Pushkar Pics

Opening and Closing

I always felt I opened a little
With crushed ice on a bedspread
In the dotted eye of a wildflower
When you came to me with your sunlight smile

I always felt I opened a little
In the crinkled pattern of crumbling plaster
At the flapping pages of fragrant paperbacks
When my embrace first held your inner core

I always felt I opened a little
At the heart of circling sand
In the wetness of heaving grass
When I slowly enclosed the thought of being with you forever in my palm

A nine year old boy dies
xxxxBlown up
xxxxxxxxTo shreds

Trying to return a plastic bag
xxxxCheerful grin
xxxxxxxxRuffled hair

Containing a detonating bomb
xxxxFull of nails
xxxxxxxxCrucifying nails

Carried by two men on a bike
xxxxBleeding faith
xxxxxxxxHoly Terror

Who fling it aside
xxxxTo explode
xxxxxxxxOn quiet faces

The newspaper lying on the sofa
xxxxHeadlines read
xxxxxxxx‘Deadly Saturday’

Tells me this story
xxxxTiffin bomb

xxxxxxxxKills two

As I hold my child
xxxxWarm and clinging
xxxxxxxxTwo month life

Trying to discover
xxxxShe’s asleep now
xxxxxxxxPalms clutching

My newly found fatherhood
xxxxLove is
xxxxxxxxA verb, an action

After two months
xxxxLove is
xxxxxxxxAn activity

Of my indifference
xxxxLove receives
xxxxxxxxWhen it gives

I rock her to peaceful sleep
xxxxSunlight
xxxxxxxx& Darkness

Tenderness

Tenderness
It is
A bit like early morning sunlight streaks on a crumpled bedspread
A bit like smiling to yourself in solitude
A bit like running your fingers through your lover’s hair
A bit like the glow of your bedside lamp when all other lights are switched off
A bit like the goosebumpy warmth of a nostalgic memory
A bit like a hand holding Rumi’s poetry
A bit like curling up with your favourite TV sitcom about to start
A bit like the first gently steaming cup of morning’s brewed tea
A bit like moonlight spreading dancing silhouettes of tree leaves on your bare chest
A bit like the searing saxophone notes on night drives, on roads lit by sodium lamps
A bit like the texture of Paul Simon’s voice on Kathy’s song
A bit like the methol-peppermint mist of foggy winter breath
A bit like the outline of your lover’s first sleepy smile in the morning
A bit like the pen curling through the letters at the end of a poem and then standing perched on the last full stop.

The Weight of History: Istanbul Musing

History falls heavy on my shoulders here,
Sometimes so palpable
Like heavy, hairy, signet wearing fingers
Pressing on my arms
Hammering home my insignificance
My being a small link in humanity's chain
Reminding me of humility
Laughing at
The ones that laugh
At history.

History falls heavy on my shoulders here,
Sometimes like a thick, heavy cloud
Gently draping me with
Its melancholy and depth
Its timelessness and varying incarnations
Guiding me gently to a cafe
To see pigeons atop monuments at sunset
Fly away like the empires gone by
Leaving their monuments behind.

History falls heavy on my shoulders here,
Sometimes so turgid and full
That it bursts open because it has so much to hold
Filling a thousand books
Greedily inked by the richest of pasts
Running those empires and years
Furiously under my gasping eyes,
So that I, dizzy, under a lamplight with the flooding of empires - of Byzantium and Greece, Athens and Persia, Romans and Christians, crusades and sieges, the Turks, the Ottomans, the faithful and the infidel,
The world wars and their ending
The new republic and me sitting
Silently hearing the unending quaking souls
Under the cobblestones at my feet fly past engraving their ink in my eyes, while I am forced to sit
Because I'm so nauseous
Because I'm so full.

History falls heavy on my shoulders here,
Sometimes like a silent professor or quiet psychoanalyst or wise saint or philosophical prophet,
Teaching me lessons, showing me patterns
Telling me that I live by the same laws that emperors lived by, that their subjects lived by,
That history's laws seperate none
Not the slave from the king
Nor the BC from the AD
They apply to us all for all time
With us either crashing against them like the Bosphorus waves on castle walls
Or learning and living by them we feel
At peace, full of tranquility, passion, yearning and love
Like the moonlit Bosphorus,
Still,
A quiet lover
A spiritual saint
With messages for both continents
Of Europe and Asia
(Which it connects or divides depending on which history we choose to see)
To be torn up or preserved for peace.

History falls heavy on my shoulders here,
Perhaps you and I, together sometime,
Can sit along these cobbled streets,
Sipping our tea, swallowing our wonder
As we sit silent, with earnest awe and righteous amazement
Gazing at
The city of history
At Istanbul, all of a two and a half thousand years old
Giving us some permanence
Some continuity
Something bigger than ourselves
Some slice of immortality
In our brief, eventless lives
Perhaps we should enjoy the weight of history.

Flocks

FLOCKS

They fly everywhere
Like a succession of musical notes
Octaves, minors, majors and melody
From the top of searing minarets
Emaciated with purity, tall with austerity
Like a gliding cannon shot
When the muezzin calls for prayer
Flocks of pigeons in flight
Flying with the wailing ney of Sadreddin
Flying from the warnings of the blazing fire
Flying to the different minarets of the world
Flying on quarternotes of melody
Flying by clouds of conjecture
Storms of certainty
Draughts of opinion

Starlight on emeralds
Sunlight on aquamarine
Daylight on marble
Moonlight on silk

They fly with the prophet
Nightbound to Jerusalem
Sharing his revelation
In his cloak
Shuddering ominously
Shaking off the terror
Of the thudding blocks of cool marble
Containing the slabs of scripture
The bashing of brains
The dulling of imagination

Delhi, Baghdad, Istanbul, Mecca
Tabriz, Bokhara, Alexandria, Marrakesh
They fly everywhere from every religion to every freedom in every land
Flying from minarets when the muezzin calls for prayer.

