Skip to main content

Ibn Battuta’s Blind Guide


My blindness will cost you more
than the sight of the other guides,
said the eyeless man to Ibn Battuta, me.

I started this journey as a pilgrimage,
the Hajj that ensures the soul the bliss of Paradise.
But Paradise is here, on the earth,
I learnt as I travelled through Dar al-Islam.
Mountains and valleys, rivers and deserts,
The birds that fly and the snakes that crawl,
The infinite variety of hypnotic women
Whose men are grappling with fate
In the torrid ruggedness of their life.

Sight is a curse, said my blind guide,
in the desert where a wind can shift a mountain.
The sand dune you see now is a valley after a storm.
Trust not your eyes in the land of illusions.
Trust not your ears in the land whose air
echoes the songs of spirits and calls of phantoms.
Trust not your senses in the land of
Ostriches that bury their sight in sand.
Trust me,
I’m the blind man of the desert
whose heart beats with insights;
I’m the blind man who sees more than the senses do. 

Note: Ibn Battuta was a 14th century traveller. 

Comments

  1. Such insightful pearls of wisdom, thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very true, Matheikal. A blind man sees more than his senses......Uncertainty is the potential ground for all certainties.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Our generation is getting more and more addicted to the senses, Ravish. Some blindness may be in good order :)

      Delete
  3. What I have seen till now is enough to make me believe in ALL which I have not seen - Am constantly trying NOT to be blinded by sight .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Great, Kokila. That's just what I've been trying to say in the poem.

      Delete
  4. The guide was blinded in one eye and diseased in another yet a man of intelligence and great knowledge. You have depicted it so beautifully. Simply amazing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The desert becomes a metaphor, Shweta, for our own 'worlds.' The vastness of the desert is puzzling enough to depress. Insights alone will help in the end.

      Delete
  5. Insightful....beautiful take

    ReplyDelete
  6. Made me remember "On His Blindness" by John Milton. Ibn Batuta The traveler and a poetry coming out of history, nothing short of a master piece.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Imagine Beethoven, the deaf man, composing musical masterpieces, Datta, let alone Milton. There's a kind of knowledge that can come only from within.

      Delete
  7. ’m the blind man of the desert
    whose heart beats with insights;
    I’m the blind man who sees more than the senses do.- beautiful lines

    ReplyDelete
  8. Sights do blind us sometimes.... a profound piece Sir, especially love the second part... :-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Colin Wilson, in one of his books, wrote about the modern man rushing through the world in his car seeing only what the headlight reveals. A very limited perception of the world. Ibn Battuta's guide could lead him at night too. In fact, the nights turned out to be better in certain areas where the days were too hot.

      Delete
  9. Ibn Batuta the mystique traveller

    ReplyDelete
  10. nothing much to say Tomichan... I'm deeply touched!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...