As I laze around this Sunday morning, summer, elections and Holi are in the air.
The early smells of summer give me two things. A bout of hay fever and a sense of possibilities. The hay fever is to do with a strain of pollen that summer releases in the air and the sense of possibility has its origin from those days from my childhood and youth when exams got over and the summer holidays stretched out before carrying a promise of renewal.
The lazy discovery of the new you in cousins you met after a gap of years and the revisiting of favourite books, music and haunts. There was also of course the allure of the completely new. The mysterious new girl who moved into the neighbourhood. The pile of new books in my father's study. The promise of a holiday to a new place.
These days the sense of possibilities I feel is part nostalgia, part the vicarious sensing of the onset of joy I can sense in the kids and the teenagers I run into and part the promise of renewal that awaits me only if I can let go my prejudices, regrets and resentments just as a child drops all the tensions and disappointments of the school year and leaps into the delights of summer holidays.
For us adults, given the much greater freedom and control we have over our own lives, every new day should be a joyous leap into the delights of renewal and newness. At least that is the wistful promise that the onset of summer makes to me these days, soon to be forgotten in the endless remembering of the past that adulthood seems to be.
Elections are neigh. Checked the electoral rolls online and both Jyoti and I found our names missing. Spent a weekend filling in a spiffy form online and then standing in meatspace queues to re-submit it to clueless clerks in a musty tehsildar office.
Once again the promise of the young and modern belied and denied by the drag of the old and rusted. Very much like the larger picture this election presents. Will another election go by where nothing much will change. Will the promise of a PM who is his own man and not a 'durbari' (courtier) and of an opposition that is an activist watchdog instead of being Delhi mandarins sniffing around the corridors of power and Parliament, be once again denied. Will the strongman is found to have feet of clay and the activists loses steam and sink into effete "chotta-peg jholawallah" and/or "drawing room socialists" existence?
I am filled with a looming sense of disquiet when I have a feeling in the gut that it could very well happen. Think of it. Of every rupee we earn the Government claims 60 paise in the form of income tax, service tax, sales tax and excise duty. In fact the poorer you are the greater is the share of your income that the Govt. claims in terms of indirect taxes.
So why do we the people make such bad choices when it comes to choosing who gets to spend the major part of our income? Or more realistically why do we have such only poor choices to begin with? Is it a collective failure of the imagination or just the same lethargy that persuades many of us to let our bodies run to seed. Baffling.
Holi is the festival that signifies the conquering of the evil within us by the good that is us. For me Holi is not the rather raucous party where grown-ups give themselves the license to act as juveniles and the real juveniles, secretly peeved, try hard to out do the pretenders in bad behaviour.
The quintessential Holi moment for me is in the evening before when families and neighbours build a bonfire and gather around it to watch good triumph, once again, over evil. In a past Holi this moment inspired me to write a few lines of poesy which I posted on this blog.
I revisit them in this post today in anticipation of this evening's bonfire.
Bonfire of the Vanities
I have smiled at shallow triumphs
And long mourned the loss of what I did not own
I have dwelt long in the shadow of my desires
I have constructed an ego built of my senses
And with foolish bravado fought the chimera of misery
I have looked for God in vain meditations
And reserved action for the pursuit of Mammon
I have sought love in the cravings of flesh
When love was within and all around manifest
I have played to weakness when strength beckoned
And belittled myself to myself/
Enough say I, enough this night
This Holi night, as I go back millennia
People hunched around an ancient hearth
A primeval force, pure and cleansing
This bonfire of the vanities
The lazy discovery of the new you in cousins you met after a gap of years and the revisiting of favourite books, music and haunts. There was also of course the allure of the completely new. The mysterious new girl who moved into the neighbourhood. The pile of new books in my father's study. The promise of a holiday to a new place.
These days the sense of possibilities I feel is part nostalgia, part the vicarious sensing of the onset of joy I can sense in the kids and the teenagers I run into and part the promise of renewal that awaits me only if I can let go my prejudices, regrets and resentments just as a child drops all the tensions and disappointments of the school year and leaps into the delights of summer holidays.
For us adults, given the much greater freedom and control we have over our own lives, every new day should be a joyous leap into the delights of renewal and newness. At least that is the wistful promise that the onset of summer makes to me these days, soon to be forgotten in the endless remembering of the past that adulthood seems to be.
Elections are neigh. Checked the electoral rolls online and both Jyoti and I found our names missing. Spent a weekend filling in a spiffy form online and then standing in meatspace queues to re-submit it to clueless clerks in a musty tehsildar office.
Once again the promise of the young and modern belied and denied by the drag of the old and rusted. Very much like the larger picture this election presents. Will another election go by where nothing much will change. Will the promise of a PM who is his own man and not a 'durbari' (courtier) and of an opposition that is an activist watchdog instead of being Delhi mandarins sniffing around the corridors of power and Parliament, be once again denied. Will the strongman is found to have feet of clay and the activists loses steam and sink into effete "chotta-peg jholawallah" and/or "drawing room socialists" existence?
I am filled with a looming sense of disquiet when I have a feeling in the gut that it could very well happen. Think of it. Of every rupee we earn the Government claims 60 paise in the form of income tax, service tax, sales tax and excise duty. In fact the poorer you are the greater is the share of your income that the Govt. claims in terms of indirect taxes.
So why do we the people make such bad choices when it comes to choosing who gets to spend the major part of our income? Or more realistically why do we have such only poor choices to begin with? Is it a collective failure of the imagination or just the same lethargy that persuades many of us to let our bodies run to seed. Baffling.
Holi is the festival that signifies the conquering of the evil within us by the good that is us. For me Holi is not the rather raucous party where grown-ups give themselves the license to act as juveniles and the real juveniles, secretly peeved, try hard to out do the pretenders in bad behaviour.
The quintessential Holi moment for me is in the evening before when families and neighbours build a bonfire and gather around it to watch good triumph, once again, over evil. In a past Holi this moment inspired me to write a few lines of poesy which I posted on this blog.
I revisit them in this post today in anticipation of this evening's bonfire.
Bonfire of the Vanities
I have smiled at shallow triumphs
And long mourned the loss of what I did not own
I have dwelt long in the shadow of my desires
I have constructed an ego built of my senses
And with foolish bravado fought the chimera of misery
I have looked for God in vain meditations
And reserved action for the pursuit of Mammon
I have sought love in the cravings of flesh
When love was within and all around manifest
I have played to weakness when strength beckoned
And belittled myself to myself/
Enough say I, enough this night
This Holi night, as I go back millennia
People hunched around an ancient hearth
A primeval force, pure and cleansing
This bonfire of the vanities
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