Tip: This post contains graphic text. Please do not read further if you’re expecting it to be anything but morbid.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Life is full of uncertainty, but nothing beats that like the eternal leveler: death. As soon as a baby comes out of it’s mother’s womb, the ageing, and dying, process begins. It doesn’t get apparent when the mother cuddles her newborn child, when she lets it feed from her, when she dreams about its future. It doesn’t become apparent when one passes out of college with a promising job in hand, when one falls in love and casts dreams about yet another future. And then it does. Tragedy, illness, an advancing age: whatever be the reason, the final destination of each one of us is exactly the same. Death.

It dawns on you when you see someone you were close to on the deathbed. Someone who walked, talked, ate, and lived in front of your eyes lying lifeless, cold and thin, like a withered tree. He never showered his love on you, but at that moment, in that hospital room, the tears come on their own. You weep, but then your senses tell you: no, you must stay calm. For you’re his eldest grandson, the first-born, the one who must carry the family name, the baton, the flame. For you’re now a man, and your strength forms a pillar for your own father, whose sorrow you can’t even imagine. And then, when you see them take the body to the mortuary, your eyes don’t bleed.

The next morning, you see the women crying as the body bag is brought home. But you’re unmoved now. Once is enough. Then the white cloth is removed a bit to show the face, which looks like skin on a skull. A tumult forms inside you, but you still stay calm. Once is enough. Then your father puts his father’s head on his lap, and he cries. Cries like a son would cry if his father left forever. You’ve never seen him cry. Never. Now you do, and you break. Break like a glass ceiling whose walls had been blown to shreds. When it’s time to take the now-decorated body to the cremation ground, your mother tells you to lend a shoulder; you were going to anyway. And as soon as your mother tells you this, your aunt tells her son to do the same, almost as if there’s something like a competition between her son and me. A competition to lend a shoulder to your dead grandfather. The tears weren’t real, didn’t you know?

At the cremation, you watch the body being laid on the pyre, the dry rice being poured onto the lips of the deceased, the head being washed with honey. He is ready for the final journey. The final journey of every Hindu who is lucky enough to be cremated by one from the bloodline. You don’t bid him goodbye, you fold your hands and treat him like a forefather should be treated: like a God. Your father lights the pyre, and your lips form a prayer. As the flame grows, you can’t help but marvel at the sight. At the sight of a life lived out being given a fitting, fiery conclusion. There you see another side of death: glory.

But that feeling fades away a few hours into the cremation, when the skull and spine are clearly visible from outside the now-depleting wood. The chandal uses a bamboo rod to shift the remains into the heart of the pyre, into the flames, so that they burn properly. And then, when all the wood is all but charred, the intestines are all that’s left, full of moisture, with the cells deep within probably alive. More wood is brought, the pyre is remade, and now the chandal used the bamboo like a fork to place the guts on the replenished flame. Then you realize, your own guts are wringing, partly by seeing that sight, and partly due to the fasting. Nevertheless, you watch the guts burn, till only the smallest of portion remains: the navel, the remnant of the same placenta that forms the bond between mother and child. The sign that links this morbid event to the very formation of the life that was. And you realize your guts hurt no more.

The remains are immersed in the river, and you know that’s the end. The end that everyone alive will meet: your parents, your love, and you. And, at that time, while the remains sink, you start praying. You pray that may your own children give you the final fire, that may destiny not give you such a tragic end that you miss this chance. A chance to burn, a last shot at glory. ওঊম্ শান্তি, ওঊম্ শান্তি, ওঊম্ শান্তি।

Layla, you’ve got me on my knees
Layla, I’m begging, darling please
Layla, darling won’t you ease my worried mind?

The strength that women behold under their tender forms has been an enigma all through history, since the time of the cavemen. The very fact that they were the ones who could produce new life made their power something to be afraid of, something overwhelming to men. For their souls could give rise to new ones without causing them any apparent loss. Nature, weird in its sense of justice as always, had hence gifted men the power of the body. For centuries, women and men lived in this equilibrium, and while men were the ones who hunted and held sway over the community, they silently bowed to the feminine race by following the lunar calendar, worshiping them without conceding so.

But no equilibrium lasts forever in human society, and hence men went about proclaiming their superiority by way of politics and religion. Women were branded as mere carriers of seed, and worse, as a source of sin and guilt, a system of belief which is still visible in the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church for all to see, and in the teachings of almost all other faiths at a subtler though definitive level. The women who were revered once upon a time wes banished to the harems, treated as servants, branded as whores and executed as witches. And the men thought they had rid themselves of the power of the feminine race. To this day, that illusion prevails in the minds of most men. Why, most heads of state are men, most CEO’s are men,  the sports that are most popular involve men too!

