Saturday, May 21, 2011

Cycles of time

The time cycle penetrates through my skin, the world sits and watches. Waits... I am waiting too for that one moment when everything will flip to the otherside. When the cosmic reboot happens. All time will be erased, there will be no more seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months. Only the present second. The happy new second. No more happy new years. Every moment will be fresh with activity. Everything will look clear, there will be no more fusion of past with the future. Only the present moment and a presence. Not 72.8% water. 100% water and a pure consciousness. When will this timelessness arrive?

It happened this January in Benaras for fifteen days. When everything changed. I became the new man, the uber-man, the man whose consciousness had jumpstarted to the next level. I was time, I was also timelessness.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Now I am...

...on the periphery. Looking in. Watching all that was. I have been ejected from the spiralling staircases of Benaras. The wind found a way to get me out. Now I can only remember what it was like to look through a kaleidoscope the shape of Chet Singh Ghat. I remember those walls, those cracks, age finding a way to mark all that is grey with a texture the colour of the earth. Abstract Kollisions everywhere, the ground looked six-thousand years old. That tree, those birds, that oasis. I remember being with Brownie looking at him with him. His tail fading to black. I remember that pigeon hovering about near a mirror thinking he found his mate. I remember Tomya, the way he played with Brownie. I am now sitting on a corporate chair listening to those stories played on repeat inside my head.

I remember that wonderful terrace where I played Marwa for hours at sunset, hoping the sun would stay. Any sign of the sun and I would return to Sa, the root note, that primordial sound from where the whole world emerged. The red sky bringing on the night, the night sky bringing on the black and the wonderful entry of Malkauns. How a raga can be coloured black but still sound so optimistic. I heard the Sarod's mirrorsound in my heart. The way the end of the day signalled a temporary movement to the dominant Madhyam and time bringing a crystalline shaped Rishabh into its vessel, a rose-shaped vessel holding all my thoughts from the day and its different descendants...

I am struggling to find a chorus to join, or a voice to sing in unison with. Its all come down to one. That one is me. There is no one near me, physically there are many but I have been singled out to pay my dues to life's unexpected taxman, he came knocking on my door that day in January when I became Dara Okat, the one who lost his hundred hands in the battle against time. But, time has to pass...

Sunday, May 15, 2011

JK @ Rajghat

The work of J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986) has been of particular relevance to the teachers of the school both in their own lives and in their concerns about education. In his writings and talks to audiences all over the world, Krishnamurti emphasized the need for a fundamental transformation in human consciousness. The turmoil in our relationships and in the world is a reflection of our self-centredness and our confused attempts to escape pain and suffering. Without this transformation, he felt that there was no possibility of lasting peace and freedom for the individual or for society.

Krishnamurti was probably unique among seers in his unequivocal rejection of religious and spiritual authority. He refused to be cast as the guru, demanding instead that each one of us be “a light unto oneself”. He rejected method and practice, pointing out that these implied psychological time and a false sense of becoming. He spoke of the possibility of a choiceless awareness in the present that makes no effort to change or transform.

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Benaras for me...

...was the insignificance of time. It was the smile on the faces of the four little girls in Assi, the hours spent in Harmony having chai with Rakesh talking about self-realisation and Gurdjieff, it was those solo walks on the ghats looking at the "Rakaposhi loves you" signs on Niranjani Ghat, it was timelessness in Kedar Ghat, it was listening to Shree in Pallabda's place, it was singing Sakhi Mora Piya Ko Dekho in Bhupali, it was the time spent in Lal Babu's little shop having his high protein lunch cooked by one of his employees, then talking about Yoga and man, it was researching the Raga in Aum Cafe, wifi internet and all while I played Kumar Gandharv's Bhimpalasi... Benaras for me was all this and more, wonder when I will come home again to Benaras...

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Revisiting Gabriel Libinski in September

Two days of intensive discussions on film, life, art in general, cities, society and the future of humanity. And within those, interludes of Rat and Bear, Holy Mountain and El Topo. A very rich two days thanks to a chance meeting with Gabriel, a Belgian writer-thinker-violin & miniature guitar player. Oh not to forget he rides a cycle-rickshaw in Barcelona. And the best thing - he listens. Carefully listens, asks questions, reads the synopsis of my films in extreme detail reading everything out loud. Its been refreshing to have met him. And his sense of humour, wow. Really like Alice in wonderland, but Alice on LSD. Among other things, we spoke of the insignificance of a life spent buying Prada slippers, Armani watches & ck underwear (to think I was all that!), of a society that has lost the plot, of a people living in a time where they have no connection with their own inner selves, of the foreigners who come to India and cycle around everywhere with their children - the richness of that, the inward arc, of selling out working in commercial graphic design - making rich companies richer, of "flaunting it" a book about the power of shopping and owning and above all flaunting it and women wanting to be with someone purely on the size of a man's, errr, bank balance, of the floating man productions and its rather absurd logo, of being bit by an elephant!

