Sky Gazing: The Enzo Circle

When we sit down to meditate and take an honest look at our minds, there is a tendency for it to become a rather morbid and depressing project. We can lose all sense of humour and sit with the grim determination to get to the bottom of this stinking mess. After a while, when people have been practicing that way, they begin to feel so much guilt and distress that they just break down, and they migh...

"After me repeat Your numeration till we reach the Lakh, One, two, three, four, to ten, and then by tens To hundreds, thousands." After him the child Named digits, decads, centuries; nor paused, The round Lakh reached, but softly murmured on "Then comes the koti, nahut, ninnahut, Khamba, viskhamba, abab, attata, To kumuds, gundhikas, and utpalas, By pundarikas unto padumas, Which last is how you c...

I have held myself back from giving it all up and walking north with my dog several times over the last couple of decades, and I have met women on my journeys who did not share my restraint. You don’t need to look back to Andal or Miraabai to meet the woman mystic, even today, schooled, unschooled, regardless of caste or class, stripping themselves of the trappings of their origins, at Haridwar, A...

Gorakhnath asks Kabir: “Tell me, O Kabir, when did your vocation begin? Where did your love have its rise?” Rabindranath Tagore’s translations of Kabir’s poetry adds a transcendental layer to the language of the mystic. Purushottam Agrawal’s contemplation of the poet saint pulls it gently back down to earth and roots it in his context. The modernisation of Kabir, his new-ageification, is also a de...

Lest you thought three books in consonance was too ambitious, I went for four. I have been reading multiple versions of Draupadi simultaneously and was just keen to share my thoughts. I revisited Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi , printed as part of Seagull’s excellent Breast Stories compendium (2016), since the DU decided to cast it out from their syllabus. She is the anti-Draupadi, sans constraint, san...

I first read Sumana Roy’s How I Became A Tree (Aleph India), when it was published in 2017. Why am I reflecting on it now? I don’t think I can say with any honesty that I have finished reading it. It’s not that I am a slow reader, but that this is not a book one reads as words, but as a river. And the only way to read a river is to immerse oneself and be swept along with it. My journey along its c...

Every contemplation of the Buddha’s teachings begins with a contemplation of the life of the Buddha. Why? Isn’t it sufficient to have read one version, or to have known ‘the facts’ of it? There are a number of reasons. The first is there is no one version. There are historical versions, hagiographic versions, devotional versions, fictionalised version, graphic versions, poetic versions. You learn...