I do ask more often to myself “who am I?”, and occasionally to others, “what is life after all?”
I am not a Vedantic scholar. I didn’t learn Sanskrit as it was never included in my curricula, nor was I smart enough to grasp that extremely difficult tongue. Therefore the Vedas are undeniably beyond me. Notwithstanding, my endless quest continues for a comprehensive answer for leading a purposeful life. Hence the inquisitive mind in me took zestful leaps to every possible direction on earth. The journey had been commenced without any road map, without a defined destination. Curiously enough, perhaps self-righteously I was led by myself to the places of worship as well; Hindu-temples, Christian-churches, Buddhist-Pagodas and Muslim-mosques.
And, I am now led to the belief that each of us, rich or poor, literate or illiterate, has intrinsic worth. It is understood and rightly said, “we are arrived the same and will depart the same.” Some of us, nonetheless, fail to comprehend this stark reality and maliciously thrust the wheels of justice to grind at various speeds and directions in preparation for trading their very values for power and wealth.
To discover the reality of life, not to untangle the myth, I was visiting those places of God, waiting behind the wilting stacks of pithy but seemingly absurd notions perched deep in my mind. I thought I would be able to get enlightened and have my world-loving heart salved, thus the world around me would lighten up at least in front of my own eyeballs.
On the contrary, everything happening around me everyday has been shattering my sense of being.
People never become happy with what they have. The rich wanted more riches. Those who are flooded with wealth now want to change their physical shape, as though they want to flaunt their belligerence to the very creator since they are not content with the way they are born. So frenetic they become, dauntlessly they subject themselves to artificially corrective procedures. They reconstruct their perceptive ugliness as if the ultimate definition of beauty unquestionably goes along the so called glamorous image that is kept personified by the socially myopic elites. The woman of this evolutionary iconic society suddenly realises her inflated breasts are more than adequate to be displayed in front of the gloating eyes of her peer. Therefore she resolves the jelly implant she once resorted to has to be siphoned out at any cost. Not a moment’s wait, she straight away heads to the operating theater as the cosmeticians are ready to open her up to reduce the heaviness of the breast and increase the thickness of their purses.
Just as they pursue that course of cosmetic touch up, a poor lady waits ridden in pathos for a hospital bed, let alone a theater, to get rid of the insidious growth of a malignant lump in her breast... Somewhere on this very earth, near the door steps of a mosque, mutilated bodies of innocent ones lay in a pool of blood, their once beautiful organs asunder... And, there are many out there begging for a pacemaker to sustain their heart beat for their meek survival so that they can satiate the palpable emotional feelings by cuddling their loved ones.
The lives of abject poverty wait beneath the blazing sun, fronting the flogging of downpour, and braving the lashing wind, in vain…
- Just for a touch!
- A touch of love!
Universal justice thus being beheld fluttering in paradoxical proportions, one’s belief in God, justification of faith, is sorely tested. My anxious wait desperately continues to see the human race envisage a better class of not one’s body shape but that of humanity with greater quality of comfortably simple life.
The Natioinal Gallery of Australia was contemplating buying a $35 million painting of the legendary painter, Wassily Kandinsky, a world pioneer of abstract painting. Sitting inside the Art Gallery of New South Wales, its director Edmund Capon was reported to have said: You know what I would do? I would sell this building and buy the painting!
Whatever happened to follow his statement may be immaterial to this context. But while he boasted with ebullience and ease toying with this ludicrous notion in his mind, I wonder whether he has ever bothered to look back to those who were struggling to meet the basic needs of their simple lives at his own back yard, let alone the reverberating mournful appeals that he might have severally heard from those children in rags, surviving in far away places of the wretched third world.
I don’t know what his erudite words really meant. It does not really matter, but certainly those words of a highbrow have instantly imploded a sand castle that this uncouth layman has been painstakingly building in mind - a beautiful symbolic representation of a utopian world.
“Hopeless world,” I mourned and fatuously said to myself. “Realisation of an egalitarian world community will only remain as an everlasting dream for many...”
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