Oblivious to them, though, women never lost their glory, for they have continued to hold sway over men’s minds. Kings have been led to victory and death by them, urchins have graced glory due to them, and riches have come to naught because of them. The fact that men would never admit they can be controlled by the weaker race of women makes it even easier for them to remain the powerful race they have always been, from behind the curtain for millennia and increasingly so in front of it. Those who know of it view them as a threat, but the reality is that we men have been unfair, very unfair to them. That they’ve managed to fight back despite the woes we’ve given them demonstrates the true power of womankind.

It is only when we fall in love with a woman, and hopelessly so, that we realize her true strength. She overpowers our mind, she controls it till we have no say over it whatsoever. And if she loves us too , she galvanizes our souls and makes it impenetrable for anything life can throw at us. Invincible, except in her presence. It is this overpowering nature of a woman that most men cannot accept, and herein the dreaded male ego comes into play, a sort of resistance that only ends up breaking the bond between man and woman. Heinrich Himmler, the greatest mass-murderer of modern times, is a despicable character to most. Yet even he was in awe of the feminine race at one point, stating in his diary:

A proper man loves a woman on three levels: as a dear child who is to be chided, perhaps even punished on account of her unreasonableness, and who is protected and taken care of because one loves her. Then as wife and as a loyal, understanding comrade who fights through life with one, who stands faithfully at one’s side without hemming in or chaining the man and his spirit. And as a goddess whose feet one must kiss, who gives one strength through her feminine wisdom and childlike, pure sanctity that does not weaken in the hardest struggles and in the ideal hours gives one heavenly peace.

The only way a man can find peace in his life is by giving up this struggle for power with the woman in his life, and letting his inhibitions relating to her bite the dust. If a man truly trusts his woman, then baring his soul and submitting to her presence cannot be a shameful act. We submit to our superiors, people who don’t even care about us, in worse ways. Then why not to the woman we claim to write our lives off to? If you were to ask me, I’d rather lose to her than to any other person in the world. For if you lose to her, there’s little chance you’ll ever lose to anyone else.

Oh Layla, I’m begging on my knees,
Oh Layla, I surrender at your feet.
Oh Layla, won’t you take me down,
Elevate me to the highest crown?

Television, now this is one thing I’d devote one half of my text to if I were to write a book titled Absurdia. I simply do not understand its relevance in today’s world. I mean, there is so much we can do to spend our time and have fun while we’re at it, but we prefer to sit in front of a screen which shows nothing but illusions, and we amuse ourselves by imagining the illusions to be reality. Many people see their real world as illusions these days, which is evident in the way they try to emulate what they see on the tube, often with distasteful results. Even the news channels have joined the bandwagon, preferring to delve into the private lives of film stars (who sleeps with whom and who has to satisfy himself because he has nobody to sleep with) and crimes, especially rape, because sex sells, baby. It would make some sense if they spread awareness about crime, but they simply make an entertaining piece out of someone’s agony, be it a murder or 26/11. Bravo.

Coming to newspapers, the so-called mouthpiece of the erudite. Gone are the days when newspapers played a pivotal role in the freedom struggle, and had radicals at their helm. In our time we have seen the rise of the tabloid, the newspaper that so isn’t. Worse than that, all newspapers that claim to be free from sensationalism (the genre that tabloids have mastered) seem to have some tabloid-like tendencies. Though they are far more reliable than the television for giving you a view of the world outside your window, they remain biased towards certain political factions, and since most of us only read a single newspaper, we usually end up with a distorted view of the world. If of late you’ve been reading the Outlook, for example, there is a good chance that you’re convinced Varun Gandhi is worse than Masood Azhar. And though they themselves will deny it, all newspapers are controlled, at some level, by the powers behind the curtain, the details of which I shall address via another post soon.

So how can we counter this rapidly-advancing world of illusions that is threatening to encroach into every part of our existence? How do we get to know what we want to know, rather than what is presented to us? The answer is simple: the internet. The reason why I say this is simple: on the internet, there are no boundaries or regulations. You can find different versions of the same story, say, the views of the Pakistan press about the Mumbai incident. Or maybe, about the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal from the American viewpoint. In a way, you can verify the truth about the world around you while checking your mail. And sites like Wikipedia go a long way to establish the credibility of the world wide web. But the much of this credbility stems from the selectivity of the internet, enabling us to choose what we wish to know, rather than having skewed knowledge dumped upon us.

The established mass media have created a virtual blindfold, making us slaves to the directions they provide. It is high time we tore off this handicap, and tried to search the truth ourselves. It is time we realized that Roadies is not reality but a cooked-up show, that the secular parties only consider Muslims (and not Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jains and Parsis as a whole) as a minority and ignore them as soon as elections are over, and that our BSF’s frequent human rights violations are partially responsible for the present situation in Kashmir. For if we don’t, we will be soon living in a second dark age, oblivious to the real world, and lost in our own illusions. Your choice, your call.