Bhagavad Gita, Bharatiyar And The Super-intelligent Lady!

“To protect the good, to destroy the evil and to establish righteousness, I will be born in every yuga, every period.”

When my heard my atheist friend, Maran, speak these words I was very happy. I immediately supplied the original sanskrit text.

“Parithranaaya saadhunaam vinasaya cha dushkritham dharma sampsthaapanaarthaya..”

“Stop. Stop. STOP IT, I SAY.”

“I am not enjoying the words. Yes, they were spoken by Your Lord in your holy book Bhagavad Gita. But I can’t imagine a greater lie than that.”

I was furious, but remained silent.

“Your Lord has not kept up his word. According to your own scriptures he was born a few thousand years ago and yet He has not cared to appear before us again.

"Do you mean to say that the good people of the modern days do not require protection? Or do you want to argue that the evil-people do not merit a total destruction? And yet Your Lord is playing truant, man.”

I stood up to leave.

“Hey, why are you running away? That’s escapism. Come on; argue your point, man.”

“You have a point there. And I am not in a mood to argue.”

“Say something, Sridhar.”

“Remember, Maran, when your father fell down on the road because of low sugar who helped him?”

“A kind auto-driver who almost dragged him up to his auto and took him to the hospital.”

“Who do you think that auto driver was?”

“I don’t remember his name. Some Muthukrishnan or Ramakrishnan.”

“He is none other than my Lord Sri Krishnan. His name was different, his dress and his vehicle was different. But his love and his kindness, his eagerness to help people in trouble was the same as that of my Lord.

“Remember when your daughter was in bed suffering from diptheria who saved her life?”

“How can I forget her? She is Dr. Govindammal.”

“No she is my Lord Govindan Himself who came to help you.”

Maran was silenced for a while.

“You will have to read Bhagavad Gita, or for that matter any religious scripture, like poetry. It should be read with a mind of a poet and understood with a heart of a devotee.

"You are reading it with the lawyer’s eyes. It’s not a legal statute or property document, which can be literally intrepreted.”

“ “

“You love Bharatiyar, right?”

“I am crazy about him.”

“In one of his songs he praises his lover’s eyes as that of a sun and a moon.”

“I remember -[FONT=TSCu_Comic]“சுட்டும் விழிச்சுடர்தான் கண்ணம்மா சூரிய சந்திரரோ”[/FONT]

“Good. We know that the sun is several times larger than the moon. So does that mean that the great poet is mocking the inequality in the size of his lover’s eyes?

"Imagine a woman whose one eye is as large as the sun and the other as small as the moon. She will be the most terrible demon on earth, right?”

“When somebody says “my heart bleeds for you” will you immediately dial up a cardiologist? Or if someone talks of a heart-burn will you summon a fire-engine?”

“If you are literal you can’t use any idiom in any language without being ridiculed. And yet a language without idioms is poor and prosaic.”

“And Maran you remind me of a lady whom I saw in a video clipping. She comes home late.

The house is locked. The bell is not working. She knocks the door. Nobody comes. Then she takes some stones and throws them on to the bed room door in the first floor to wake up her people. Still she is not successful.

“And then an elderly neighbour comes to her rescue. He offers his mobile phone to her.

“The lady who has been throwing stones till then grabs the mobile phone from the man and throws it like a stone.

“This is an allegory of our impoverished lives. We are standing outside our homes. Our loved one is inside. But the door is closed. We are disparate to get in because it is very cold outside.

"We call, shout and even throw stones. The kind Lord moved by our struggle offers a life-line in the form of a mobile phone. If only we are intelligent we will use the phone to call our beloved.

"But the problem is that we are so much used to stones – words with literal meanings. And by the force of habit we give a literal meaning to a profound statement. We simply throw the phone as if it were a stone.

“Bottomline: we still can’t reach our home. We can’t be with our beloved.”

 

I can mark today as a golden letter day (I don't use red letters) in my life. It is not every day that a poetess of Ambika's stature deigns to visit this blog space and sanctifies it.
The fact that these writings can rejuvenate you, well, that's something which should appear on my CV or on the blurb of my next book.
You made my day, my friend. God bless.
sridhar