God's Tough Love

When we are beaming with success or luxuriating in wealth, we seldom feel miffed with god. In our affluence and prosperity, we take his blessings to be a mark of our good fortune. But what happens when we are ripped off of comfort and are faced with situations that challenge our faith in god? Losing a highly remunerative job, a loved one, or failing in life’s countless endeavors are examples of some unexpected mishaps. During privation, we often feel betrayed by god’s grace and his eternal love and begin to question his imperceptible plans for us. Here is a short story that would delineate our unfathomable relationship with god.    

Once upon a time, a survivor of a shipwreck was washed up on a small and uninhabited island. In his restlessness to save himself, he offered feverish prayers to the lord and desired that he be rescued. Every day the survivor scanned the horizon for help, but none of his efforts or prayers seemed to be paying. Days and months passed by and the exhausted sailor eventually managed to build a little hut out of driftwood to defend himself from his unasked cast away. In his hut, the sailor had his little possessions that he had saved during the ship wreck. One day when the sailor came back to his hut after hunting for food, he found his little hut burning in flames and the smoke rolling up to the sky. The poor sailor had experienced the worst. In his anger and annoyance with the lord, he asked, “Oh lord, why did you have to be cruel with me?” Stunned with grief, the sailor asked, “lord, how could you do this to me?” and he slept feeling bitter and blue. The next morning when the sailor woke up, he was awakened by the sound of a ship that had come to rescue him. The weary sailor asked his rescuers, “How did you know I was here?” The rescuers replied, “We saw your smoke signal.” 

When it is dark and desolate, we can rarely imagine god’s mysterious and profound ways of loving us. His ways may seem abstruse yet they contain life’s refined and pragmatic lessons. When god puts us to a test, we may hold a grudge against him. In our failing faith, we may lose hope in prayers and believe that god’s heavenly warmth has left us stranded. We, however, forget that it is the god himself who wants us to be marooned, penniless, and shipwrecked, so that he could rescue us from our doubts and insecurities. It is god’s tough love that makes us strong enough to find a new purpose in our swamped and submerged life. Hence, from a fragile being during our gala times we turn into resilient individuals during our rough patch. It seems that God’s elusive plans are surreal, which cannot be questioned, but could only be surrendered to.

Copyright © 2011 - Present dharbarkha.blogspot

Video Courtesy:  Barkha Dhar

Dear God

Dear God, 

You may still remember the pristine prayer that I sang to you everyday in the school assembly. I innocuously thanked you ‘for the food I ate, for the clothes I wore, for the birds that sang and thanked you for everything’. As child, I wondered what contained in thanking you for ‘everything’. To date, I devoutly tumble on this thought that vaguely describes your art. I certainly imagine thanking you for my material existence that spurs my life in day and night. But that would be morsel of my gratitude. So I am writing to you about what subsumes of thanking you for that ‘everything’ unknown to me as child. At the outset, I would like to accede with my habitat’s preeminent contributions that have been substantial in valuing what I have than what I don’t. This feeling perhaps enunciates that life is beyond our control and sometimes its course gets haywire. In moments when logic appears irrational, your stupendous milieu guides and sustains me and my fellow inhabitants. Your signs reinstate that when things go wrong, there is a purpose and that you have something daring and exciting planned for us. 

God, alongside your immaculate lessons, yet another earmark distinguishes us in this habitat. It’s the disposition of your children. Besides physical self, our mind is most visceral. It reins our thoughts and feelings and often hobnobs with our relationships. So sometimes we fight, brush along with ego, meddle in other’s family matters and disturb someone unrelentingly instead of sharing love. In such instances, your blessings are colossal in reminding us of the one’s who express their cheer and ardor for us. You remind us of looking up to those who inspire us and accept us for who we are instead of picking on us. Besides, your sanctity and faith generates might and keeps us away from those who spite us or are vindictive. 

Dear God, your omnipotence is your third eye watching us all from a celestial cinemascope. Its mammoth screen is like a mirror that captures good, sad and changing moments of our lives. Besides, it reflects on the magnitude of our musings that quite often absorbs us in self-praise without any heed to self-blame. In such occasions, we get preoccupied with selfdom, criticize and conceal against the one’s we dislike. Sometimes, we may even go overboard to denigrate others with our one-sided judgments. God, this is when your prayers invoke hope and conveys that no matter what, truth shall always prevail. 

God, although your supreme craft sometimes appears absolute. It however leaves us with invincible quest to look inside before we look outside at others. Such self-exploration helps in coexistence. Unmasking ourselves even for once makes us realize that even if we are different, yet we synchronize as pieces of an unending puzzle. Now that awareness certainly seems magnificent! It indeed is a chunk of ‘thank you for everything’ that you gifted me and my fellow inhabitants in this abode that we call life. 

Signing off with reverence,

Barkha Dhar  

Copyright (c) 2011 - present Dharbarkha.blogspot

Video Courtesy: http://www.youtube.com/user/BarkhaDhar

Voice-over: Ash D.

Route to Tranquility - Barkha Dhar - Hindustan Times

My latest article Route to Tranquility has been published in the Inner Voice section of The Hindustan Times,India's leading Newspaper.

Copyright (c) 2009 - present Dharbarkha.blogspot

Compassion Is An Ace Virtue

Compassion is like a cathedral in our heart that incites us to serve the destitute. When we internalize this feeling as the voice of our soul, it bedazzles us with the radiance of an inner shrine. Often, words that emanate from our soul are the wisdom of our conscientious state and show us a unique light that exists in all of us. This illumination within is the grace that we can feel when we touch others lives through a compassionate heart and an open mind. As a synagogue inside, compassion is a novel gesture that connects affection and inspiration to pain and suffering in a healing relationship.

The magnificence of compassion is a push that we feel by sharing its benevolent power with the ones in great need. As the lyrical beats of our heart, compassion is a song that God gifted us to listen to other’s call of anxiety and turmoil, violence and abuse. Uncovering this abundant empathy inside to uplift the oppressed and unfortunate, is a fulfillment beyond comparison. Such rehabilitative force inside us can repair wounded emotions, help restore positive energy in others and can sometimes be a phenomenon deeper than the acumen of medical science.

Compassion is also a stimulant virtue that helps us honor the dignity in human relationships, irrespective of one’s material status. As fortitude of a visionary mind and strength of character, compassion is the route to righteousness. Preserving the sanctity in humanity through kind actions and genuine concern for the sick, poor, battered and homeless conserves positivity in us and also promotes social conscience. Most importantly, as a cornerstone of faith, compassion trespasses creed to create uniformity in our feelings for others and unites us in motley with our global brothers and sisters.

Mother Teresa was one such humanitarian who left us with the legacy of her compassionate mission. Her work for lepers, abandoned women and children is instrumental in the history of charity and social change in India and world over. Born as an Albanian with a heart that was truly Indian, Mother Teresa took compassion to a global scale. As an apostle of charity, she served and saved many vulnerable lives in India and throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, Poland and Australia. Had she restricted her altruistic mission to her native in Albania, this world would have been deprived of a compassionate mother. On her death, Mother Teresa laid beatified in a glass coffin with her serene white face and a life similar to a sage. As a holy icon, she taught us a chaste lesson that compassion is not an end but the means to an allusive beginning.

Copyright (c) 2009 - present Dharbarkha.blogspot