I will be seeing him everyday till I leave. We even jammed last night at his place, him on the violin, me on the miniature while my boatman was rolling the J. I am having too many ideas these days. Its got to be the electricity of Benaras, one of the strangest yet inspiring places ever. How about a series of films like "The Belgian in Benaras" - peoples ideas of the place, what it means to them, etc. Go on then, do it Mordecai! Knives out...

Die in Varanasi

Benaras, also known as Varanasi, or Kashi, is the place many people visit to die. They stay here waiting. In waiting they see the flames burning 24 hours, 365 days a year at the cult Manikarnika Ghat where apparently Parvathi lost her earring. This ghat is always busy with activity. There are the drug dealer boys who I befriended just to get a peak into their lives. They all had white girlfriends. They were fashion conscious. They wanted me to make a film about them and call it "Fun of the Life". What a perfect title. I loved talking to them in English in those dark corridors of Manikarnika. Over chai. Listening to their stories was fun. I imagined their on-the-edge lives in the dark alleyways of Benaras. Their red right hands dealing drugs and making joints, the same hands rowing boats and eating food, opening beer bottles and drinking chai. This was their life. They were the boys of Manikarnika, their eyes saw a thousand things, their hearts shrunk to the size of a peanut. All they wanted was money, women and charas. There existed nothing beyond this. They partied on the boats during the festivals, their eyes glistening from the fire of the pyres. After spending an afternoon with them, I would walk back slowly through the gulleys back to Assi, back into the silence of Ganesh Ojha house...

Sunday, May 1, 2011

I discovered Krishnamurthi that winter...

Question: Instead of addressing heterogeneous crowds in many places and dazzling and confounding them with your brilliance and subtlety, why do you not start a community or colony and create a reference for your way of thinking? Are you afraid that this could never be done?

Krishnamurti: Sir brilliance and subtlety should always be kept under cover, because too much exposure of brilliance only blinds. It is not my intention to blind or show cleverness, that is too stupid; but when one sees things very clearly, one cannot help setting them out very clearly. This you may think brilliant and subtle. To me, what I am saying is not brilliant: it is the obvious. That is one fact. The other is, you want me to found an ashram or a community. Now, why? Why do you want me to found a community? You say that it will act as a reference, that is, something which can be pointed out as a successful experiment. That is what a reference implies, does it not? - a community where all these things are being carried out. That is what you want. I do not want to found an ashram or a community, but you want it. Now, why do you want such a community? I will tell you why. It is very interesting, is it not? You want it because you would like to join with others and create a community, but you do not want to start a community with yourself; you want somebody else to do it, and when it is done you will join it. In other words, Sir, you are afraid of starting on your own, therefore you want a reference. That is, you want something which will give you authority of a kind that can be carried out. In other words, you yourself are not confident, and therefore you say, `Found a community and I will join it'. Sir, where you are you can found a community, but you can found that community only when you have confidence. The trouble is that you have no confidence. Why are you not confident? What do I mean by confidence? The man who wants to achieve a result, who gets what he wants, is full of confidence the business man, the lawyer, the policeman, the general, are all full of confidence. Now, here you have no confidence. Why? For the simple reason you have not experimented. The moment you experiment with this, you will have confidence. Nobody else can give you confidence; no book, no teacher can give you confidence. Encouragement is not confidence; encouragement is merely superficial, childish, immature. Confidence comes as you experiment; and when you experiment with nationalism, with even the smallest thing, then as you experiment you will have confidence, because your mind will be swift, pliable; and then where you are there will be an ashram, you yourself will found the community. That is clear, is it not? You are more important than any community. If you join a community, you will be as you are - you will have somebody to boss you, you will have laws, regulations and discipline, you will be another Mr. Smith or Mr. Rao in that beastly community. You want a community only when you want to be directed, to be told what to do. A man who wants to be directed is aware of his lack of confidence in himself. You can have confidence, not by talking about self-confidence, but only when you experiment, when you try. Sir, the reference is you, so, experiment, wherever you are, a whatever level of thought. You are the only reference, not the community; and when the community becomes the reference, you are lost. I hope there will be lots of people joining together and experimenting, having full confidence and therefore coming together; but for you to sit outside and say, `Why don't you form a community for me to join?', is obviously a foolish question.

Marcela Rossiter

Aum Cafe, January 2010. Chance meeting with Marcela Rossiter, blond bubbly elderly french woman always in black. She was in Benaras to learn about Kundalini from the famous Vagyogi Vagiesh Shastri in Benaras. We connected on the spot, a sphere of similarities, we extended our chance meeting over cafe latte and humus. She is more Spanish than French, psychic capabilities of feeling the presence of dead people in places where they died. She felt the exact spot of Joan of Arc’s death in a fort, later on felt psychic connection with black man, realised he was the force that managed to get her out of hospital from a bad kidney. She realised it was him who was going to save her. Then she let go and walked and walked as a certain force from inside took her to a Church in Notredame in front of the statue of Joan of Arc, who apparently became a saint in the last years of her life. A strange series of events. Give up trying to figure it out. Its life, it cannot be figured out, discussed or even be insulted by being put into words. Give up, give it all up. No labels. This is the time I realised the trajectories and tapestries all woven into a cosmic oneness we call coincidence.