Skip to main content

A story in images

 I don't feel like writing anything today. I want a story to unfold through some old pictures. 


One of the most beautiful places in Delhi is The Garden of Five Senses. You will find yourself bathing in an ocean of flowers and floral decorations. This picture belongs to 2010, long before the Radha Soami Satsang people invaded Sawan school and began to corrode our happiness for the sake of their spirituality. 


2014. Narendra Modi came to power in Delhi. The invasion of Sawan by RSSB was almost complete. The sprawling playgrounds of the school are what you see in the picture above. Those grounds which were maintained meticulously by the physcial education teachers and their supporting staff were now filled with buses from all over North India. These buses brought the devotees of RSSB for their usual quarterly Satsang. 


RSSB left an immense vacuum not only on the campus but also in the hearts of a lot of people. 


Monkeys ruled the campus soon. They were alll over. Some of them occupied high positions in the school's offices. 


Maggie and I went a few places in search of another job since Sawan's death was certain and imminent. One such place was Jhansi. We took a diversion from Jhansi and visited the cenotaphs of Orchha. The cenotaphs left a symbolic imprint in our hearts. 


We have walked on happily together in spite of all those invasions and cenotaphs... That's how life is: it has a way of going on. In spite of everything...

Comments

  1. magiceyeJune 15, 2024 at 12:17 PM

    Well done!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yamini MacLeanJune 15, 2024 at 1:31 PM

    Hari Om
    🙏❤️ YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  3. rupam sarmaJune 15, 2024 at 6:58 PM

    Beautiful post

    ReplyDelete
  4. Jose D. MaliekalJune 15, 2024 at 9:23 PM

    Glad you are taking time to re-live..., unlike the tourist, who moves and clicks much... with no space and time for Memory..

    ReplyDelete
  5. Liz A.June 16, 2024 at 2:16 AM

    Sometimes it's just nice to reminisce (even about not good times) and look at old pictures.

    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
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more