SHRIMAD BHAGAVAD GITA ADHAYA 1- COLLECTION

That nobody can every decipher the sacred words of Bhagavad Gita is not a recondite fact yet "we continue to beat against the currrents." In the same manner, I too, am trying to unravel what I can to the best of my intellectual abilities which obvious fall extremely short of even understanding the mere words of the sacred conversation between Lord Krisna and Arjuna. So, here is the first part of 

MY THOUGHTS ON SHRIMAD BHAGAVAD GITA ADHAYA 1[CLICK HERE]

JAI HIND, JAI BHARAT

JAI MA BHARTI

52 years of unparalleled writing.

Salman Rushdie unequivocally avows the following for this exceptional piece of work:

“The greatest novel in any language of the last fifty years”

And I won’t dare digress a whit from this statement. The insuperable amalgamation of magic and realism that Gabriel Garcia Marquez endues to this novel is nothing less than an imperishable incantation. Moreover, the pain, the pleasure and especially the solitude as expounded in the novel seems so much realistic and every serious reader would have a predilection to fall into the cobwebs of Marquez’s unparalleled imagination.

This novel is for everyone. The contours of the book seem boundary-less for the books encompasses all sorts of human emotions. Be it obsession, love, discovery, pain, abhorrence, lust or envy, everything has a special place in this figment of Marquez’s ingenious thought. And above all nothing can be as incisive to a reader as is the pain of solitude that Marquez has imbued his characters in. The most intriguing thing about the story is that there is no convoluted plot, no hidden subterfuge and no awe-inspiring ruses but the mere reality of the human life and how we all evolve to fall slowly but certainly into the abyss of solitude. Besides that, there is no protagonist in the whole story. Every character is special for every person in the story no much how much extraneous he/she seems to appear in the inception, is indispensable and goads out a wide range of different feelings in the character.

The simplicity of the story is the first thing that will catch you eye. It seems to belong to us all, it has human desires and concocted fantasies, it foments emotions and sometimes also shows how much impassive and nonchalant the world can be. Also, one more thing that truly corroborates Marquez’s exception story-telling ability is his deft virtuosity at maneuvering your emotions. The thing that stupefied me most was that the author has indited the plot in such a way that he can make you loathe or love a character at his whim, whenever he wants he can give you reasons to deplore one particular characters and just after turning some more pages, he can give you substantial reasons to feel sympathy and love for the same character. Such is the greatness of Marquez’s writing that we you end reading the novel, your arbitration skills at judging the characters of the actors will be clobbered and what will be left will be serene reverence for Marquez and a feeling of melancholy making you realize the harshness and asperity of solitude.

Nobel Prize in Literature (1982) winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Solitude, as obvious from the title, is the most significant theme of the whole book. Every character here is condemned to solitude throughout his life. And here Marquez takes out a very vital issue. Solitude as per Marquez’s characters is not the absence of people around, solitude is not being solitary but solitude is being so much indifferent to others and that we stop living itself. None of the character is the novel is living, they are all surviving and compounded by their great life expectancy, all of them are living lives of complete solitude. Every person has immured himself in solitary confinement and sheer breakdown in their life generates pathos in the mind of the every reader. Yet in between we find glimpses of realism where we realize that we too as part of this techno-savvy generation are part of the same canker. In this age of technology, we have so many ‘friends’, yet no one to talk to; we have so many who know us, yet no one who understands us; so many who meet us, yet no one to share our feelings; so many who talk with us, yet no one who believes in us. This sheer similarity between Marquez’s magnum opus truly invokes a sense of profound respect for the deceased author. It seems as if this 1967’s novel could peep into this 21^st century’s melee and taunt us all with its sharp similarity to the present day world. All of us today are feeling the pain of solitude that has been edified in the book. Just as the advent of new technologies in Macondo village (fictional village where the whole plot is set) widened the cleft between people so is the present rise of the technological juggernaut is doing to the current generation. Our geographical and spatial distances have been curtailed to a great extent, yet our emotional distances have developed deep chasms. On one hand, we have made communication possible, yet on the other hand we are excommunicating ourselves from the world. Our basic lifestyle has unskeptically ameliorated, but whether the quality of our life has followed the same trend is a question worth musing. Technology is not the culprit here, in fact, we are the ones who are banishing ourselves from the world. We too have transfixed ourselves just like Marquez’s characters and this engenders in every reader a feeling of grave poignancy.

