A date with the stars...

Standing on this deserted road, I was alone. My head turned left and I saw a large pond, big enough to swallow me down. I peeked on the right and I saw a large field, which was conquering everything that came on its way as it met the sky, may be I was next. Ahead was the bifurcated path on which I was reluctant to enter and then who cares about the past, so I never looked back. Sudden tremors ran through my body, is this what my life has become? Refusing to face the demons of the present and scared to step into the uncertain future? Or am I scared of the demons and refusing to step into uncertainty?

Then I concluded that it doesn't matter, either way, I am standing alone, and have no one to guide me from there. 

In despair I look down for a solution but that just reminds me of the time I've hung my head in similar direction, should I be ashamed of being where I am? 

It is then that I chose to lift my head and set my eyes on the sky. The hundreds of stars that filled the sky seemed familiar, though I might be greeting them for the first time. In an instance I had given up despondency and my thoughts took homage in those stars. 

Start drawing a line from the third star on your left and stretch the line towards the fourth in the centre while taking in the second on the right, what do you see? 

I see hope.

A hope that made me realize that life is something which is as easy as forming ones own constellation among the stars, we just have to join the dots we want to. Those dots might not be the correct ones but they lead us to another one and we might not end up with the figure we wanted to make but in the end we complete the process. Your life is like that imaginary image that is formed by these dots. We have to leave one dot in order to move ahead but our life ceases to have a meaning if any of the dot gets lost. 

As I tried making an image, I felt as if I am standing on the edge of the earth, big enough to touch those stars. I felt as if I belong with them and one leap would take me into their world. The demons and the uncertainty seemed two minuscule objects that I would crush with my feet.

I lunged to enter this magical world when suddenly I heard a voice from behind, calling my name. I turned around and saw something that belonged to my species coming my way, in the next moment I had a myriad of them around me. They were all familiar, they were all the ones I love. May be I had taken that leap and entered the world of stars. In this moment of joy I look around and see me standing on the same road, same place, gazing at the stars in the night. 

God is one - An excerpt from my book

God is One

We are brought up believing that God is omnipotent and omnipresent. Then why do they want us to worship him only in a few forms and at a few particular places??
If he is the almighty then why would he take up a form that resembles only a minuscule of what he has created i.e the human form..?
What makes us believe that he has a nose, two eyes, two ears etc.
Is this because our imagination is limited or we humans think of ourselves at par with God.
If he is ubiquitous then why do we claim to find him at some places depending on the religion he belongs to?
God is the same it is the religion that has divided him and us.

Here is an excerpt from my book 'The Second Life' that is an elaborated version of the above text.

”God is one, God is everywhere, you see that beggar lying on the street, God is inside him. You see that woman selling flowers there; God is inside her, God is inside those flowers. The only place where God is not present are the places where we assume he is, inside the idols” Said an old fakeer sitting outside a dargah to an 8 year old girl who used to come there every day. The old fakeer was embraced by a long kurta that seemed like it has never seen the world of cleanliness. His long grey beard was acting as a store room for food particles, one can easy figure out what his food menu was in the recent past. With ruffled hair and big eyebrows, his eyes remained the only thing that were visible and for the little girl nothing else but the vibe and the aura in those eyes mattered.

“He sees no divide, He sees no colour, He sees no religion, and He sees no caste. For him we all are the same and He never loves any one person more than any other” he adds

“But I have seen many forms of God and all those are very different from each other. One carries a bow with him while the other one looks like a monkey, there’s one with a snake wrapped around his neck and another one with an elephant face. Then I have seen one hanging on a cross and one with huge white beard. They are all different from each other, How can you say that they are all one?” the little girl countered innocently.

“They are all different illusions of him created by us to create a vision of the thing we believe in so much. But in reality no one has seen him in person, like this Char Minar was built by some human’s imagination, these idols of God have been created out of human imagination and this age old vision seen by some person are now encumbered upon you children to believe”

He continues, “God does not want you to imagine him as others did, he wants you to be creative, he wants you to have faith in him and see him in any way you want him to be”

“Hmmm, I am trying to understand what you are saying but Sunanda Tai told me to stay away from muslims as they are cruel people and she beats me every day because I come here to the dargah. The muslim god must be bad that is why Tai said they are cruel?”

“Can you look at the face of a person and tell me that he is a muslim or a hindu? You cannot and likewise there is bad in every religion, not all Hindus are good and not all muslims are bad. I believe in no religion, Religion always creates a divide and makes it easier for us to imagine someone we have faith upon, but that is not what God wants us to do. He did not make any Hindu or Muslim, It is us and that tells us about how great God is irrespective of him being a Hindu or a Muslim”

Answer to the ancestral conundrum

Walking on the narrow lanes of Haridwar, on the banks of the River Ganga, the various ‘kothis' which provide sanctuary to many ‘pundits’ are also the store house of valuable information that cannot be found anywhere else in the world. The ‘family tree registers’ which are in the possession of these ‘pundits’ have the information about the ancestors of almost every community and every caste that fall under those communities. Strictly adhering to the Hindu religion, the most fascinating aspect of these registers is that they are completely hand-written and are massive in their size. Unlike the normal registers, these are thick with a long vertical side and a short horizontal one. There is also one reason that make these registers appalling and that is, any new entry into the register is done only when a family brings the remains of another recently deceased family member. 

“We have records of almost every caste in your community, you just tell us your caste and we shall find you the names and the address of your ancestors” said Harish Sharma, an apprentice of a known pundit there. When asked about the year from which they have the record, he said that even he was not sure about it. But when I tracked the names of my own ancestors, he had only checked less than one-fourth of the register and had already made me note the names of my ancestors whose remains were brought there in the 1930s. Due to a paucity of time, he asked me to wait for another day to further track the roots my family down. 

In the current era of computers it won’t be a big deal to form a database of such registers and allow the public access to them online but that would take the essence out of this practice which has been going on for ages now and should not go obsolete for a long time from now. For the people falling under this religion, this archaic system can find the answers to their ancestral conundrums.