Let me sail in the ocean of my dreams

Lebanon and Beirut have been in the news these past couple of days because of the terrible explosion and the awful loss of lives.  What a tragedy!

Some day, when peace returns, I hope I will be able to travel to Lebanon.

As a young teenager, I realized that I had a deep-seated yearning for understanding the world outside the small little part that I had been exposed to.   My window to the world was through the radio and the print media--after all, the internet had yet to be invented!

Thus, it was perhaps in my eleventh grade or so, I wrote two letters.

The first one was to the West German embassy in New Delhi.  In the letter, I requested information about possibilities for undergraduate studies in West Germany.  With the characteristic German efficiency, which I would personally experience two decades later, I got a thick envelope from the embassy with a whole lot of information.

Well, it didn't take me long to realize that fluency of the German language was required. And, that was it.

The second letter was to the American University in Beirut.  Yes, the Beirut of the horrendous civil war that was dominating the pages of The Hindu those days.  I couldn't care about the war, and I figured that there wouldn't be any language issue with the American University.

When a thickly padded envelope arrived, dad was flummoxed, and may have said something along the lines of "you want to go to a country that is in the middle of a war?"

I suppose I had a difficult time explaining my fascination for Lebanon--it was all because of Khalil Gibran.

I had borrowed The Prophet from the only library in town, and found Gibran's writings very intriguing.  It appealed a lot to the brooding teenager that I was, like most teens!  Even though, I wasn't able to quite fathom Gibran's philosophical and mystical words.

But, Gibran had me all worked up about Lebanon.  A few other essays I read talked up Lebanon as a Venice, as an exciting place where the West met the East.  Others described it as a Paris in the east.

I wanted to be there, civil war be damned!

I might have made it there, but for the truckloads of money that was needed.

So, no Beirut either.

Instead, I went to Coimbatore, via Nagpur.  Oh well, Beirut, Coimbatore, ... all the same, right? :)

A little over five years after the first time I ever went to Coimbatore, I reached America.  Lebanon and Beirut always managed to pop up in my life at regular intervals.

Towards the end of graduate school, a friend, Praveen, who returned to India after completing his doctoral work, presented me with Gibran's Tears and Laughter.  It kept the Lebanon flame alive.

One of the people in the life after graduate school, and who later became good friends, was a couple from Lebanon.  Samir, who suddenly died of a heart attack way too young, fondly talked about his growing up years in Lebanon, and about the cedars and the figs.  Sam, as he was known, did his part to stoke the fire inside for Gibran's land.

It is now almost forty years since I fell in love with a place and its peoples I had never met.  Maybe soon I will be in Lebanon.

Here's a stanza from Gibran's "Leave me, my blamer"

Let me sail in the ocean of
My dreams; Wait until Tomorrow
Comes, for tomorrow is free to
Do with me as he wishes. Your
Laying is naught but shadow
That walks with the spirit to
The tomb of abashment, and shows
Heard the cold, solid earth.

Your favorite guru was what yesterday?

Over the weekend, in a conversation with the friend, I recalled the saying in the old country, "ரிஷி மூலம் நதி மூலம் ஆராயக்கூடாது (do not try to trace the origins of sages and rivers.)  The idea is that in both the cases, the origins can be quite unimpressive.  Or worse in the case of the holy men and gurus who actively peddle their "wisdom"--their past can sometimes be darn ugly.

In the contemporary world, with the Indian diaspora far away from the old country, there are quite a few gurus who sell their merchandise to those of Indian and other origins and--this is where the old saying came in to the conversation--many of them might have quite some blemishes in their past.  Like with this cult leader guru, for instance.

