Be A Lotus In Life - Barkha Dhar - Hindustan Times

My latest article Be a Lotus in Life has been published in the Inner Voice section of The Hindustan Times, India's leading Newspaper.

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.

I am the Spirit of a Woman

Copyright (c) 2010 - present Dharbarkha.blogspot
Video Courtesy: http://www.youtube.com/user/BarkhaDhar

Akshaya Patra: Feeding The Future

My elderly friend once said to me, ‘praying for others before praying for self’ invokes invincible blessings. Indeed, her wisdom meant that our prayers are holy seam that resurrect hope even for people unknown to us. Tonight at Christmas Eve, when my family & I shall enjoy sumptuous meal, we shall pray for the million souls fed daily by Akshaya Patra, an NGO fighting hunger across nine states in India. The sanguine mission of Akshaya Patra adumbrates the legendary ‘service before self’ in its nineteen kitchens that satisfy the cravings of young children to bring back the sheen in their empty eyes. Through its mid-day meal program, Akshaya Patra feeds future of each child and liberates neglected smiles. Under its shelter, children are heirs of love and contentment.  They are gladiolas of innocence, whose ingenuity and ability would otherwise be lost to streets in search of rags and contaminated food. Feeding a child reinforces their intellect, explores hidden talents, nurtures and empowers life and augurs social change. A continued drive against hunger boosts energy in each child to unnerve malnutrition that causes atrophy of human potential. An endeavor of such magnitude stirs the soul to reflect on Akshay Patra’s immense capacity to procreate in their humanitarian crusade. 

With each under-privileged child fed at Ashaya Patra, lives are transformed and made viable and opportune to their habitat. With each growls of hunger killed, the verve for kindness and compassion is induced. With each nibble inside million mouths sustenance is stimulated in efforts to endow and encourage eclectic relationships. Akshaya Patra’s indomitable model of service to mankind modestly upholds the values of generosity and beatitude as new-age sermons of humanity. It firmly reinstates that each day can be merriment like Christmas if we conjoin in motifs against starvation and illiteracy that slowly is devouring life. As my dearly friend always says, ‘blessed are those who bless others’. So let’s make a ‘pledge of aid’ this Christmas in possibilities we can to Akshaya Patra and its philanthropic quest.     

Copyright (c) 2010 - present Dharbarkha.blogspot

Video Courtesy: Akshaya Patra

link to make a donation online

I Am Thankful For Being Alive

My dad always says, “There is nothing permanent in this life except for the rising and the setting of the sun”. To this day, I feel that his words have an astounding aura and an amazing grace. Being alive means more than just breathing and living life. It’s about rising to the shine of soul that makes us aware of being thankful for ‘who we are’ and ‘who we become’ as we move through the tunnels of time in this life. Being thankful for being alive is to accept that life is mortal in many ways. It becomes fatal when we get ruthless with nature, when we are merciless for the vulnerable and when we are injurious to our self through our actions. Life ceases to exist when we freeze our love for others, when we create endless hurdles and envy for others and when we plug out the possibilities to change. In this carnage of emotions through life, we forget to summon our mind with the time when we were born with clean slate and clenched hands and the time when we shall depart with folded eyes and bare hands.

Being alive is to honor the chastity of our soul that helps us to be thankful for the virtues of nature, an immortal gift of the supreme lineage. Being thankful today, tomorrow and forever is to enlighten myself for the blessings that I have realized and the blessings that are unrealized. I am thankful for the milieu that wakes me up to the glare of the sun and to the hope that today is good and tomorrow shall be better. I am thankful for being ‘who I am’ till ‘I am’. As Meister Eckhart once said, “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, “thank you,” that would suffice”.                                     

                                  Happy thanksgiving everyone.

Copyright (c) 2010-2011 Dharbarkha.blogspot

Photo Courtesy: Sunrise Church

Helping Others Begets Happiness

What if you were a child with potential worth a vista but were born and bred in darkness? What if you had futile dreams given the ebb of survival in Kolkata’s   (Calcutta, India) red light area? Such was the epoch that little Avijit and his friends aspired in their uphill battle until Zana Briski, photographer, filmmaker and activist saw the unseen blooming in their dingy rooms. Zana’s appetite for giving back and her ardor to share smiles through her lenses gave a group of deprived children the pursuit of happiness. Grooming an excited bunch of children on photographic skills to recognize their hidden talents gave these hapless a light of hope. 

