Mind

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You saw a face in the flint, didn’t you?
Two sockets of sorrow, a slit for a mouth —
you stared and called it ghost or god.
But it’s limestone, chipped by frostbite and time.
Still, you felt it staring back.
Don’t flinch. That wasn’t madness.
It was memory playing charades with chance.

There’s a name for this
ritual of conjuring meaning from the meaningless:
Pareidolia.
The old cerebral trickster,
born of evolution’s anxious clockwork,
trained to spot the tiger in the tall grass,
and now spotting saints in toast.

Yes, you, with your clever cortex —
you are no less a primitive animal
when you see your dead gran
in the outline of a tea stain.
There is no sanctity in the splotch.
Only your synapses desperate for certainty.

Look at the moon.
Not with romance — with rigour.
Those are impact craters, not ancient eyes.
Yet poets and fools alike have sworn
they saw an old man weeping there,
some reckoning in the rock.
But he’s not there. Never was.

We see what we want,
or worse, what we fear.
Jesus in the wood grain.
A demon in the damp patch on the wall.
Whispers in the static,
like broken radios speaking truths.
But the noise is just that — noise.
We add the voice.

It’s not divine revelation.
It’s just apophenia’s softer cousin,
whispering comfort from chaos.
Making patterns of peril palatable.
Because we are pattern-hungry beasts.
We darn meaning where there is only fray.

Turner knew this.
In his storms, those apocalyptic skies,
you can almost glimpse
a veiled skull,

a bear,
a smirk in the sea spray,
figures rising from vapour,
not painted, but invoked.
He never confirmed it —
he let your imagination do the haunting.

Gainsborough,
elegant conjurer of sylvan dreams,
was no stranger to subversion.
In one soft-rendered landscape,
he slipped in what the critics
would not name aloud —
a penis, carved in bramble and bark,
not as jest, but as whisper.
A cipher for the carnal,
veiled by pastoral serenity.

You wouldn’t see it — not at first.
But stare long enough,
let your gaze drift through
the dappled light and dusky trees,
and it emerges:
not vulgar,
but vital —
like nature speaking in riddles.

Was it defiance?
A quiet rebellion against the polite gaze?
Or a challenge —
what will you see,
when you dare to look without blinking?

Even the ancients weren’t spared.
The Greeks saw gods in constellations —
Orion, not a random splatter of stars,
but a hunter forever mid-stride.
They sewed stories into the dark
so the heavens wouldn’t feel so silent.

Say what you will —
but the artist knows.
The poet knows.
Even the child staring at ceiling tiles
knows how to survive by seeing
what isn’t there.

But is that folly?
Or the only thing that makes life bearable?
Because if there is no face in the fire,
no figure in the fog,
then all we are left with is hush,
and the world becomes too loud in its vanity.

Hear this:
There are songs in the wind, yes —
but only if your ears bring the notes.
The murmurs in the kettle’s boil,
the speech in the whirr of streetlamps —
they are your loneliness,
begging to be sung back to.

And perhaps that’s the rub —
it’s not about seeing truth,
but the truth of our need to see.
A mirror for the mind’s illusions.
A trick — but one that tells us
where the cracks in our soul lie.

So next time you see
a weeping angel in your coffee foam,
don’t worship it.
But don’t dismiss it either.
Instead, say this:

“I know you are not real.
But I see you,
because I am real.
And that is enough.”

And walk on,
eyes wide,
knowing the world
wears your thoughts like a mask,
and sometimes the mask
smiles back.

The painting is The Fighting Téméraire, 1839, by Joseph Mallord William Turner.

