The abode of Peace

I landed at the great being's abode , Prashanthi Nilayam after a grueling 7 hour journey by bus along the sometimes inhospitable terrain of Southern Andhra Pradesh. To my utter astonishment and later, displeasure, it only dawned on me at arrival that I had indeed taken the longest possible route to arrive at my destination. Self appraisal kicked in at its deceitful best and I blamed the ticket collector at the Cuddappah bus complex for the folly. Then, a strong sense of foreboding broke into my senses and assured me of a certain break down in the very particular bus that I would have boarded if I had chosen the shorter route. A mind full of guile can go distances to prove itself innocent, I thought. No more resentment, I had to indulge in the sanctity of the place ASAP, for time was running out. I had a mere 30 hours at my disposal to rake in whatever I could, whatever I wanted.

I checked in, as a 25 year old, unmarried male with one piece of luggage, a rucksack. Allotted the A-1 dorm at the North West-ish corner of the ashram, I walked along the imposing brick and mortar structure of the performance cum drama center, Poornachandra Auditorium, on the left with the red and yellow barricades that skirted the place along the greyish white balconies made of portland cement and its solitary escort, the bright red fire engine, that always stood there, weathering the heat of time and circumstance, with no signs of budging from its designated place. The master had decided.

Lord Shiva and Ganga, cast for perpetuity in the larger-than-life iron contraption stood stuck to the colossal wall of the auditorium. Riveted in the about 40 feet structure, like immortal custodians of time and space, they stared along into the nothingness of the moment, unflustered, unperturbed. They are here to stay.

As I walked past, the chirping of the birds had just started. The little ones, perhaps awake, waiting for their cuisine were singing in gay abandon. Slowly, the shrill was picking up and as I walked, I could see the flocks of birds, the parents, swiftly fluttering far away in the sky towards their little ones, concievably with food in their mouths.

Past the auditorium, as I walked along the concrete boulevard with the residential complexes on the left and the Southern Canteen on the right, the effervescently intangible scents of baking bread swept my senses as they smoothly jostled me into those forgotten days of foolhardy brawls over food tokens and lost footwear in childhood. Now I stand, at least a few metres tall, a hundred and eighty pounds, stubble on my face and a friable heart. Where am I moving?

I come across a sevadal member as my vision spanned across my left from one residential complex to another. He was pleasantly reclined in a duralumin armchair, dressed in an immaculately starched squeaky white kurta pajama. He must have been a man in his early fifties. Under the shade of the tree and the faint breeze blowing across his face, the silence of the place calmly slid him into a siesta. As his blue scarf with the Sanathana Dharma emblem emblazoned on it flickered in the breeze and the spectacles slithered down his nose, he seemed to be in utter paradise. I quietly muttered in a hushed tone to coolly muscle him out of his skumber, "Sai Ram".

A brief repreive

I always thought I deserved a break. So, I fled. From this blood thirsty, ever hungry, voraciously gluttonous and shamelessly guiltless baboon called life. It keeps sucking from us. Doesn't it? Sometimes air, sometimes blood, sometimes emotions. It does hurt. So all hard working mules out there need a break. So did I. So do you. Think about it. I thank and I fled. Thank god. Thank me. Thank you. Well, Ok.

Now for the sensible part of it. I was on a pleasure trip across my state. Incidentally, at a time when the state is bursting across its seams with fervent emotions of statehood and regional identity, I got to visit all three major regions of the state. Rayalaseema, Telangana and Costa. Relentless.

The descriptions of the often miraculously captivating incidents and simply spellbinding moments that I came across during my sojourn shall follow in later posts, but let me assure you, the trip was only a notch above boring. Nothing like the Zumanji game actually happened. It was the routine saga like the scrupulously choreographed sequence in the recap portion of the Indian soap serial. I went, I saw, I came back. Ala Alexander the great. And a bit more.

But for the real part, the trip was spiritually rejuvenating, socially energizing and quite admittedly, a true break from the hullabaloo at home. I spent some time with the dark, often misunderstood and mostly incoherent speeches inside my brain. I sat with them over coffee inside the 3 tier AC compartment of the majestic Indian Railways, chugging along since time immemorial, with no sign of retirement for about 2000 kilometres. The speeches wouldn't budge. So wouldn't I.

