To become the Path itself ...

When I was young teenager, which I was once upon a time, a couple of cousins referred to me--appreciatively and not mockingly--as Buddha, all because I offered highfalutin thoughts that were perhaps a tad out of the normal for that age.  I refer to the "mockingly" because it was also true that we used to mock people who came across like they had suddenly realized their mistakes--as if they became enlightened like the Buddha. (புத்தருக்கு ஞானம் வந்திருந்து)

Perhaps because of all these kinds of influences, or otherwise--who knows!--I have always had a fascination for the Buddha, as any number of posts in this blog reveal.

Buddhism has largely vanished from the India.  Once, I had a spirited argument with a friend, which went nowhere and ended with a agree-to-disagree, on how Adi Sankara led the charge to wipe out the rapidly growing Buddhist influence.  In the marketplace of religious truths, Buddhism lost!

My folks, like many devout Hindus, have visited Bodh Gaya and the tree (well, its descendant) where Siddhartha became the enlightened one.  Some day, I will visit those parts of India too.

For now, it is all vicarious.  Like by reading this fantastic piece in The New Yorker, in which Paul Salopek writes about waking the Buddha trail, in his Out of Eden project.

Caption at the source:
The Out of Eden Walk is an experiment in slow journalism, retracing the pathways blazed by the first Homo Sapiens

The author writes:

In the Buddha’s day, northern India’s religious landscape was in a time of spiritual crisis and social upheaval. Disillusioned, rudderless, Siddhartha renounced his gilded life—a childhood with thirty-two nursemaids, a kingdom with seasonal palaces and private gardens, and his princess wife and their child—to join other ascetics meditating in forests along the Neranjara River.
Today, plastic trash spangles the river’s sandy banks.

Such is life.  When even the Buddha has become irrelevant in this pale blue dot, how utterly foolishly arrogant of us to think that our egos and desires matter the most!

Fair goes the dancing when the Sitar is tuned.

Tune us the Sitar neither high nor low,
And we will dance away the hearts of men.

But the string too tight breaks, and the music dies. 
The string too slack has no sound, and the music dies.

There is a middle way.

Tune us the Sitar neither low nor high.
And we will dance away the hearts of men.

More here

Wrestling, or parliament? :)

I suppose I can keep this thread open, forever; here is the latest one from India's Bihar:

The caption for this photo (news report here) is:

An expelled opposition MLA being marshalled out of Bihar Legislative Assembly following a ruckus over an alleged multi-crore scam in Patna on Wednesday.

Long live democracy, eh! :)

More than a million affected by massive floods

Even as we are on the Hurricane Gustav watch, India's northern state of Bihar is reeling from massive floods. Well, Nepal too.
AFP reports that "More than 400,000 people have been evacuated in an operation involving local authorities, emergency workers and the army, disaster management ... Another 800,000 people have made their own way out and sought shelter in overcrowded relief centres set up by the government or in concrete buildings and temples, officials in Bihar said, but at least one million remain stranded."

Bihar has been a tragic story for decades. It is probably the least developed state, with the highest level of corruption and violence. A classmate of mine, Vijay Nambisan, wrote a book on Bihar a few years ago. A columnist quotes Vijay: Probably one of the best intros to Bihar could be the book by Vijay Nambisan, Bihar. "No one who has seen the Ganga plain after the monsoon and the annual flood, who has seen what it produces despite more than 2,000 years of intensive cultivation, can think that the state of Bihar is a poor one. The soil is incredibly fertile: Poke in a seed and it sprouts," writes the author.
Cut to the tale of Pushpa, thin, dark and short-statured who tells Vijay's wife, Kavery, "Why should I worry about that? I will be dead by 40."
Vijay comments: "It seemed incredible that a woman in her mid-20s, in the year of grace one thousand nine hundred ninety-seven, in a democratic republic which purports to guarantee the welfare of all its citizens, could make such a statement. The most horrible thing about it, of course, was that it was true."