Roseringed Parakeets Psitticula krameri

Orange Breasted Green Pigeon Teron bicincta

Receding from this sea shore with slow valediction.

Here you stand with wide eyes

And gaze at the rising waves, your hand in mine, warm still.

How many dawns have we seen from this tiny corner

Of our world slowly climb up the mounting waves

And close in over the darkening hills! It is all about

Light and shade: nothing more. But I have seen it all

In these wondrous eyes. Day and night, sun and star.

Now the dark closes behind your floating hair. And then

With the suddenness of a flickering star your eyes widen

Again and again: the village by the sea floats up in a sea of light.

Fireworks lighten sky and night—their flares swell

With the sea’s delight as you break into sweet laughter

Letting the night slowly merge with the palm leaves and sand

Your hand in mine, warm still, and a blue moon above the sea.

Dr Murali Sivaramakrishnan

Now, we in the present appear to have forgotten the fact that cricket is a game to be played with the sportsman spirit it calls for. In all fairness Tendulkar had demonstrated it albeit the fact that he was playing for a country and that there are enormous amounts of money involved in the whole process. After all, the entire industry of Indian cricket and the business of the World Cup with its whole rigmarole of mega crowds, hoardings, televisions and their ubiquitous commercials, big business offers and betting and so on, revolves round the strategic issue of big money. How could anyone deny that? The spirit of play may be one thing, but the spirit that runs the whole thing is another. In this context what has playing fair and square got to do with the game?

And what is game? What is play? What is fair and square in the field and off the field?  All games we must recognize are essentially sport, which entails entertainment, recreation, and exercise primarily. There is a whole history of human sports that would trace its evolution from the primordial ritual to the contemporary scenario of big Capitalist business. There is also the implied connection with war and destruction and domination: all contemporary games at the international level (and even at its minor levels) are perhaps symbolic versions of battles and wars—a mockery of the all consuming, vindictive passions of the human being!

            Game, Sports, Play—almost synonymous, but each are descriptive of different issues. Game as it is usually understood, is something innocuous, non-violent, played out for the sheer pleasure of it all, and for the most enjoyable and involving little or no disastrous physical violence. It has a beginning, middle and an end—there is a marked difference between the before and after in terms of the protagonists as well as the spectators; above all there is entertainment and enjoyment for all in a game. Sports I would categorize in the similar manner as one that involves outdoor, physical activities, for the most. Entertainment and enjoyment there is, no doubt. There is a game in Sport and there is a sport in game as well. But the point is that all games and sports have their own set of rules which are purely arbitrary, having evolved over the years over cultures and times. In simplistic terms we could even state that all games and sports are products of sets of rules—they keep varying of course, but their visible presence (read umpires, referees, field book etc) and invisible presence (read time, place, action etc) account for the structure of all games and sports. However, the concept of play is something rather loose. It has a structure, no doubt, but this is an ambiguous, amorphous and protean structure, very loose and almost a non-entity, as when children get together and play about.

All three words have conceptual backgrounds; their own socio-political, cultural, economic and historical dimensions too. The proto game-sport-play is of course shrouded in human prehistory. It has necessarily evolved over many centuries.  One could trace its graph from ritual to the romance of the Capitalist market economics of the present. However, there are these sets of rules that govern the logic and pattern of the game that is disrupted if not observed in practice. Rules, we recognize are invisible (or visible as the case may be)–threads that govern, condition and control all sports and games. The rules themselves are arbitrary and not nor never absolute, and this is what makes sports and games entertainment. For instance from the long colonial structure of a five day test match (with a rest day in between) how far has cricket come these days!  When Kerry Packer invited major players to a fifty-over limited version of the game there was so much hue and cry over the sanctity of the test match structure and its disruption. Nothing sanctified was violated but the limited over cricket game evolved and attracted more viewers and audience. Commerce and market caught on and the television and technology supplemented the game. From there to the twenty-twenty rules and regulations have been altered and amended from time to time: nothing has remained inviolable, everything was open to transformation, change. All it required was convenience, consent and consensus. All rules are subject to change, very much like human history. We play on.

