change....not quite !!!

Well not quite. It’s New Year according to the Bengali calendar and things haven’t turned out quite rosy for me. Had to get up at 6 in the morning to help my better half with Pujas i.e. morning prayers (the usual norm on a day like this back home). Got to work and somehow the greetings from my colleagues all fell to deaf ears almost. I had a long day ahead of me – had to visit a temple in the evening and take my wife out for a dinner. That too, with a long list of queries and mails to be answered back in office. Boy I had a long day ahead of me.

My mind wandered back - around couple of years to be precise. We were discussing life with a couple of friends back at the Nescafe stall in IIT Delhi. One of my friends from engineering days, an architect who was doing his masters in Design from IIT Kanpur had dropped by and we were busy recollecting thoughts and sharing amusing anecdotes of life in campus when we got caught up on a discussion of things we had learnt from life. Scribbling on a piece of paper we tried to make a “dhobi-list” of things we as individuals have learnt and follow religiously in our lives ahead. And the fun we had that day…..

Things look so different today in perspective.

And then I realized nothing around the world has changed – the change has come in us that somehow leads us interpret the same things in a different way. The following small story might reinforce my idea…..

Once upon a time in a certain village in India there lived a guru. Every evening the guru would sit on his seat and deliver a lecture to the public. It so happened that the guru had a cat, and just at the time of giving the lecture the cat would create a big disturbance.

Being greatly annoyed by the cat, the guru decided to tie the cat to a tree before starting his lecture. So doing, the guru then delivered the lecture without disturbance. It worked so well that the guru regularly tied the cat to the tree before beginning his discourse.

After some years the guru died. His disciples carried on the guru’s program. They also continued tying the cat to the tree. When the cat died, they bought another cat and thus the ritual of tying a cat to a tree continued generation after generation.

In the fifth generation that followed the guru, one of the renowned followers wrote an elaborate treatise on the spiritual significance of tying a cat to a tree before beginning one’s studies of the scriptures.

“For the current of our spiritual life creeds, rituals and channels that may thwart or help, according to their fixity or openness. When a symbol or spiritual idea becomes rigidly elaborate in its construction, it supplants the idea which it should support.”

- Rabindranath Tagore

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