the one that you can sing well
21. My most precious possession... Enquiring mind / Ability to be different from the mundane.
22. What makes me upset / scares... Sycophancy / Closed mind
23. Turning points in my life ... Father's death (1965) / Joining a poetry group called Kaurab (1976) / Joining Tata Steel (1973) / Meeting Judith Kramer in her class on Intuition & Awareness (1988-'89).
24. Three of my wishes ... Explore, Enrich and Create valuable moments.
---------------------------------------------
Why should I have my own web page? -I had asked myself, as the idea crossed my mind in May'02. Well, just for the fun of having own site,..and... to be involved in a creative work of self-expression,... to design something passionately beautiful, involving writing, sketching,
Why should I have my own web page? -I had asked myself, as the idea crossed my mind in May'02. Well, just for the fun of having own site,..and... to be involved in a creative work of self-expression,... to design something passionately beautiful, involving writing, sketching,
travelling, photography, and even making friends across ethnic boundaries and tectonic plates, -I thought.
There should be space for self- expression in a myriad of ways, -analog, digital, neural..., - time away from the daily grind of the gyrating mills, the omnipresent score card, the hyper-linked KPIs, and the snailing EVA! Take off from this spring board, then, on to the vast arena of art and literature and music and painting and feelings and thoughts that could be shared under the sky. From anemones to the Andromeda,... from homing pigeons to multitasking servers,.. from here to eternity!!
Michael Dertouzos, 64, the computer scientist and Director of MIT's Laboratory, who was central in establishing the World-Wide-Web as an international standard, died in Boston hospital in August 2001. We, the users of internet, are indebted to him, as he made this day for
us.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The future is in digital, neural & planetary networks,-I know. But what I am worried about is that mankind is still fighting with Nature; -quake, drought, super cyclone, land slide, flash flood, smart virus... The developing and the developed countries both are suffering. And we do not know how to reach help to distressed people digitally, yet in body & soul, moving materials through gravitational fields obeying Newton's Laws! The physical world is getting polarised in many ways: kind vs. cruel, poor vs. rich, rational vs. fanatic, and so on. All our decisions, innovations, persuasions and temptations in whatever field we work, could yet take our civilisation to destruction! We must find out & understand:
i) Why do we feel the way we feel?
ii) Why do we think the way we think?
iii) Why do we act the way we act?
I had placed these questions to Dr. Nicholas Negroponte, a celebrity and Director, MIT Media Lab. He was so kind to send me a mail appreciating my concern. I am delighted to learn that Sir Roger Penrose, the great scientist & mathematician is researching on 'quantum consciousness’!
So much I admire in Stanley Bing, the columnist in the Fortune magazine, for his wide angle vision and extraterrestrial ability to sum up the time! In a recent issue of Fortune he has done it again. I am tempted to quote: "So just when we thought Krebs was about to get a well-earned office in the executive departure lounge, the guy up and gets this massive job elsewhere that pays him a gazillion dollars a year. One day he's here, about to get demoted in the latest ineffective reorganisation tango and the next he's grinning out from the business section of the paper with a new headshot, all crisp and fat-faced. I don't blame him for beaming. The boy has every reason to be as happy as a million clams, not counting bonus and options. He's got a fresh start in a brand new dysfunctional organisation! He has, in short, fallen up instead of down. Again. It isn't the first time he's pulled this off. Nor, I am sure, will it be the last.
How did he do it? How do they all do it? How does it happen that certain individuals, throughout their careers, continue to perform with consistent, stunning mediocrity, sometimes even stupidity, falling slowly and inexorably at whatever they put their hands to, shining with a dull and insufficient glow at one job after another? And yet they always fall not down, like the rest of us, but upward, ever upward? Why, O God?...."
So there is a need to reorient ourselves, to modernise our mind. -I remember Buckminster Fuller, the great American inventor, designer and visionary, saying: "Our own misconditioned reflexes are powerful deterrents to our successful self-reorientation" Fuller had great respect for poets. To be creative, he advised to work from the feeling level, like poets.
The gyrating mills, the never-ending chase to beat the competition, the capricious bull & bear markets and fear, greed & superstition surrounding all these, -often turn out to be mundane and maddening. The soul craves for liberation. It is the bigger picture and the larger perspective of being with life & nature, through its myriad faces of fascinating expressions that satiate the thirst of passionate explorers who are out to taste the unknown.
I joined the Kaurab group of writers & poets in 1977; we had to invent and set a trend of literary expression that would be different from the going-ons. Our effort was to make every year's work better than the past. And we did that. Kaurab was selected to be the best little magazine in bengali literature by a panel of eminent writers and educationists. I still remember the AIR broadcast in the prime time, breaking the news. It was music.
-------------------------------------------------