Jacques Derrida the harbinger of deconstruction—a veritable destructive and reconstructive practice of re-reading and reinterpreting interpretations themselves—initiated the whole issue of recognizing the play element in human sciences while delivering a significant address in the mid sixties in the Johns Hopkins University in the US [See Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Alan Bass, tr. Writing and Difference (1966), pp. 278-95)]. According to him, human history (read western history of ideas) has been one structured round the idea of centre and periphery. It has been a virtual centre that has potentially ruled, manipulated and conditioned the structured thinking of the human being (read western). The invisibility of a centre that could be transcendentally present within a system maintaining the stability of the system without undergoing any change in itself has been the mainstay of western history of ideas. There have been no doubt many attempts to overthrow or discard this centre but for the most these attempts have been toward replacements rather than any displacements.  As Derrida demonstrated, western history of ideas has revolved round such invisible centres. If one were to think of the idea of a god as the centre, one could almost logically close off all doubtful positions—all elements within the circle of the invisible structures are created, organized and maintained by god, and while he/she is at the indispensible centre all else is locked. The various elements within this system cannot bring any change to the centre, while they themselves could be changed. From Derrida’s reading the process of western structural change has been from god as the centre through science and rationality in turn replacing god as the centre.  There has been virtually no change in the system even when such transplanting take place. This could perhaps account for the system’s stability.  It is however when the element of play enters that a new discourse comes to be created. When the centre remains invisible and unaltered play is possible for all elements within a given structure. But this is playing within the structured rules of the game—playing fair and square. This element of play could be unending if one could imagine a structure without a centre, because then all the elements with and without the system would be constantly in a state of play!  This just like a kindergarten class-room without a teacher in the middle!  Utter chaos?  Sheer confusion? But a recognition of total freedom, no doubt! However, the moment the teacher enters the class-room the system is restored to its harmonious structure.

The implications of Derrida’s concepts can be seen in close examining a totalizing situation where everything is dictatorially controlled and maintained. Human freedom is at stake here. So then, play reintroduces the element of human freedom, the recognition of the very condition of human existence. This is play at its extreme. When all totalizing systems collapse (like the state withering away) then the extreme conditions of entertainment and ecstasy would be revealed in play. We have come very far from the idea of play we started out with.  But we are armed with new insights.  When Tendulkar walked away from the crease he probably never even dreamed of all these possibilities. He was playing fair and square on the green fields! But he was also making a statement that rules and regulations are invisibly present in the game and this sport is essentially a play that needed to be played out within a structure– an arbitrary system– that is always open-ended. Many new transformations could be padded on to these rules—much could be changed, but for the most there is an implied idea of entertainment and ecstasy within a set of rules at a given time—all players have to adhere to that. Some of course play fair and square, others might wait for the umpires to dismiss them—still others would appeal to the third umpire loaded with his techno-tools and rule-books and strategic calculations. But the point of it all: heroes are made within the set of invisible rules–  to play well is sometimes strategically to break the rules, to go beyond the boundaries, but the play within the imaginary rules is sometimes even more magnificent.

smurals@gmail.com

http://smuralis.wordpress.com

I had taken up teaching in a state Government college in north Kerala in the early eighties and then one day a whole host of admiring students ushered in two kurta-clad bearded forms right from the highway all the way up the hill to the college. I was in class lecturing when Shanthi and Raman came up to the open door. For a minute I couldn’t believe myself, I had given up hope of ever being with my old friends once I joined the Collegiate education department. And here they were right in my classroom! I had just about winded up my lecture on the nuances of modernist writing and so we all trouped into our college canteen. Shanthi said while munching banana fries: we are on our way to Kollur, care to join us?  I said yes and then we were off in no time. I stuffed some things into a haversack and we jumped into the first available bus north-bound. Travel in those days was a little more difficult than that of the present. Buses were rather few and far between. Trains two times a day. Our journey took us to Kannur, to Kasaragod and then to Mangalore. There we got into a private bus and were on our way to Kollur and the Mookambika temple. We reached sometime in the late evening and stayed at an Ashram. The next day Shanthi went around looking for his friend and guide to the hills Chandukutti sami.  He was a rather short dark tough person who spoke very little and smoked beedies. He agreed to come with us into the hills. And we set off the next morning. Shanthi and Raman had gone about collecting a few essential stuff for lighting a fire, vessels for cooking etc. The walk into the shola forests of the greener parts western ghats was memorable. Trees of the tropical evergreen always appeared to reach right into the skies and each one struggled to reach higher than the rest for the favoured sunlight and warmth. Dew dripped from above on to the bush and creepers below.  The rivulets sparkled in the speckled sunlight as the breeze blew high among the trees. It was late September and the touch of autumn was on every leaf. The climb was slow first and then became arduous and demanding as the path became steeper and steeper. Once we were on the top of the Kodajadri I was informed that the total walk was but 16 kms. However, the scramble through the tangled bushes and creepers dodging thorns and sharp rocks appeared then to me pretty long indeed. This was my first exposure to the wonders of Kodajadri.  As the ubiquitous mist withdrew briefly I could see the breathtaking panorama of the blue and purple hills. All three of us were silent for the most and our stops and pauses were as though decided in unison. Perhaps this was what they meant by the touch of the hills. I had written in a rather long poem about Ganga a couple of months ago:

The mountains know the hand of god. They are so huge, so mute, so invincible.

