The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Saturday 8 August 2015

THERE IS SOMETHING IN VARANASI

The city pulls me.

Yes, it is not one of those ordinary or routine or normal reasons that call me to never forget this city, to keep this city among the places in my life where I need to come back again and again.

It is complex.

Whenever I come to this city, I routinely find myself disgusted at its potholed roads with clouds of dust, be it in any part of the city. I find myself at staring the ubiquitous garage heaps in every lane, on every road of the city and feel increasingly frustrated about it. I see badly manned and managed traffic stuffed with people and vehicles in every part of the city and feel so helplessly trapped.

And during recent two trips, after we chose Narendra Modi to represent the Varanasi parliamentary constituency with hopes to change its fate, I even felt having a sense of loss on losing some hard earned chance to recovery.

The city’s dirt quotient is still the same as it was in May 2014. There are some efforts but the city needs massive reconstruction and modernization to become a world class heritage city, something that Varanasi deserves. We can’t say when the day will come though we pray for it daily and we can say the efforts so far don’t meet the requirement. Banaras Hindu University, inseparable element of Varanasi’s identity, continues to earn bad name with caste ridden factions enjoying their dominance. Quality of education is consistently going down in this temple of education that is known globally.

But whenever I come to this city, I feel an internal harmony that is refreshing. I feel so charged up – in the lap of Mother Ganga – that things start looking a shade more positive. I feel so complete, so deep inside me, that living spontaneously gets lyrical. Varanasi is uniquely famous for its crowds and I adore feeling a nameless soul in the multitude of people.

How I live this paradox is a question of satisfying internal inquiry for me.

Varanasi gives me what other places couldn’t give me – something I cannot define – but something that I don’t feel restless about.  

Yes, the city calls me – again and again – and I come back to it – again and again – feeling at loss at myriad of problems it faces – and celebrating the peace at the same time that it offers.

Probably, that is one of many aspects important in making a true Banarasi.

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com