Rain From Heaven

In the relations I came to form with other Indic individuals over the years … even with friends from college days … it always came to an uneasy situation … of not meeting eye to eye on issues. And if that friend is from the Thevar community …  it makes the differences especially pronounced. The Thevars … as a sub-category of the general Indic population … were originally farmers … but their reputation today extends … to that of bards and poets … and rulers ...  who initiated the treatises on Indic Gods … that forms a significant aspect of Indic faith … social discourse and self personality.

 

Its no different from the stories of King Gordian … that Alexander met on his journeys of conquest.  The farmers enjoyed a powerful reputation in society … in the early days. They were the people who supplied the all important needs for food. And soon their reputations grew as mild mannered … honest people … healthy and good natured … and whom many would have thought … spoke to God … in their free time.

 

They apparently ruled with a sense of contact with the soil … the weather … and an identification with the features of the landscape.  Their part in the cultivation of the human passions must have been considerable … and we make contact with that today … in our disposition … as the beginning of idealism … mixed with a mind of wonder at life in the world … and brought to such relations with life's purpose … that makes us wonder about … love and adoration … in the bosom of man.

 

In making contact with these ...we get the impression of an adolescent … on the threshold of puberty … whose passions are led by his eyes … into the world around him … perhaps pausing to engage the mind in the cognition of words. Like Shakespeare's sonnet … that adolescent seems to be asking … ' how many ways do I love thee? Let me count the ways.' But thereafter … the adolescent gives way to the teen … whose hormones … are all for doing something and would have much preferred Freud's prose on the pleasure principle.

 

Such a teen rode up to King Gordian's domain … and in the last days of the adolescent farmer … when human self figuring got tied up in a knot … the teen cleaved it with the need to simply move on. Perhaps … he might come back another day to review his actions … and the choices he made … in favor of the pleasures that were possible. No doubt Alexander did that … when he returned to Babylon … but we the modern generation probably understand that better today … than when he was reviewing it.

 

King Indran was such an Indic farmer who rose to lead his people in his domain … and made it his realm. But the forces of pleasures … comprising the qualities of a civilizing influence itself … rose in mind and intellect … beyond the rudiments of passion … and saw a greater will to God and country … than the farmer did. King Indran was overthrown by the Vasudeva … and substituted for the practice of love in faith … with a mind in dialectics. It paved the way for man … to understand the difference in the mind-passion relations … and to found a new basis of his identity.

 

King Indran's legends … amply communicated in the Rig-Veda … forms an integral part of his relations with his … mother /wife experiences. Brought into retirement by the growing glamor for pleasures … I figure he must have returned to the days of his adolescence … like an Alexander in Babylon … to muse on that which he saw grow from his love impulses … and to compare that with the new society's enthusiasm for life.

 

How's our record so far? I'm always surprised by how fast we have moved as a society … from the founding of love to that of knowledge. Its only in these last 500 years that we formed democratic governments … and pronounced our loyalty to knowledge in mind … by the announcements we have made with regards to science and scholarly study. And our inquiries today … take on a new urgency … owing to our personal involvement in family and society.

 

In the old days … the Kings promoted study and scholarship … and welcomed all manner of poets and philosophers to their court … to exchange pleasantries of views … in song and verse. It appealed to the passions as the basis of truth. It relied on the attainment of equanimity in the disposition of man. It was rain from heaven. Today … as we yell from our rooftops of scholarly achievements … we are also asked to refine it into song. Its for the acquiescence of the passions … and not to forget … the needs of women … children … and the general society … to follow our reasoning.

 

I've always thought that ought to be possible … and I continue to apply myself to the task with a constant balancing of the heart of love … with the will of the mind … to find a happy union. On occasion I feel that I am bound to do so … like an accountability of my actions from the past … that returns to me … to remind me of the way I used to apply my will in the matter. It feels a little like this lady in San Francisco … who channels an Indic warrior.

 

If it feels like an act of redemption … sometimes … it may be because like Alexander … we may have all brought the sword down on the farmer king … not his knot. That normally means … there's going to be hell to pay. What can I say … the joys of the modern expressions … make quick work of what we mean. But I've also come to realize that our passions are not mean … or vindictive. But they would like for us … to unravel the knot slowly … with thought.

Reviews

[Anahat]

Wow...this was such a great write Ma'am :)
Very nicely written! Liked it :)