I have lost my bearings confronted with such vastness.     

I recalled my experiences in scrambling up the lower Himalayas in search of the trickle in the bosom of Himvant!  Here in the far south of India I was experiencing almost the same breathless joy! The touch of the hills was magnificent, almost religious. What is prayer but the heart’s lonely mutterings to the unknowable? The seeker and the search have become one here in the silence of the hills. Kodajadri will remain with me forever. The profundity of feeling, the depth of emotion, the largeness of vision my heart experienced cannot be expressed in plain words and I did not try the impossible either. I had just let myself go and merge with the rising curling unknowing mist of unreason. Where was I? Was it morning or time to sleep? None of us cared. We were in the thick of being. That was all. Shanthi always had a smile as answer to many of my queries. Raman was one of those people who could simply fade away here in the hills. He kept pace with the breeze and clouds.  He helped to light the fire and make the food, wash up and get our sleepings places readied. Shanthi sometimes would talk about many things, about his Guru, about meditation and meaning. We sat around the dancing fire near the Sarvajnapeetam and listened. This was the sacred place that Adi Sankaracharya lay when he was sick and the benignity of the Devi brought water trickling down the hills. We huddled together in the late evening and watched wide eyed as the sun disappeared over the hill tops and the cave Chitramoola became mysterious all the more. The trickling sound of falling water and the gathering dark were extraordinary. And then I heard the whistle. Because I had heard it earlier in many of my wanderings in the hills I recognized it immediately. The Malabar whistling Thrush, we call it the Whistling Schoolboy. Because the thrill and the casualness of a truant boy straying off from school was there in the song. Now this day it rang mysterious, while the bird lay hidden in the darkening evening. This entire Kodajadri, this outcrop that descended from the hump of the hill that held the Sarvajnapeetam, on to the sheer drop below the cave of the ancients called Chitramoola, reverberated with the song of the dark thrush. We did not know the passage of time, neither did we care. The trees were shivering in the coldness of late September and the sky was vibrant with vanishing and merging colours. The hills were sentinels of a strange experience a hastening in of complete being.  I had not felt such calm mingled with such excitement; the sheer touch of amazement. The bird would not stop.  The breeze was becoming chillier and night was swirling up the carpet of darkness through which some strange points of lights flickered. Kodajadri was lighting up with the mystery of all being. Here was the centre of all life. This was the point where everything returned. My mother’s arms reached forth and embraced me. I was a child once more.  I didn’t know anything. There was no knowledge. The song and sky and mist and breeze and star all rolled into one. The rock on which we sat for meditation had disappeared and the sound of falling water was so loud. Where is the thrush song leading me? A deep fever rose in me—deeper than the distant seas, dreams and forms rolled into one long experience of nothingness.

It took me a few days to get well. We slept in the cave and meditated on the sun and wind. Water was there a plenty and silence through the colours of the rainbow as the sun’s rays danced on the droplets. Then many days later we decided to regain our mortal existence as Shanthi and Raman and myself. Our walk downhill was even more silent. The thrush song was everywhere but the touch of mystery had lifted. Life was so ordinary afterwards. But then we are all mortals. We live and we pass. I had kept in touch with Shanthi for a long long time. Much later when I was travelling toward Umeo in Sweden, I flew into Stockholm and the old familiar face with the long beard appeared at the airport. Shanthi had driven all the way from Goteborg where he was living then and he brought me a large case full of warm clothing.  He had k

nown I was flying further north and had come to arm me for the severity of the northern winter. By then he had become quite well known and had followers and disciples all over the world as far away as Rome and Italy and Sweden. We both looked up at the moon and marveled at its upturned figure. This was close to the north pole and cold.  There was thrush song too in this late autumn in Europe. But I recalled our Kodajadri.  Our own Himalayas. The toughness of the mountains and the pure existential touch of the hills. The song of the Malabar Whistling Thrush!  Nothing like it before and after.