PART 1

The author Richard Sennett said that sometimes it helps to see ourselves by stepping into another person’s shoes, that looking at how cultures quite foreign to our own assess social capital and cooperation we can learn far more than what we have been taught. He explained that modern China offers one way to do so; that is have a strong ‘code’ for social cohesion, despite the fact that the country is aggressively capitalist lately, and that this ‘code’ is what the Chinese call guanxi. The systems analyst Yuan Luo describes guanxi as ‘an intricate and pervasive relational network which the Chinese cultivate energetically, subtly, and imaginatively’. The network means a Chinese immigrant feels free to call on a third cousin in a foreign city for a loan, while at home, it is the shared experiences and memories among friends, rather than written contracts or laws, that lay the foundations for trust in business dealings. In families, guanxi has a further reach in the practice common to many non-Western societies of young people sending home whatever they can spare of their usually meagre wages, rather than spending all that they earn on themselves. ‘Duty’ better names these social relations than ‘social capital’.

So is honour a better name some ask? Well, in a way, yes, Guanxi invokes honour as a key ingredient of social relations. Douglas Guthrie, an American student of Chinese guanxi, explains that it is akin to the old Western business code, ‘My word is my bond.’ You can count on other people in the network, especially when the going gets tough; they are honour-bound to support you rather than take advantage of your weakness. Also, one must keep in mind that Guanxi entails something other than sympathy; people in the network criticise one another, and they nag each other; they may not be nice to one another, but they feel obliged to prove helpful when the occasion arises. And in many ways than one, this code of guanxi is an example of how a social bond can shape economic life and bail one out of the doldrums. To throw some more light on it, guanxi, in essence, as a bond, is informal in character, establishing a network of support outside a rigid circle of established rules and regulations. The bond is a necessity in the fast-changing, often chaotic conditions of China especially today, since many of its official rules are dysfunctional; the informal, personal network helps people go around these, in order, to survive and prosper.

The value of informal cohesion is not new, it has already appeared to us, in say dialogic exchanges, whether in a conversation or in the community organisation. The West, however, wants to establish the scope of these exchanges in its society, but, the bigger question is: do they have an equal practical value as they do for the Chinese? And the answer lies in two reasons why the West might want to think like the Chinese about cooperation.

First, if informal, the guanxi network is also meant to be sustainable. Sometime in the future, the one who gets help will give it back in a form neither party may now foresee, but knows will occur. Guanxi is a relationship meant to endure from generation to generation. By the standards of a Western contract, there’s no reality in such an ill-defined expectation; for the Chinese student, government worker or businessman, the expectation itself is solid, because people in the network punish, or shun those, who later prove unresponsive. It is a question for us of holding people accountable in the future for their actions in the present.

Secondly, people in a guanxi network are not ashamed of dependency. You can establish guanxi with someone who needs you, or whom you need, beneath or above you in the pecking order. The Chinese family, as traditionally in other societies, has been a site of dependency without shame, and shame has become deeply associated in Western culture with self-control; losing control over your body, or your words, has become a source of shame. Modern family life, and, even more, modern business practice, has extended the idea of self-containment: dependency on others is taken to be a sign of weakness, a failure to promote autonomy and self-sufficiency; the autonomous individual appears free. But looked at from the perspective of a different culture, the Chinese or the Asian culture, a person who prides him-or-herself on not asking for help appears a deeply damaged human being; fear of social embeddedness dominates his or her life.

As you can see, guanxi in itself is congenial in spirit; so too, I suspect, would settlement-house workers and community activists a century ago, who were congenial, and sharing, and giving despite of having to be a part of the Western world. The common thread is an emphasis on the qualities of a social relationship, on the power of duty and honour. A culture can be ferocious. It can be capitalist like it is in China at the moment. By our standards, that fact seems difficult to reconcile with culture practises, still, some Chinese believe that guanxi is beginning to break down as the country more and more comes to resemble the West in its ways of parenting, working and consuming. While all cultures have their pros and cons, it would be nice to know why certain aspects of the Western culture has this corrosive effect on people and thinking.

PART 2

The recent epidemic of unprecedented proportions; the Covid-19, or Corona as it is commonly known, has caught us off-guard, and though one is led to feel regret, more so for the ones hit by the economic uncertainty the world over, one wishes, however, that we human beings realise from this strain that the first thing we need to do is to slow down, and maybe attempt to plant a seed and watch it until the flower grows. That the instant gratification culture of ours has nearly ruined all that we hold dear, and until we find meaning in what we say and do, our world will be as chaotic as it was when we were accelerating at the speed of light without the light in sight.