‘Spiritual Gin’ and The Tangled Web That Weber Un-weaved

According to Lenin religion was ‘spiritual gin’. He quite obviously inhabited a world of more drinkers than people who smoked up. Marx believed it was the opium of the masses so perhaps Karl’s era had more of the latter or perhaps he read with fury as a journalist of the way the English were forcing millions of Chinese to smoke up. Either ways his theory didn’t really hold in England, the capitalistic paradise he landed up in after being expelled from his Germanic homeland.

This post is about three sociological giants and their theories about religion and why Max Weber seemed to have rocked the religion theory towards the truth much better than the other two; it’s also about the British working class’s ability (god bless their honest, hard-working souls) to put many theorists and theories in their place with in their earthy commonsensical practice.

Emile Durkheim believed religion was the creation of the ‘sacred’ by society. Social acts were divided into the sacred (religion) and the profane (day-to-day life). Durkheim meant by profane something quite different than what is in common usage, profane in its Latin meaning is nothing but ‘outside the temple’ or day-to-day life that is lived outside the temple. He also added that religion in the final analysis was nothing but a worship of society itself. Society symbolized its values, beliefs, customs and integrating and uniting forces into God (s), rituals, symbols and signs – basically religion. Society then developed structures to support this – churches, divinely ordained rulers, laws and codes. Religion provided the status quo, security and stability needed by society.

Marx pretty much agreed with this, except the fact that religion did so pissed him off. For Marx’s opiatic views of religion we need to see how it fitted into his basic view of society itself. According to him, as we all know, history was nothing but an endless yin-yang of a class that owned the means of production exploiting another class that slogged it out by providing its labour. According to him religion was nothing but a tool for the privileged, exploiting class to maintain their supremacy. This is because religion either soothed the exploited classes or promised them a better life after death or simply justified their present condition as being God’s will. All this according to Marx completely suited the ruling classes and established an eternal status quo of supremacy, subjugation and exploitation. The exploited classes – soothed and acquiescent – never united to take up arms against their oppressors.

My heartfelt commendation to the British working classes at the top of this chapter was because the proles in London, the British proletariat in general in fact, quite disproved both Marx and Lenin by much preferring real gin to the spiritual one. Around the time of Lennin’s comments the working class in London were merrily getting sloshed on gin and not attending the spiritual gin offered by the Church of England. This has happened so much in the course of England’s history that I remember sitting in a quaint pub in the Lake District in England where there were, hung on the wall, copies of the proclamations banning gin in England down the ages. It seemed their preference was neither to form a unified, revolting (pun intended) class, that revolted against the means-of-production owning capitalist nor was it to devoutly believe the angelic after-life of the church and accept their status in life as a divine deal with earthly zeal. They instead went to pubs and got blown in a revolting fashion. God bless their souls!

And that leads me to Weber. According to me Max Weber hit the nail on the head by stating that no one clear theory explains the sociology of religion, instead, each society has to be looked at as a unique entity, with a history and social structure that has developed due to a special set of circumstances.

I began musing on this with the constant accompaniment of a steaming cup of coffee perched in my barsaati in Delhi. Began merging Durkheim’s basic thought of religion being an integrating force for an other-wise unruly bunch of homo sapiens. And the making of things sacred that would keep social stability and status quo going.

I then thought of Weber’s theory of unique responses for each unique society. I remembered reading Toynbee’s theory that each society’s history is its own unique reaction to the challenges posed by its environment.

I started thinking of two sets of religion – the desert religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and the Indian religion of Hinduism (I’m side-stepping Buddhism and Jainism for now as they were later responses to Hinduism’s excesses).

Let’s look at the way the religions have evolved; the sparse, harsh environment of scarcity in the desert must have lead to extreme infighting and bickering over very scarce resources. Let’s look at the response – all desert religions have one harsh God, who jealously allows his followers to follow no other (scarcity) and has very strict commandments and punishments (harsh laws to prevent the incessant in-fighting).

Now let’s look at Hinduism – the gangetic plains and endless rivers, the fertile soil and easy climate, the profusion of vegetation, the environment of plenty. Many gods, a god for knowledge another for wealth, another embodying fire another wind – plenty, abundance. The laws were harsh in some ways but also very flexible – harsh when it came to inter-marriage and mixing with the dark-skinned natives and therefore preserving their Aryan identity (therefore untouchability) harsh in terms of inter-mixing period – the caste system. Yet easy and overflowing with abundance - a profusion of paths and Gods. The path of bhakti (devotion), karma (work), Jnana (knowledge) and many more. In fact one could be accepted and affirmed as a naastik (atheist) as well.

Perhaps Weber hit the nail on the head by accepting the basic fact, that like many other things, religion too was very varied and its characteristics varied with different societies and their environments.

Both Weber and the English working classes basically proved the point that it’s not easy nor commendable to pigeon-hole the infinite variety of human social life and its manifestations like religion into three line summaries.

Sadly I’m a teetotaler these days, other-wise I could happily ended this post saying – now that the spiritual gin is dealt with, how about the real thing. Cheers!