The downright analogy between ours and Macondo’s time is enough to horripilate any conscientious reader. One thing to learn from Macondo would be that it is high time we rectified ourselves otherwise the same fatalism and perdition that ensued for Macondo would follow the suit for our own society. We need to accept that human being can’t survive alone and the way we are confining ourselves would one day do nothing less than asphyxiating us through our own hands and then when we will decipher the whole code in the end, it would be a lost cause (just like Aureliano’s) and a hurricane would blow everything away.

JAI HIND, JAI BHARAT

JAI MA BHARTI

Shrimad Bhagavad 2.20,2.21,2.22

य एनं वेत्ति हन्तारं यश्चैनं मन्यते हतम्।

उभौ तौ न विजानीतो नायं हन्ति न हन्यते।।2.19।।

Whosoever views this to be the slayer and whosoever believes this to be the slain, both these do not understand: This does not slay, nor is this slain.

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न जायते म्रियते वा कदाचि

न्नायं भूत्वा भविता वा न भूयः।

अजो नित्यः शाश्वतोऽयं पुराणो

न हन्यते हन्यमाने शरीरे।।2.20।।

This is neither born; nor ever dies; nor, having not been at one time, will this come to be again. This is unborn, destruction-less, eternal and ancient and is not slain [even] when the body is slain.

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वेदाविनाशिनं नित्यं य एनमजमव्ययम्।

कथं स पुरुषः पार्थ कं घातयति हन्ति कम्।।2.21।।

Whosoever realizes this to be changeless, destruction-less, unborn and immutable, how can that person be slain; how can he either slay [any one]? O Partha!

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वासांसि जीर्णानि यथा विहाय

नवानि गृह्णाति नरोऽपराणि।

तथा शरीराणि विहाय जीर्णा

न्यन्यानि संयाति नवानि देही।।2.22।।

Just as rejecting the tattered garments, a man takes other new ones, in the same way, rejecting the decayed bodies, the embodied (Self) rightly proceeds to other new ones.

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Here the lord goes on to reveal some primordial and vital veracious facts about life. He avers that the ‘atman’, the conscious that can never be destroyed, its power is ineffable, its existence irrefragable, its basis incontrovertible, its realm unfathomable. It stands as destruction-less, no force can clobber it, nothing can make its grandeur totter, nothing can transmute it and nothing can ever pervade its contours. Lord avers that the atman is insurmountable. Infernos are inefficacious in torching it, even death can’t slay it and apocalypses can’t annihilate it. It remains aloof from the bounds of our imagination for we can’t gauge its depth neither can we ever unravel its gravity. But one things remains constant: it changes from one form to another, one life to another. Just as the human beings change clothes so does the Atman change its dwelling and goes on to reside in some new abode. Moreover, Lord says that if nobody can kill it then why should we be despondent over other’s demise, if nothing can produce it why should be ecstatic over someone’s birth. For the Atman’s existence is far beyond the reach of human, why should we deem ourselves as the slayer or the producer of the same. Something that is neither bound by the space nor by the time and can’t be decimated and can never be begotten. One should accept the limits of mankind and should forsake the egoist notions that one is the architect of the soul. As long as we cling to these prejudiced notions, we will not be able to the limpid reality and will thus continue to fall in the cobwebs of our thoughts. Those who can’t see the lucid truth of the existence of Atman will never be able to feel one with their existence and thus their spirit will continue to wander in confusions and life would seem too arcane and recondite. Rather than fighting the supremacy of Atman, we should rather connect with it and the first step to connect with it is through acknowledging its eternity and existence.

JAI HIND, JAI BHARAT

JAI MA BHARTI