Live simply so others may simply live".
Do you know how many droplets are there in a cumulus cloud? 10 billion per cubic meter! This mind-boggling information is emitted to the neurons by a book called 'The Cloudspotter's Guide'. It hits me like a thunderbolt. I wish Anna Sébastien the 26-year-old Chartered Accountant who committed suicide last month because of work-related stress had known this trivia. May be it would have made her feel less alone in terms of 'feeling the pressure'. Yet, if it were up to the so-called 'visionaries' like Narayan Murthy, CEO of Infosys, our youth would be reeling under a 70-hour work week and dropping like flies...the way 30-year-old Rajesh Shinde did at his work desk. 'Stress,' the medical reports claimed. All in the name of enhancing productivity, GDP, and in the process all manner of pollutants. How dare we consider ourselves the absolute masterpiece of Creation, the pinnacle of evolution? We, who have designed our own convoluted labyrinth whose narrow lanes we tread, forever lost, forever looking for a way out? A huge, ungainly infrastructure, oozing out toxicity has been erected to support a species which scurries through the day aimlessly, trying to find a meaning, a raison-d'être...
The evening is upon us with its balminess and its puff of clouds at the horizon where water from the lake holds the twilight colors of the sky. Splash, splash splash I go doing backstroke: flutter of pigeons in flight ripple over me...the silence of two black kites circling above like hands of an invisible clock breaks through the prism of time into some infinite space as the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer. One can't but be envious of their uncharted freedom, effortless voyaging as most of the city-dwellers at this very moment are stuck in honked up traffic jams. A joke we used to find funny as children suddenly hits me as something profoundly contemplative and intimate. It goes more or less like this:
Once a man was standing in his boxers and feasting upon wild berries, when his friend came by and asked him what he was up to. "As you know I have only two hobbies: dressing well and eating well...so, that's what I am doing," came his candid reply. To us kids, the man in the joke came to epitomize a good-for-nothing simpleton, his nonchalant response sounding comical to our youthful ears. But today, with everyone enrolled into a senseless scramble, our childhood joke has joined ranks with poignant zen fables. As the eminent Japanese monk and poet Ryokan confessed:
"Too lazy to be ambitious, I let the world take care of itself. Ten days' worth of rice in my bag; a bundle of twigs by the fireplace. Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?"
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