A day later came this email from the friend after re-reading Paul Theroux's "Africa's Aid Mess" in which he quotes Thoreau:

A rich white doctor in black Africa is a study in high contrast that puts one in the mind of the gallery of role models: Tarzan, Mr. Kurtz, King Leoplold, Cecil Rhodes... The overlords, the opportunists, the exploiters, the visionaries, the hunters, the care-givers, the baptizers, the saviors... Seeking a kingdom of their own, if not an empire. Henry David Thoreau believed that all such outgoing people had something discreditable in their past that through giving they wished to expiate.

I loved that phrasing: "something discreditable in their past that through giving they wished to expiate."

I am so thankful that I do not blindly chase after false gurus.  In fact, I joke that I have enough materials within me to market them to the gullible and live the life of money, sex, and drugs--like how that notorious guy from India lived in Oregon.  But then I am a dull, boring person and I merely blog! ;)

There is a huge difference between appreciating profound ideas, understanding them, and applying them to our lives versus appreciating, adoring and worshiping the messenger of those ideas.  The messenger rarely is faultless and clean, and even then to celebrate them when they are alive is a huge risk--we mortals err, and for all we know the human we adore today could be tomorrow's axe murderer.

Take the case of Khalil Gibran--a figure that I have quoted often, like here.  As much as I like his mystical thoughts, well, I knew enough not to worship him.  Because, like most mystical thinkers, Gibran, too, was a fraud in his personal life.

Most of Gibran’s life, as it emerges from these biographies, seems to have been spent in tête-à-têtes in stifling Boston drawing-rooms, or at not very successful New York private views, where the talk was usually of the Higher Life of the Mind and the special responsibilities of the Poet. In time, books like The Prophet made Gibran a wealthy man (Waterfield notes that his early contempt for money softened somewhat in later life). In his last years he took to drinking heavily and he died of cirrhosis of the liver.

"something discreditable in their past that through giving they wished to expiate."  Lovely phrasing Thoreau's is, right?

From the New Yorker

Only Modi can go to Pakistan. Will he?

At the carefully chosen auspicious midnight hour in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru famously spoke on India's "Tryst with Destiny."  Sixty-seven years later, it does have the feel of yet another tryst with destiny, with the election of Narendra Modi to the office of the prime minister as a mere formal act that is pending, after the thumping victory in the recently concluded long-drawn election.  (Modi will become the first prime minister who was born in independent India.)  

Such is the margin of victory, and such is the magnitude of loss for the scions of the Nehru family, that the Congress Party might not rise again. Finito as they say in the Congress Party's president's old country. Coincidence it will be if Modi gets sworn into office on the anniversary of the death of the last of the Nehru-clan's prime minister--Rajiv Gandhi.

No doubt about the gravity of the political development. It is a marker in history.  What might be in store?  Que sera sera is not what we bloggers and commentators say. We attempt to read the tea leaves. We express our excitement and concerns. In this case, given my long track record, like here, of anything but a Modi sympathizer, concerns are in plenty.

A friend, in/from India, reminded me about Khalil Gibran's poem, Pity the Nation

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave
and eats a bread it does not harvest.

Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,
boasts not except among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid
between the sword and the block.

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking

Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting,
only to welcome another with trumpeting again.

Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years
and whose strongmen are yet in the cradle.

Pity the nation divided into fragments,
each fragment deeming itself a nation.
Khalil Gibran (The Garden of the Prophet - 1934)

The concerns about Modi are about the very traits of the leader and the country that Gibran notes: " the bully as hero," whose statesman is a fox," the nation divided into fragments" ... And the poem itself, therefore, serving as a contrast to the wonderful dream that Rabindranath Tagore dreamt for an independent India, Where the mind is without fear:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Of course, Gibran's poem was the later one and could easily be his response to Tagore.  Both the mystical thinkers were expressing similar sentiments about countries and their leaders.  The biggest worry of mine is about the fragments and that Modi, even if not a uniter, might end up being even more divisive.  A future where the walls narrow, the minorities live in fear, and the neighbors get even more ready to push that red button.

Yet, I hope against hope. After all, human existence over the thousands of years has been propelled by hope, if nothing else.