smurals@gmail.com

Samuel Beckett

I recall those days when we drove through the plains of this part of the world with shady tamarind trees lined on either side of the dark bumpy road –bullock carts tottering along with men with reflective shiny eyes and creviced faces in white dhotis and large turbans. And women in multicoloured saris scrambled across with bronze water pots balanced over their covered heads. They had such wonderful heavy gold coloured ornaments that dangled on their ears and noses. Their dark smiles spread a natural charm over the golden land blessed by the yellow sun overhead. Life was peaceful, silent, and pleasant.  Deep crevices split the red soil on either side of the road on the undulating softness that touched a steely blue horizon. And straight grayish palms shot upright into the relentless blue of the skies. An occasional black-winged kite hung wind-treading overhead.  The skies always held floating clouds that never rained.  All this is now changed. The road bifurcated a flat land smooth and indifferent to the traffic that flowed at break-neck speed unmindful of the carts and bullocks and the sleepy-eyed stray dogs that barked away at the strangeness of it all. In between the binary roads ran a parallel patch of greenery with rose-pink flowers, as though to break the monotony of the steely blue of the road.  There were several breaks in the highway between miles to allow for the villagers to greet each other across this great divide.  At any point any day or night one can easily sense the indifference of the motor- world  blaring by,  and come across the mashed carcasses of unfortunate dogs cats and squirrels, which even the hungry and adroit jet-black crows or pariah kites, however nimble they be, couldn’t get at on account of the increasing traffic.  Life in these parts has changed and so has the sky-scape. It is as though all of a sudden someone has opened a huge hole above and let in the massive spread of the sky dominating everything below.

Inside the car we were relishing the exotic nuances of a rare Dhumri of Swati Tirunal rendered in the amazing voice of Ramesh Narayan, disciple of the maestro, Pandit Jasraj. All of us were literally transported to another world another time. It was near perfect.  And then, the peacock flew across from east to west.  It was just a flurry of colours and forms plastered on the windswept terrain. With the large tail drooping, with the heavy wings flapping, desperately straining against the tearing wind and the onrush of the charging motorcars, the bird flew.  Its mate followed close by. The magnificence of it all! The moment that remains frozen in all eternity. If I could rewind time slowly and unwind it leisurely I could stay frame by frame and relish the moment. Nevertheless the moment has lasted in its long-drawn-out, lingering, lasting, enduring.  The sky, the wind, the song and the flight, all in one unending thread of being. Nothing lasts forever in nature, as everyone knows, but all things move and in their movement there is a design. The design of life, existence, and meaning. The road had taken us so very far from the point where our vision was bisected by the flight of the peacocks. We had left an experience so far behind in time and place. And yet the road was never the same again.  It was as though the land had closed in all of a sudden and a moment frozen in all eternity.

In the Mahabharata there is a minor episode of the famed Nala-Damayanti story narrated during the Pandava’s Vanavasa, jungle days and nights. When Nala in his transformed state as Bhahuka rides the chariot with the King enroute to the professed marriage of Dhamayanti, the angavastra, or the upper robe of the King slips off and is caught in the fleeting wind. When the King asks Nala to retrieve it he is informed that they had moved miles by then because they were riding at the speed of the wind! Nala as Bahuka was supposed to be the master of aswahrdaya, or a special knowledge of the horses that enabled him to ride at breakneck speed. The angavastra that flew in the wind had disappeared the moment it left the chariot, like the peacocks that fleeted across our dreamy eyes. We were all in the epical chariot for a brief moment that transformed us. The birds, the car, and the song all trailed in the timeless flow of being. Myth and reality had become one. Fable and fact were frozen in time and place.

All birds live in the air of their own spaces. Big birds like the peacock need large spaces to dwell and fly. They described their time and history only between the sky and earth, inscribing their lives in the space of timeless life. The Dodo and the Passenger pigeon had passed without trace through the history of life on this planet. The Ostrich could always duck its head under the moving sands and lurk within the confines of its own biology. But the peacock is the national bird of India and painfully preserved in its fast depleting natural habitat. In our hurry to conquer new spaces and reach against the rush of time, we have very little space in our minds and hearts for the soft swell of its usually lazy unhurried flight.

