Heart to Heart

Hyderabad diary Weather gods get angrier by the hour; ‘la-Mercury-sans-merci’ goes up north a notch or two every day; and what in March was a benign welcoming smile on the round resplendent face of Phoebus gives way to deepening frown dawn after dawn. Misty greyness shrouds the view. Sky has a grey countenance too, and looks languorous. The air gets hotter. Fans whir at greater speeds.  ACs get busier. This in short is my latest weather diary of Hyderabad. How is life like in an apartment perched up high on the 13 th , and now the 22 nd floor of a high-rise where we have recently shifted? As soon as ‘la-belle-dame’ dawn bids adieu, taking away the soothing quietude, and the sun-god clambers up in its fiery robes, human noises begin taking over. As school children finger-held by their multi-tasking indulgent Mums and Dads hurry for the school bus, life seems to switch gears bracing up to yet another rigmarole of the day’s trudge and toil. That’s all fine. We are all addicts to

                               Mantraheenam, kriyaheenam, bhaktiheenam…   A crippling sense of being “mantraheenam, kriyaheenam, bhaktiheenam…” has sneaked into me that mounts by the hour. It is a sickly, stifling feeling of speechlessness, powerlessness, helplessness, awe and fear: a kind of encircling gloom with no “kindly light” above or around to summon and beseech: “Lead Thou Me On.” Make no mistake please. I have not plucked out these self-effacing Sanskrit words from a redolent shloka out of any great bhakti bhaav (with ‘bhaktveers’ galore, my kind of bhakt/bhakti has no place anyway!)   My spirit of ennui has anthropomorphic origins. I have found myself idly wondering: did indeed God create man in his own image? If it were so, wouldn’t the world today be brimming with happiness, peace and love? Instead what have we? Wars, violence, vandalism, brutality, hatred, greed; man killing man; and Nature; and, perversely, digging up his own grave as also of the earth itself. Mot