The hope is this: Modi will become India's equivalent of Nixon going to China.  With his long documented association with the RSS, Modi bleeds more saffron than anybody else can. Thus, if he were to engage in opening up relations with Muslims--internally and with Pakistan--his supporters will not have the slightest doubts about the strongman, the Hindu, that Modi is.  Modi will not be accused of treason by his fanatical followers. The huge parliamentary majority that Modi has, which is such that there might not even be a formal Leader of the Opposition, means that Modi does not have to try to appease any coalition partner and can go about mending fences with Muslims within India and with the ummah.  

For now, good luck, Mr. Prime Minister!  And good luck to my old country!

Confessing my thirty-year love affair!

A high school classmate, "S," suddenly went off the cyberspace, and a few days later explained his absence:

I'm back here again after a small hibernation in Beirut & upcountry Lebanon. Business ....huh..

Lebanon. Beirut. Aah, I have been in love with the country and that city from my early high school years!

As a young teenager, I realized that I had a deep-seated yearning for understanding the world outside the small little part that I had been exposed to.  As I noted earlier, my window to the world was through the radio and the print media--after all, the internet had yet to be invented!

Thus, it was perhaps in my eleventh grade or so, I wrote two letters.

The first one was to the West German embassy in New Delhi.  In the letter, I requested information about possibilities for undergraduate studies in West Germany.  With the characteristic German efficiency, which I would personally experience two decades later, I got a thick envelope from the embassy with a whole lot of information.

Well, it didn't take me long to realize that fluency of the German language was required. And, that was it.

The second letter was to the American University in Beirut.  Yes, the Beirut of the horrendous civil war that was dominating the pages of The Hindu those days.  I couldn't care about the war, and I figured that there wouldn't be any language issue with the American University.

When a thickly padded envelope arrived, dad was flummoxed, and may have said something along the lines of "you want to go to a country that is in the middle of a war?"

I suppose I had a difficult time explaining my fascination for Lebanon--it was all because of Khalil Gibran.

I had borrowed The Prophet from the only library in town, and found Gibran's writings very intriguing.  It appealed a lot to the brooding teenager that I was, like most teens!  Even though, I wasn't able to quite fathom Gibran's philosophical and mystical words.

But, Gibran had me all worked up about Lebanon.  A few other essays I read talked up Lebanon as a Venice, as an exciting place where the West met the East.  I wanted to be there,civil war be damned!

I might have made it there, but for the truckloads of money that was needed.

So, no Beirut.  Instead, I went to Coimbatore, via Nagpur.  Oh well, Beirut, Coimbatore, ... all the same, right? :)

A little over five years after the first time I ever went to Coimbatore, I reached America.  Lebanon and Beirut always managed to pop up in my life at regular intervals.  Towards the end of graduate school, a friend, Praveen, who returned to India after completing his doctoral work, presented me with Gibran's Tears and Laughter.  It kept the Lebanon flame alive.

A few years later, one of the people we met in our work lives after graduate school, and who later became good friends, was a couple from Lebanon.  Samir, who suddenly died of a heart attack way too young, fondly talked about his growing up years in Lebanon, and about the cedars and the figs.  Sam, as he was known, did his part to stoke the fire inside for Gibran's land.

It is now more than thirty years since I fell in love with a place and its peoples I had never met.  The email from "S" reminds me that it is a love affair that was not a mere teenage crush.  Maybe soon I will be in Lebanon.

For now, I will satisfy myself with this one stanza from Gibran's "Leave me, my blamer"

Let me sail in the ocean of
My dreams; Wait until Tomorrow
Comes, for tomorrow is free to
Do with me as he wishes. Your
Laying is naught but shadow
That walks with the spirit to
The tomb of abashment, and shows
Heard the cold, solid earth.

PS: had to re-do the post because Blogger went down for hours, and when it came back up, my last two posts had vaporized :(