Baring to the Beholder’s Eye…
An article by S H Venkatramani reads as: “We greet each other: “How’s life?” Do we really expect an answer? In a way, perhaps, there is no answer. For rarely do we lead our lives consciously. A mechanical and programmed life is a rut. So much so that there is no life in living. That is the ultimate irony. T S Eliot wondered: “Where is the life we have lost in living? / Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / And where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
How true the lines are??? To add the lines, in Hollow Men Eliot focalizes as:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form shade without colour,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes to death's other Kingdom
Remember us--if at all-- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
The modern man has become typical thinking machine! A speaking creature!! Day by day the patience, humor, satisfaction level and the passion are fading out. He is loosing the very purpose of his presence on the earth. Has become money making dissatisfied creature!! What a pitiful condition of us, still we want to be considered as Human, a genius creature on the earth… What for? Whether the co living animate beings are happy with us?? Never! Eventually the natural cycle in the atmosphere is being disturbed by the greedy culture of human.
None of us has time to share things each together. We have tried to digest the civilization of our ancestors who lived thousands of years ago but unfortunately we ignored our own parents and the result they are members of Old Age Centers!! We have stepped into Moon, Venus in quest of new relationship & kinship but we do not care of our own neighbors who live beside us from years together!!
“Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink”.
In the “Lyrical Ballads” of S T Coleridge in a poem called The Rime of the Ancient Mariner depicts the pathetic condition of the ship & its voyagers. The Mariner's tale begins with his ship departing on its journey. Despite initial good fortune, the ship is driven south off course by a storm and eventually reaches Antarctica. The plot’s theme or the background may be different but we can view the poem in the same grounds as above.
In my college days these were one of my loved lines. I had remixed the lines of the verses as below!
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
People, people, everywhere,
Not a single to share the things…
The pills have acquired the meals menu after the dinner! Now they are undesired guests of the life. Blood pressure & sugure are reknowned friends of us. What else the busy, unconditioned life can offer us! Sure the science & technology has contributed to the mankind immensely but they have carried us too far in the kind of mad hurry we see today. How many of us have dreamt recently? The peaceful long sleep has lost in our mothers' laps only!!
I do not question the possibilities & strength of the modern life but I concern towards the very aim of us TO LIVE!!!
Once D R Bendre, apposed the modern road construction opposite to their house. An engineer wondered by the action & asked for the reason. Bendre convinced him by saying “the modern roads would not allow me to inhale the gladdening fragrance of the soil! So I do not want it”!! How many of us have ever witnessed the first drop of the rain! How many of us have smelt the healing, moisture soil's aroma!! Have we ever counted the pulses of a newly born baby!!!!
Let’s satisfy ourselves in small things. because desire is an never ending horizon. That can not be suppresed or gratified so easily. Let’s open the door…and allow the breeze in!! Today an empathetic & a compassionate approach to life and an enlightened insight into the core of human nature is desired. The transformation of humanity through the inner transformation of the individual is essential. Life is not there just to spend but to invest for OUR & OURS future!!