When our roads become wider and wider and the huge spreading tamarind trees uprooted perhaps for a better cause, no doubt, uncaringly we have deprived the innumerable other forms of life with very little choice but to flee at our approach. The birds had so little time to reach across to the other side.  When the first venturing seamen arrived at the isles of Madagascar, we have known, the innocent Dodo driven by inquisitiveness and curiosity came by to investigate only at its own peril. Having had little or no competition or natural predators these ground dwellers had become flightless. They found new danger—in the human being. What began as mere easy pickings for food came to be slaughter eventually. Perhaps humans were innocently unaware of the consequence of their actions.  Just as what happened to the Passenger Pigeon in the great lands of the North American continent. At one time, we are informed by researchers, large flocks of these birds used to flood the skies to the extent that the sun threw huge floating mass of shadows down below. They would block out the sun! Such were their numbers that anyone could easily bring a few down by a merely flinging a casual stone up into this cloud!   It really didn’t require a Billy the Kid or a Mad Tex McGraw or any other famed shooter to drop a dead pigeon down. Anyone could have with the mere fling of a stone done that! Such were their numbers so that no one expected them to vanish as a species completely. We humans are used to thinking only around ourselves at any given time. We think of silently and secretly disposing of one plastic bag or a beer bottle or some such environmentally-unfriendly garbage so naively over our neighbour’s wall or fling it across away from our own walls. Little do we think of the consequences. It happened: A certain guru was to celebrate his birthday and so he ordered his disciples to bring buttermilk for the lunch get-together the next day. One little fellow went home and consulted his mother about what to do.  His mother told him: Look, everyone in your class will be bringing butter milk and pouring it into the big vessel in the corner.  They will only notice each other in the act of just pouring. So then why don’t you simply carry water in a bowl and pour it innocently into the buttermilk vessel! The boy did just that.  And what happened is anyone’s guess. The big vessel held nothing but water. Each one of us thinks that our little actions will go by unnoticed and their consequences would be so very negligible. Of course we would outsmart others! However, all of us apparently think so very alike when it comes to deception and wrong doing as this tale proves! More than everything, there is something of a collective responsibility that we humans have to share. Seldom do we think on these things.

There are many instances in the environmental history of the earth when many species of life forms—birds, mammals, insects, reptiles—have disappeared due to human intervention and what goes under the name of habitat destruction. Living things no doubt are dependent on the land they inhabit, and when we change that landscape those which can easily adapt to the change survive as a species; others die and disappear. Every little act has its consequences; even our casual deeds have their reactions whether we are aware of these or not. In Chaos Theory they speak of the tremor of a tiny butterfly wing causing huge ripples in the cosmic dimensions eventually.  All things are connected—the living the nonliving and what we usually consider as empty space. The earth is just another extension of this emptiness. Just as we move through our roads on the face of the earth, the earth traces another invisible path through space.

Our roads are our signs of progress and development. They are our nerves in our great cultural and civilizational structure. We cannot do without these anyway. Our history is scribbled all over the globe through the ever expanding network of roads and highways.  The landscapes that we saw in our childhood have definitely changed for they have to change. The birds and animals insects and reptiles, trees and bushes we cherished as children have disappeared, no doubt. Some that remain are transformed completely. After all, nothing remains the same forever. However, when the land disappears like the Dodo or the Passenger Pigeon it leaves traces of nostalgia, of tragic sadness. The innocent trail of the peacock’s flight hopefully has not traced this path! Perhaps it has found its other-side of safety!

smurals@gmail.com

Cleopatra

For some things we have channels of pure silence:

Here word and image pass side by side

Sometimes submerged

In memory

Like long leaves of thin grass stems in rain

Like huge trees that blend into the quiet of night

Like slow lightning that freezes the monsoon skies

Like the flight of green pigeons against a blue sky

Like the flattened mount of clay and sand

What is else to remember but the sadness that darkens all?

Cleopatra. Cleo, our muse.

Each time the heart recalls your name, your eyes

We look this way and that

Forgetting the distance between a million stars.

Everything is an after thought

Filled with pain and distraught.

Your last wave of that flowy tail.

Your valediction and the tale trailing our deep silence afterward.

All pain is forgotten in time, I know.

All memory will suffer the touch of forgetfulness.

This is life’s simple truth. The plainness of reality for us humans.

Each of us know this, but we carry our precious pain

In an eternal present. You have eased into memory.

I saw the light go out in those pearly eyes.

You taught me to love and to treasure each moment.

The spectrum of silence that now veers between red and blue

Is hastening toward red; all things move from all others.

And it is the light that has gone out of our eyes.

smurals@gmail.com