Zana’s movie ‘Born into Brothels,’ an Oscar winning documentary on the emotions of these little children in the red light district portrays that happiness is inborn. It’s an expression that is not bound by destiny but by desire. Like the Midas touch, happiness is a brush of life that has the power to endow love and cheer in an eclectic relationship called humanity. Zana’s altruism is a snap shot of brilliance with purpose that also captures incredible moments of euphoria amid eclipse. Zana’s non-profit; ‘Kids with Camera’ is a venture that empowers heap of creativity while refurbishing innocent lives. Through its charitable efforts it reinstates that happiness is a treasure of the soul, which contagiously multiplies as we reach out to the helpless and the needy. 

Most talented out of the bunch of these street children, Avijit who decade ago led a bleak life on the somber lanes of Kolkata (Calcutta), today is a budding artist at New York University’s Tisch School of Arts. His other street buddies too see a pie in the sky. Some of these children can fluently communicate in English today and are setting an example for others like them. Zana Briski’s ‘kids with camera’ that funds Avijit’s education in the US and of his friends and their siblings back in India illustrates that happiness is actually contentment. Its vivacity lies in sharing the elation of our heart to fill dreary lives through community service and social good. Like Zana Briski we all have a colorful fountain of affection and peace inside us that adorns our conscience. This feeling of pleasure is a paradise beyond material prosperity. It starts with exploring our true self to generate mirth in helping others. Such serene sense often lies covered beneath a worldly merriment. To uncover this strength we need to effectuate change for greater good. When such realization seeds in us we become mindful of paying it forward. This feeling of giving and receiving love is nothing but happiness.

Copyright © 2011 - Present dharbarkha.blogspot
Photo Courtesy:  www.IMDB.com

Poverty Is An Unending Threat: Millennium Development Goal

What could be the fate of a child in a womb that is nurtured with agony and adversity? What could be it’s destiny on being conceived and born prey to paucity? How shall he or she survive while being raised handcuffed to poverty? Sadly, this is the life of 1.4 billion people around the globe who survive in trenches thwarted with misery, anger, depression, abuse, addiction and victimization. In shrieks of exigency and outage of happiness, these forbidden souls are exiled to maltreatment. Their vulnerabilities inflict brim survival with lean emotional and social recovery. Their crisis, which appears to most a void of basic amenities, is actually a trauma of hope.                                                                      
                                                                      

Entrapped with bane, poverty incites most to beg, borrow or steal to meet the ends. As a parasite of pride, its most outrageous impact is on the lives of children who are in state of destitution. Being born and raised amid scarcity and subservience, these children hardly see a light. Lack of proper nutrition and basic education, absence of emotional and fulfilling care and untimely medication are some added injuries to their lives. Besides the bereft of bare necessities, these children are devoid of positive parenting, which is the bedrock for a healthy, meaningful and sustainable life.

Most often these children belong in slums or homeless shelters. Those who stay with their families are forced to work as laborers and slaves. When they are not serving for money, they are captive to their parent’s emotional upheavals, physical abuse and mental frustration. Their innocence and self worth is slaughtered by poverty and its consequent unending drill. Right from the mother’s womb to a vacant life on the streets, poverty eats them all. In absence of conducive parenting, fertile minds of young children squander and resort to delinquency. Competencies and capabilities that could have been suitably utilized for each and by each for collaborative efforts towards socio-economic development hence go waste.

Unfortunate yet true, in the abundance of distress and negativity that poverty spurts, there lies a dearth of intellect and untapped potential, not just in one city, one state, and one country but around the world. Poverty therefore is no more a problem but a pandemic today. Over the years, United Nations’ indispensable efforts have been elemental in raising awareness about this critical social and economic issue. However in the millennium, this goal has become a manifold responsibility for each of us. 

• To appreciate social diversity and understand that people in slums or families with low socio-economic status are like firefighters. Day in and day out they battle for survival. 
• To acknowledge the fact that poverty is the ground for most social evils like gender inequality, rich-poor divide, famines and hunger, malnutrition, poor maternal and child health etc. 
• To understand that making education available to all, empowering women in villages, suburbs and small towns through micro-credit financing are some basic tools to eradicate poverty. 
• Adult education, emphasis on controlling crime and corruption, and rescuing people from harmful addictions are ways to rejuvenate valuable human resources. Better amenities shall result in better parenting, which shall help save future generations from entrapping into poverty. 

• Last but not least, raising voice and increasing awareness on Poverty can encourage million thoughts. Putting these million thoughts into hundred actions can result in countable efforts. These countable efforts can then lead to fundamental goals. 

As a blogger, I certainly believe that leaving these problems to federal and state government alone won’t help. However, if each of us support and participate in taking action towards these goals by 2015, many major problems shall appear minor. So Lets stand up against Poverty as a Millennium Development Goal, this time not just to shout but also to act.

Copyright (c) 2010-2011 Dharbarkha.blogspot
Video Courtesy: United Nations