PARENTING

Trying times nearly always reveal the true faces: there is no time to put on masks, and likewise, history has taught us, especially from the stories that have emerged from war, that you see a pristine, almost primeval side of compassion when faced with life-threatening situations. These times are no less than war, and it is at this stage that we need to erase the prejudices we may hold towards attitudes and people so that we can collectively work towards the betterment of the community. Let us take hugging for example. It is an intrinsic part of our culture in Asia, and furthermore, as Muslim, we have no qualms in holding hands of our male friends, coiling our arm round our best friend’s neck, wrestling with each other so as to laugh our lungs (and in some cases our guts out), kiss on the cheeks when we greet, and touch our noses like the Arabs do in order to feel a closeness, a connection, togetherness, and it is here that I would like to extend the concept of guanxi to matters of personal dealings rather than keeping it limited merely to business traditions as I explained above.

None of us, from this side of the world, look at any of the aforementioned human contact with anything else than the feeling of intimacy, whereas, some of them, the newer generation, think that such a behaviour between people of the same gender is unhealthy. When questioned about why they think such behaviour is unhealthy, one hears: I have seen it on the telly, or read an article that any form of touch is not a good touch. We can talk from a distance, civilly, as human beings do, right. Why touch each other? This is where I suspect that parenting is failing us miserably, especially the parenting that has grown on Western principles and does not quite discern the difference between what is acceptable and what is off-limits. Let me throw further light on this with regard to some of the detrimental ways of the West: while in the process of writing this piece, I happened to watch a Spanish television series, where a young man’s grandmother walks into the room when her grandson and his best friend are exchanging a hug before the friend is leaving his friend’s home. The old lady rolls her eyes and states, ‘When two men hug each other, they have to be gay, or actors.’ It was as if this scenario was tailored to help me write on it in this piece; for starters, being a heterosexual male, I was, at once, put off by that very manner of looking at something as beautiful as a hug being coated with something as preposterous as a sexual connotation, and so my next question is:

CONSUMPTION

Why are we letting this unhealthy Western philosophy make room in our hearts? Why are we letting the West inject their unhealthy mind sciences into our healthy minds? When we Asian, Arab, men meet, we do all that I said we did in the preceding paragraphs, and know that what such an act of camaraderie did was make us feel wanted, and loved, and that simple lack of feeling love and the feeling of being wanted was turning the Western populace into touch starved monsters, and such people ended up being depressed, violent or even suicidal. Don’t you think it is time that the West learnt from us Asians, Arabs how to greet and meet and live with each other? And get rid of the ‘I, Me, Myself’ doctrine of behaviour that is killing them? Could they not loosen up so that they would indeed not feel deprived of touch, of love, an essential component of keeping a human being in behaving like a human being - something that is more depressing and lonely than a strain of virus that has left us arrested, and at home, in a state of uncertain lockdown?

WORKING

An additional, injurious Western concept that we are implementing in our cohesive society is that of nuclear families. The West thinks that to stay with family after a certain age is being less an individual, and they would go any lengths to fight for preserving their individuality. They have failed to understand, most simply, that there is immense power in unity, and that we need the support of our loved ones, just as much as they need us, at any given time of our lives. And the Covid-19 has brought to light examples of this decay that we have willingly subjected ourselves into: nearly everything, in nearly every part of the world, is in a state of suspension, and the jarring psychological, as well as physical impact such an isolation has had on people has devastated them, while the families that lived together have managed to combat loneliness, the management of children, and whatever the rest of the demons were, with much ease. Also, what something like this does, at its basest, is that it teaches us humility, tolerance, and compromise, and it renews in us the fact that the only bond that keeps us together is love, and in extreme circumstances, where it is inevitable to live under one roof, one must try and live close to each other so that you can be separate, and yet together, just so that the fine fibre of love remains intact.

