Literary Diarrhoea

Friday, 25th August 2006. 11.26pm.

The dark pathway leads to my destinationdestiny,

Where shadows dance, in light’s harmonysymphony,

My loneliness claustrophobic, the silence too noisyloud,

I hate myself! i hate myself! Yes, I hate myself!!!

He pressed his 2B pencil hard on the page of his poem book. The lead snapped, and left a dark spot on his page. He smiled. Finally, that perfectly symbolised his emotions. Dark. DIspleased. Depressed.

He closed his book, and put it into his backpack. If ever that poem needed an ending,  he was sure there would be much motivation later that night. Maybe it would be a perfect ending. Maybe. Que Sera Sera. But now, time was of the essence. He got up, and walked to his dressing table.

Across the room, he saw his own reflection. He looked away once and flinched,  but he was used to this feeling. He went close, and sat down. His hair was curly and dry, and never had a definite style. He hated the feel of a hat or a cap on his head. He wore a cap most of the time.

His eyes were black, and the white around it always was yellow, or even sometimes red. He hated the feel of a spectacles balanced on his ears and nose. He wore dark shades most of the time.

His nose was badly proportioned and leaned towards his upper lip, like a beak. And as he rhymed in his poem once, his beak always leaked. He had sinus. His lips were huge, with saliva often gathering and dribbling down at one end. The left end. He had a medical problem, it was called Bell’s Palsy. The facial nerves are weak on his left side. His left eye droops, and saliva often dribbles down his left lip and there is very little he could do to prevent it. He never left home without his hankerchief. Not much for his sinus but for his unwanted collection of tiny bubbles.

His skin was dark. It was 76% acne, and 24% scars. His toilet shelf houses a disgusting amount of facial creams and moisturizers. Sometimes he just flushed them down one by one in anger. They never worked.

His name was Tory. He hated his name. When he first joined school, the boys often called him Frank. He thought that was a much nicer name than Tory. But soon he found out Frank was short for Frankenstein. And he remembered Aunt Isabella, his old neighbour, used to tell him a story of this ugly monster. And then on Frank didn’t sound like a nice name anymore.

11.45pm.

After dressing up, which just involved a change of t-shirt and wearing his cap and shoes, Tory walked out of his campus hostel room with his backpack. It was dark out there, just how he likes it. Nobody sees him, and he could be excused for not seeing anyone. He hated meeting people. They all looked at him as different. He was different, actually, but let’s not think about that. 

Tory reached the pavillion. This was his second most favourite place to be. His most favourite place to be was the toilet. Toilet was the place where Tory was just Tory. Asads Tory in all his glory. He often found it amusing that his best place involved the most disgusting of acts.

He chose his usual spot, overlooking the vast university field, where the studs play football in the evening and the sluts go to watch and cheer. He despised the whole lot of them for their fakeness and materialistic lifestyles. Nothing about them was true, and they all survived because of their good looks and parents’ money. They were intellectually comparable to mashed potatoes, Tory once wrote in his diary. But he knew, that this hate was the offspring of jealousy. They were lucky. He was not.

The field looked like an endless ocean from where he sat. The dew on the blades of grass gave the whole pitch a twinkle, like crystal pebbles in a clear water bed. He felt inspired to capture the serenity of the moment in his limited words. He opened his backpack for his poem book. He saw the chocolate layered cake instead.

11.55pm.

It was 5 minutes to midnight. There was no time for a poem. The unfinished one had to stay that way, he guessed. He took out the cake, and a plastic bag which contained one small candle and two larger ones, and a knife. He lined the candles up on his cake, and lit it with a lighter he had purchased earlier for a whole different reason. He held the knife, and looked at his watch.

11.59pm.

He started singing.

HAPPY BIRHTDDAY TOO MEEE…HAPPY BIRTHDAYYY TO MEE…HAPPY BIRRTHDAYY TO ASADS TORRRYY…HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MEEE….

He made a wish. He wished no one in this whole wide world should ever go through a life like his. Nobody should ever be as lonely as him. Or as ugly as him. Or both at the same time, as he knew one often lead to the other.

It was time.

12.00am. Saturday. 26th August 2006.

Tory gripped his knife, shivering and panicking in the gravity of the act that was to follow. He closed his eyes. A tear dropped from his eyes. With a quick and swift move, he slashed his wrist. The pain was not much, at first. He was shivering very badly, his heart was palpitating at an increasing speed. Cold sweat covered his whole body. His vision blurred, his eyes a messy gathering of tears. He looked down, there was already a pool of blood from the wound. He felt dizzy, not much physical than psychological.

12.07am.

Tory knew this was going to end sooner than he expected. His breathing was slowing down. He felt very weak. The blood count on the floor of the pavillion definitely outnumbered that in his body. It will all end soon. He closed his eyes, sprawled on the floor of the place he visited the most outside his hostel.

Suddenly,  his handphone beeped. It was a message.

Someone sending me an SMS? He couldn’t believe this. It was in fact ages since he ever heard that beep of an SMS notification. He had to read it. He struggled to lift his other hand, and reached into his pocket. He wiped the tears off his eyes. The blue light of his handphone filled the dark area, and his eyes took some time to adjust to the sudden brightness. He read the SMS.