The bus experience

The fine creases on The greyish burgundy coloured polyester - worsted wool trousers began to lose their character. It was an experience of a lifetime. For the trousers that is. The rocks outside on both sides of the road were perhaps the impala granites. Or the absolute black granites. i never knew. As a matter of fact, I didn't want to know. For the heat, like that in a Rotary Screw Hearth Furnace System was already beginning to strip all patience and every bit of sanity off me. The granites only reflected the sun's rays back on to the metallic container with atleast distinction grade efficiency. The bus that I was traveling in. The set up would have been the front runner for the best Hell- Raising experience award, if any, in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Forget it.

Let's talk about the road. I wished all good luck to the civil engineer and the municipal contractor who helped lay the road. They forgot one important ingredient in the road mix, tarmac. More good luck to the people moving under the bridges they built. There was absolutely no road. Yes, the road was inconsequential. It was long dead. What lay there was a rubble of rock, stone, gravel, pebbles, mud and clay, in decreasing order of the diameter of particle size. How do I know? I picked specimen samples from the pockets in my trousers, my shirt and sometimes from my scalp. I was basically having a sand bath. Why? The bus did have windows. Sure sir. But good ventilation begets good health. Thanks to advice from the ticket collecter and the wise person sitting beside me in white overalls, white floaters, a white hand kercheif, a white coloured purse that looked like it was made out of the skin of a white python snake and a white wrist watch that had the words Kenneth Cole stamped on it, 40, Comic Sans MS, Bold. So we decided to open them wide. And in no time, I could start collecting my specimens.

Now the ride part. Chassis and Suspension System Design Engineers from Lamborghini and Renault would'nt mind travelling the distance to attend training workshops conducted by the Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation, quite lovingly called RTC, in this part of the world, to know what lies under the skin of this approximately 8 tonne moving mass of steel. It is a magnanimous achievement of considerable success if a bus can provide that level of comfort on a road that is in an absolutely and ridiculously tattered shape. And all this with the same old fellow chucking along atleast 600 kilometres everyday, with no sense of gratitude, in extremely testing conditions both under the tires and above them. No nonsense achievement this. I was pretty contented with the ride quality given the state of affairs beneath, under the wheels. But then, the vibrations were strong enough to put off my white friend to sleep, now his attire turning into a pale yellow. Thanks to the windows.

Happiness

Happiness is an unimaginably abstract and an unnervingly short lived emotion of us human beings. Also, pretty depressingly, happiness often tends towards being endlessly relative that it more often than not evades a rational and comprehensively cognitive examination by the conscious brain. So, do I mean most of us, the human race, fail abjectly at understanding happiness? Perhaps.
An unassuming UFO sauntering in the upper troposphere above the earth as a part of its monotonous and understandably boring light yearly routine of capturing live feed of happenings on earth would be shocked to disbelief on hearing people's seemingly endless expectations and anticipations about happiness, if UFOs really understood our mind bogglingly complex languages.

So, how do we as humans understand happiness?

Is there a mystery yet unraveled, which is more closer, more intimate and more lovingly ingrained into human psyche than this? Do we, like immaculate automatons with floating point precision, quite unabashedly pound our breasts in exaltation over our success in brilliantly concieving a definition for happiness that reeks of febrile odours of money, fame and deceit? Yes we do! And our accomplishments are unmatched at that.

Cannot we define happiness in a less physical, less materialistic way? Doesn't our definition of happiness transcend?

A new owner of a Merc proudly splashes along his new toy's pics across his blogs, communities and forums only because he is pretty sure of the not-so-small band of the relatively poor humans who cannot proudly splash the pics of their toys. Why would I splash the pics of my new Hero Honda Splendor 100cc with elecric start and 85 kmpl mileage? I wouldn't. For very few rickshaw pullers and auto drivers log into online communities or have gmail accounts to appreciate my immeasurable pride of owning a toy.

So, does it essentially mean that, going by our definition of happiness, someone needs to be relatively less happier for us to be happy? Are we the progeny of the demonaic satans of the darkest recesesses of the underworld which wish for the unhappiness of the many and the happiness of the few, the us? No. We are not.

Bt why do we still stick to the moolah-ic definition of happiness?