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.

The Great Socrates

A savant of western philosophy in ancient Greece, Socrates’ quest for life is beautifully versed as, “True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves and the world around us”. Today such enlightenment is a treasure for those who believe perspicacity of the surroundings to be paragon of the self. Applying Socratic art of discernment is like an internal compass that can draw our true north, while awakening us to quandaries and solutions through reasoning and rendition. What Socrates always believed in, was questioning about things, what, how and why the way they happen. With an unfastened vision on life, Socratic teachings are like a phenomenon, that if observed can leverage life’s blueprint. As a philosopher he wandered for the unknown, which according to him could be derived from the known. He wasn’t a Management guru, relationship expert or diplomat but his back in the day social prognosis can be an invaluable diagnose to our apprehensions, perceptions and actions in the present day. Socrates’ idea of truth and knowledge was not hearsay but testimony of the actual. Realizing and implementing such insight into practice is one way we can ease our adaptation to change in our own life, lives of other people and the macrocosm. 

If we habituate to Socratic state of mind by putting ourselves to test through open-ended questions related to our thoughts, feelings and actions, or even engage in genesis for our problems and situations, we in a way initiate self-management. Being conscious through such SWOT, we liberate ourselves of fears and biases, attempt at unlearning old practices and learn to be part of a distinctive genre. Such avant-garde exploration of the unknown through self questioning and rumination for the way we are, the way we act, the influence of other’s behavior on us and the means by which we construe the creation around us, we can build acumen as a competitive advantage only to contribute mindfully and intently to the society. This Socratic love for wisdom and intellectualism in each of us can further shape our acuity to live life differently by learning to focus on cause rather than just the effect. So if we relied on grapevine communications more often at work or felt productively occupied with gossip in familial relationships, we will realize that such information spreads like fire, it may have good or bad effect because it’s just a rumor but its cause most of the time remains uncertain as such communication carries partial information, which only astounds problems and gaps and does not improve these.   

Elucidating admiration for Socratic logic and synthesis further, if we feel exhilarated and secured with material wealth, cash on over ambitions to prove our net worth, why do most of us feel stressed out and empty inside-out ? Possibly here too we emphasize on effect, forgetting the cause for such consequence. Why it is that ego, false prestige and greed makes one counterfeit themselves at the cost of sensitive relations? Why jealousy or one-upmanship among parent-child relation leads to clashes? Besides why do often people camouflage in public, while uncovering there real self privately? Also, are ethics and moral values precepts that only a few of us need to follow? Or is our society undergoing an intimidating phase of double standards? These are some questions that as direct dialogue can head start self examination and aid analysis of situations in one’s life. Settings, station and level of understanding of life, ourselves and of people around may differ though. However developing such sagacity is what Socrates called wisdom to answer the enigma of life. 

Copyright (c) 2009 - present Dharbarkha.blogspot  

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Love Inspires Us

Nature’s inhabitance of life through nesting and incubation is a unique example of love. Timeless and boundless, love is fulfillment in cheer and joy, charm and embrace. As a sanctum within, love unites us in benevolence, togetherness, yearning and desire. It’s the omnipotence of god and a divine endowment to humanity to value existence and appreciate the abundance of positive emotions inside. A synergy created through affection and compassion, inspiration and imagination, acceptance and forgiveness, love is unconditional and unbiased. Love also is consciousness where humility, sincerity and truth in thoughts, words and actions help sustain character, wisdom and intellect to achieve life’s goals and mission.

Love is an identity not by one’s professional degrees, awards, material gains, creed or caste but by a vent of genuine emotions though heart. Such care of sentiments brings excitement in life, heals past wounds, fosters strength to withstand crisis, empowers mind with determination and confidence and helps cope with vehemence and stress in emotions and relations. All the more, love is an exquisite service to self before service to others. It unfolds us to reverence for god and his creations by releasing us from negativities like anger, pride, jealously, fear and disgust. Such is love’s beatitude that evolves us to a higher state where positive emotions consecrate a humanitarian cause. 

As a transformational tool, love internalizes success through self-talk, focus on personal competencies and maintaining passion for life. A desire to connect with people and their feelings is the invigoration of love, known as empathy. Charting our life through love can even turn mammoth problems into magnificent opportunities for change. By sharing love, we expand the meaning of our life and contract selfishness that distracts us from our internal vigor. Capitalizing on love as core strength builds emotional profundity and aids self-introspection on a scale of social affection. Poetry of Shakespeare, inspirational quotes of Mahatma Gandhi, spiritual discourses of Dalai Lama, are all conquerors of love in common man’s heart. 