Hey Tory! This is Paula…remember me?? We met in the library last week! Anyway i remember you told me it was your birthday on the 26th, am i correct?! So i thought maybe if you are not doing anything, we should go for a celebratory supper? What say you?? I would love to continue reading your poem book! i Love them!! Hit me back, birthday boy! ~Paula~

He tried to get up. It was too late. At 12.11am, Asads Tory died on the steps of his campus pavillion. On his hand was his handphone, a text message read, but unanswered. More than that, it was hope, which came knocking a little too late.

There comes a time in a person’s life when matters often left unquestioned suddenly become sources of great conflict and curiosity. That time for me is now. They call youth the formative years, the age when one is most impressionable and receptive to ideologies. I consider youth a transition point from blind following towards practical understanding. I shall offer myself as an example in this article, for it is only my experience that I can confidently relate to you.

I grew up in a very spiritually inclined family. My early enrolment in the Balvikas ensured I knew most of the mantras of various deities, and the different religions and their teachings. The fundamental values of Peace, Love, Harmony, Non-violence and Righteousness were drilled into our hearts and souls, through devotional songs and plays. God was all-powerful, all knowing, present everywhere. Omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. I was institutionalized in the Sathya Sai Organisation, where my parents were strong devotees. But it wasn’t long before my mind decided to reevaluate this knowledge and teachings, and assess them according to the strict factors of logic and reason.

God, especially in Hinduism, is portrayed in human form. A lot of questions have been thrown at me for being a Hindu, a pagan worshipper of demigods and nature. My temple is like a walk through the local zoo. Men and women in divine poses constitute the vast array of pictures adorned in my prayer room. Why is my religion filled with pictures of people and animals and some even a combo of the two? It was a question I was desperate to answer, if not for my understanding, at least to thwart insults from my friends.

God is not a person. God is not an animal. God is not an entity to be seen or heard or felt. There are representations of God, like the many blue-faced four-limbed God figures or the elephant faced Ganesha. These are but symbolic personifications of an inevitable Law, fondly also called Truth (Sathya). God is not a person; God is the Law that governs this universe. Gravity is gravity, even if it’s called something else. Gravity was a force pulling at 9.8 kgm/s2 even before an apple disturbed a certain Isaac Newton’s sleep. God is a law that holds this universe together, believe it or not, know it or not, trust it or not. And in making things easy for the ignorant souls, religions represent such indescribable forces and laws in the form that appeals to us most - our own form. In portraying God as human, we are being told, “Look, its in your form, for your understanding…just look closer, the universe is yours to fathom!”

But alas, we tend to only look as far as the picture in our altars. We put so much faith and trust and devotional fervour in our prayers that we forget to move from the Form, to the Formless Truth - which should be our main objective.

Faith versus understanding is arguably the biggest conflict in the modern youth’s life. The orthodox practice of previous generations is to blindly follow a ritual, just because the elders said so, and the elders know what is best. The influence of Western thinking through globalization has brought about much dissatisfaction amongst the new generation on practices of our religions, which is deemed ritualistic, senseless and blind. The power of a ritual is benefited only with proper understanding. Blind faith is not in the agenda of a modern youth, and something unaccepted by our conscience, will not hold any significant value. I would never put full faith in a practice that my mind cannot accept. Having said that, strict regime of logical thinking stunts a person’s ability to appreciate and embrace. The beauty of Nature and the wonders of God are aplenty and inexpressible in logical methodology or formulas, and such things are acknowledged.

Any given ritual with the minutest benefit is worth conducting, as the story of the abandoned plane in a remote village teaches us. The story tells us about the plane which was found in the village, where nobody had seen one before. They first use it as a place to store things, until one person realizes it has wheels. The next few years they use the plane as a cart to travel, pulled by elephants. After some years a guy fiddles around with some buttons inside the plane, and discovers it can move by itself, and so the plane became a new automatic transport carriage. Only when a person from the city comes by that village did he show them the true power of the airplane, which is to fly. Likewise, we all have our own pace in realizing the power of ritual, but not until our mind body and soul is ready can we force ourselves to appreciate something that in the beginning totally does not make sense.

God in fact is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. God is the vibration of the atoms, God is the waves of the ocean, God is the elliptical movement of the planets. God is Law Supreme, applied to everything, everywhere, every time. When a prayer is told, good vibrations and energy are produced, and you are given good results. It is called God’s Grace, but really it is but a reaction to your positive energy. That is God. The laws of the universe are written in the symbolic forms and poetic songs of Hinduism and all other religions. The Vedas, Quran, Bible and all other scriptures define the various aspects of God. God is not a mystery to be solved; God is a Law to be realized. And once realized, the person will be able to understand the workings of the universe. He will be like a man in a maze, lifted above for a full view.

There is a story told about a priest, who knew every single verse of his religious text, who performed every prayer in his worship place. One day he was crossing a big lake in a small boat, accompanied by the boy who rows the boat. Just to pass time, he asked the boy, " Do you know the difference between Heaven and Hell?" The boy, who only knew Hell as a bad word, said, "No sir, I am not sure." The priest sighed, "How on earth is this boy going to survive.." Then after a while he asked again " Do you know the name of your God?" The boy again, dumbfounded, replies " No sir I don’t" The priest, utterly disappointed, says "How for God’s sake are you going to survive!" The boy, feeling stupid continues to row his boat. Suddenly, as they were halfway through the journey, the boat begins to leak. there is a small hole on the boat and it is sinking. The priest panics and starts to say his prayers. The boy asks the priest "do you know how to swim?" the priest, deeply frustrated "NO!!!" and the boy goes "how on earth are you to survive now, priest?

I think that about sums up the common mistake one makes in the pathway to attaining self-realization.