It is not merely about geographical zones, creeds, cultures, or communities. It is not about who is good and who is bad, what is good and what is bad, it is only about the mindset, and adopting the positively best from the various zones, creeds, cultures and communities. Let me put it this way: we love our bodies. We workout and we keep a tab on our diet by treating our bodies like we would do a shrine in order to keep it running efficiently. However, when we are struck with an ailment, we visit the specialist without delay, and get rid of what was limiting us, and this is where I ask, when we do that to our body, couldn’t we apply that mindset to our minds too?

I would like to end this with something I was reading by Josh Radnor. It said, but it’s the arc of every great fairy tale, right? We leave home (the comfortable, the familiar) to journey into the dark wood. Only there – in the terrifying shadow – are we able to confront our fears and push past our limitations. In that battle we are transformed so that when we return home, we return home changed, upgraded, and bearing gifts for those we love (In a neat twist, our actual homes are the current dark wood.)

The only way I can get through something like this is to view it in these mythic dimensions, to understand that this supremely odd world-wide moment we are all sharing provides us with a divine opportunity to see what we are really made of. To transform our lives and our world for the better. Or as Francis Weller recently put it, “This is a season of remembering the ancient rhythms of soul. It is a time to become immense.”

Yesterday, I had posted on Facebook – Fine let us believe for a moment that extra terrestrial life exists, but why in god’s name does everything land only in and around America. Strategy, eh?

That elicited a plethora of reactions. Some smiled, some laughed, and some more in-boxed me with their own reactions on it, and debated on things that I would find baseless to even mention here. But, yes, a friend wrote: “The same question always boggles me.” And quite without thinking I found myself typing away my response to him, which I am sharing below.

Bear in mind that I do have several American friends who are great human beings, and this is NOT directed at them, or the populace in general, only to the powers that be that create such stories to amuse themselves and fool the world.

“Perhaps it is a clever way to play on the emotions of people by keeping the drama and mystery alive. It is nearly impossible otherwise that only they, these enlightened Americans, are honoured with the sightings of UFO and their ilk. I also find it entertaining that these objects periodically keep hovering over their military, air borne and naval bases. Not that aliens possess the same inflated ego in knowing that America is as powerful a country that it assumes it is.

Also, all of these carefully manufactured incidents indicate rather clearly how they are stage-managing information for the benefit of marketing and keeping alive something that does not exist to begin with.

Extra-terrestrial life may possibly be around us, you or I may not be able to refute that, and it could be in a form not recognised by our naked eye, or our most able machinery. Furthermore, I find the aliens with elongated eyes and the human like resemblance a bit far fetched. Nearly the corniest prank pulled by them. How convenient to claim that they are a different form of a ‘human like being’ with legs and arms and eyes, but just a bit skewed here and there. For all we know, the alien life may not even have a body – what if they are entirely undetectable as I earlier speculatively mentioned. What if they are living parallely with us, and are far smarter to have outsmarted us? What if they are only a figment of our stream of consciousness? Or even imagination? Mind you, it is we human beings who are giving them a mind and body, simply because we have a mind and body.

Likewise, ‘the truth is out there’ is another stupid manifestation the media has woven around these matters. Yes, even the jesters would know that the truth is always out there until it dawns upon us that ‘it is’ the truth indeed, derived and arrived more out of experience than hearsay.”

In today’s times, one observes the male species a bit troubled to commit, specifically to marriage. Not that in the past they felt any different, it is just that today we live in rather fluid times, and there are abundant reasons that gravitate towards men not committing. Loneliness, or confusion about one’s sexual preference is certainly not one of them. What else then, you might ask? Cautious and careful are the two watchwords that withhold men from commitment with the opposite sex, and nearly most of their life sciences seem somehow to revolve around those two factors.