Manifestation of love can also lessen bigotry, superstitions, control our material cling and over ambition amid present times of fatal and excessive monetization, power and politics, professional excellence and outplay, personal and faith based rivalries. Epitomizing love both internally and externally can revitalize relationships in families and neighborhood, within communities and nations, among religions and cultures and between all ages. Love can also foment self realization when we draw its explicit energy from the bounties of nature. Spending time in silence, assessing our feelings periodically, playing with pets and children, participating in performing arts, tuning back to old hobbies, taking a day out with loved ones are  some ways we can rejuvenate love. As Morrie Schwartz once said, ‘The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in’.

Copyright (c) 2009 - present Dharbarkha.blogspot
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Rise and Shine in 2010

 

As the clock strikes midnight and the famous ball drops down the Times Square in New York, love shall be ubiquitous and pervasive. This moment shall be euphoric across continents and oceans, beyond destiny and design, in destitution and opulence and in sickness and health. This amazing eternal flash would count us all one in a motley, a divine state where grace is shared and realized. Ushering into New Year this time, once again would be enthralling to live life brand new and an opportunity to shed the old us just like a soul that changes garbs through past lives.

A fresh day and a fresh year would be a beam of inner light and beacon of a dream where each of us connects within to connect with others. This envisage of a communion is what we need for brotherhood, peace and global unanimity. This dream today is a desire tomorrow and a predilection thereafter to cast away enmity, impartiality and injustice. Such propensity to preserving integrity and the entirety in humanity shall awaken us to mind, body and soul as one, an idiosyncratic of nature and mankind.

A new year is to rise with time and shine in its bout to see love as a foreknowledge to wholeness and a synergy of five elements that we are made of.  Such clasp of ourselves shall save us from chaos and calamities of man and machine that haggle with nature. A new date today should be worth virtues, kindness, Sacraments (Samskars) of truth and justice, abandoning treacherous ideas and practices, and giving up violence and abuse. Acceptance of such route in life does not mean renunciation of temporal pleasures of time. It instead is an avowal of supreme happiness, which is the hidden heaven in our hearts. Such beatitude is omnipresent, in the young and the old, in able and disabled, in man and woman and in you and me, the power of one heart, one mind and one soul. So let’s make this New Year horizon of the cosmos in reach of our hands the moment we place them on our heart to say a prayer to ourselves. This omen of triumph in our hearts is rise and shine of humanity and the birth of solemnity and sanctity in 2010. As T.S. Eliot, the famous poet and literary critic of the 20th Century once said, “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.”

Copyright (c) 2009 - present Dharbarkha.blogspot 
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Truth or False | Intent.com

I was raised with the ideals that truth exists and shall always prevail, perhaps an inherent characteristic of nurturing and parenthood. Over the years however I feel that truth is distinctive and yet requires evidences. Our values and beliefs or material cling are such evidences in a man-made courtroom but our consciousness is a truth in itself in the supreme courtroom. Truth, in my view is never right or wrong, only in ’favor of’ or ‘against of’. While writing this post, I reassure myself that truth is not created but discovered, just as the route to self-discovery or evolving in a conscious state. Truth may seem undercover in the moment owing to false impressions, artificial imagery, superimposed beliefs, myopic perceptions and manipulations, just as we seem to be undercover of our material being. Truth indeed is an eye opener to our current state of being where each day is critical content vs. spiritual intent.
Truth is the actual, as ‘I am’ and not artificial ‘what I should be’, it is the inevitable just like the cycle of life and balance of nature. However in this rush to live, we often fail to read signs and make choices that lead us to a false end. A gentleman once said to me, “ who has seen truth? I would believe what I see and not what is actual”, little did he knew that his experiences saw consequences as truth to the naked eye but an illusion to the spiritual eye. Moreover, our life is a gamut of experiences and often weighs truth or false in each incident.  Most of the time, in my view, truth is like the dust that is hidden under the rug just to let others know of the neat show.  However only a person attuned to his conscious being can make efforts to get rid of such dust without worrying for the neat show. Truth is also listening to our heart, being thankful for all the good things around and unfolding self to sink in the spiritual energy around. It is to touch base with ‘ I am’ and ‘ I do’ for truth is the sole beginning, as also the sole end.

Truth or False | Intent.com

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