Examined most pragmatically, the roles of men and women have been etched rather befittingly from the inception of mankind: men have been the bread earners, and women, the homemakers. One leading factor to have drilled a hole in the happiness was the woman’s liberation movement, followed by the financial independence that women have obtained in the last couple of decades. This has ruined the pattern that had been followed since centuries. Then again, it is not the fault of women alone. They have been repressed from eons, and it was but natural that they sought respect, and respect, they knew, could be earned if they stood on their own feet, and that would happen if they qualified and educated themselves, and that is what they went about doing. However, somewhere, in the pursuit of practising such unparalleled power, most women have found themselves confused – they have no clue whether they belong to an office, or to their homes, and this has lead to dissatisfaction, conflict, and a crack in something that would have been wonderful had this whole ‘I want equality’ not interfered with the equilibrium chartered out from time immemorial.

I read articles every now and then of people theorising about why something is this or that. I also hear discourses on self-help that say if you do this, this will happen, and if you do that, that will happen. Truth is nothing will happen unless you want it to happen, and you cannot make anything happen until it is the time for it to happen. The rest is nothing but a marketing and money laundering drama.

If I were to cite my own example, I would say that I am now a bit old to get married by conventional Indian standards, and it has nothing to do with my sexual preference – I am perfectly and clearly heterosexual, but what had kept me from letting a woman into my comfort zone for a long time could be attributed perhaps to two possible reasons. My father, besides being born into great wealth, inherited a great fortune as well, and did not consider keeping himself occupied with a day job as it was below the dignity of aristocrats to be caught up in the nitty-gritty of life. If that was not enough of a mental adjustment, my mother, from an equally illustrious ancestry, was unable to handle my father’s indifferent nature, and had to give up her medical profession, which she loved, and dress herself up in the role of the proxy man in order to keep the semblance of the family intact, whilst he sailed, rode horses, barbequed at the exotic farmlands he bought in affluent cities and regularly burnt rubber of his luxurious four wheels. This image had established such asymmetry in me as a child that I found it incredibly tough to cope with changed gender roles, and as a consequence I escaped into a world of my own – my mind palace, as I would term it. In my palace I was free of conflict, and this is the crux of male mentality – they loathe conflict. I did not permit the domestic imbalance distress me and with time the fact was firmly established that it was not my father and mother who were responsible for me in not plunging into matrimonial bliss, (as it was presumed more so by anyone else but them) but it was the grasp of the reality, the truth, the scruples, and art that prevented me from being coerced into anything that my soul did not find relief in. Parents being parents, it was indeed difficult for them to comprehend that as their children we saw life far more clearly than them.

Next, I asked myself whether I was threatened by commitment? Or whether I was caught between the devil and the deep sea, that to find a woman who would appreciate that I believed in the traditional role play of man the earner, and woman the homemaker, was something that was a bit too far fetched in the twenty first century? My inner voice provided me a negative for both, and I came to realise that when I found the right fit, and my heart and mind said yes, and the similar bells tolled in her heart and mind too, then it were to be a connection built to last.

A friend said that by not having a wife in my life I was missing out on life. Do I ‘really’ think that life would have been any different had there been a woman in my life? Possibly, but, until the one who mattered had put in an appearance, there was no reason to stress myself with what had not happened. “Are you always this pedantic?” she further asked. I didn’t know what to tell her, I mean we have no control over what we are doing this very instant, so how can we know what fate we would meet with in the future. As shrewd as we think we are, and plan for posterity, at least until we live, we should not fool ourselves into believing that the future can hold something glorious because it simply cannot. One must organise one’s life, but one must not go blindly with the flow, since it is only the dead fish that go with the flow. The ones that are alive make their own path.

I don’t think that men in general are frightened of commitment. The smartest of the lot have schooled themselves sufficient enough to safeguard themselves from rushing into things. They have become cautious for they do not have the tolerance to deal with the strain of expectations that loving a woman, in particular a wrong one, would demand of them, and thus, they prefer to be safe than sorry. Also, one must be warned that this notion of negotiating with caution merely because one has been hurt once seems nonsensical. Each situation is different, just as each person is different, so we ought to get rid of comparisons by attempting to emboss one experience over the other. Who knows, in the fuss of letting hurt overpower us, we might just about fail to recognise the one who is meant to be the one for us. Core of the matter is that one must be mindful, but not rigid. One must be sensitive, but not over sensitive. One must be cautious, but certainly not excessively cautious.

I was reading an article that states that the more intelligent the man, the more investigative he is, and the more investigative he is, the more complex he is to get along with. While the people who have arrived at such conclusions would have their points to prove, I find such blanket statements a bit juvenile to digest. I do concur that intelligence confines us from intermingling freely with the multitudes for lack of wavelength, but it is not entirely true that clever people are problematic. Possibly, they are difficult in case they find themselves adjoined in the arms of those who do not stem from their own sensibilities, but otherwise I think it is just their own farsightedness that comes to their rescue. Prudence allows a certain luxury of seeing beyond the obvious, and when those principles are employed with respect to our partners, then the true nature of each other’s interest in one another is revealed most plainly, which indirectly helps in navigating through a relationship with caution. As a result what wisdom does is trigger the conscience to retain an upper hand than mere superficiality, and that is where the notion of ‘intelligent men’ are not prone to being fooled in a relationship has taken birth, when it is nothing but experience and arithmetic at work.

Before I go, I would like to reiterate that it is not sexual confusion as I abovementioned, or the fear of commitment that keeps men from committing. It is just the methodical reasoning that they are gifted with which allows them to remain single until they find somebody of their own liking. They know that a wrong turn could cost them their peace, and this wrong turn seldom happens considering the points discussed above. So the smart ones are single by well-thought-out choice, and certainly not the victims of circumstance.

Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip

Regality is not in being born a king or queen, but in behaving in a manner so as befitting a gentleman and lady in day to day dealings. You become what you think you are, so instead of whining that you are not born in a monarchy, like some of us, think of your home as your little kingdom, and your life as no less than that of a king and queen, and then see how you will find your life transformed for the better and find yourself much happier.

Happiness is in the mind. It is not blue blood that makes you regal, it is your attitude and mannerisms that make you so.

PS - Who says only human beings have character. Images and objects too have character.

What is luxury?

I think luxury is not being surrounded by what money can buy to help boost our ego.

In its barest essence, luxury is heritage. It is what you build from scratch. It is the humility with which you bow your head and greet your elders. The devotion you bestow on your youngsters. The selfless goodness with which you perform your duties, and without a murmur. The memories you assimilate as opposed to articles. It is certainly not the fancy car that adorns your driveway, or the art that hangs proudly on your wall. It is the euphoria you see on the faces of the ones you love when you make for them a home and money that brings them genuine joy. It is your legacy that you hand them over by your behaviour.

The maturity of the human mind is luxury. The happiness of everyday experiences is luxury. Making art is luxury. Using skills to the closest level of perfection is luxury. Responsibility is luxury. To uphold and maintain traditions is luxury. To feel pain and hurt is luxury. To feel itself is luxury. To thank the creator for two lovely eyes, limbs, arms and genitals in optimum condition is luxury. Luxury is respect. It's love. It's what you leave behind, alive, in the ones that live, when you no longer are.

Luxury to me is my Chotu addressing me as Bhaiya with all his love. The people who constitute my core. Who enrich and enlighten me. My parents who have given me birth — I might not agree with them, but to not discredit or disrespect them is luxury. It's my culture.

Luxury cannot be sold across a counter. It doesn't have a price tag to it. What can be sold across there albeit are icons of material superfluousness. Something that showy and shallow egos lap up.

LUXURY - every human being is born with it. We don't need the world to tell us what luxury is. It is in our blood.

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THE ASPECT IN THE ABYSS

REMEMBERING THE ANCIENT RHYTHMS OF THE SOUL

IS THE TRUTH REALLY OUT THERE?

I THINK

Regality Isn't A Matter Of Birth

What Is Luxury?