Devendra Gautam

The early morning mist at the Kamyakvan has cleared up, but my mind is still foggy. It is clear as broad daylight that I am lost. How do you feel when you are lost? For sometime, you may feel a bit romantic, a tad too sad or a bit adventurous even. Perhaps it all depends on your dominant mindset and the station of life you are in.
Far from the maddening crowd, it’s far better here, you might think (how about reading a bit of Frost?). How beautiful would the first rays of the sun streaming through these columns of trees look like? How would the stars look like from the canopies that columns of trees have formed in these woods? Divine?  

You perhaps heave a sigh of relief upon observing that the world seems to be atrophying at a far slower rate in the jungles than in other parts. The air is clean and pure here, and the noise is minimal. What’s more, you don’t find more dangerous animals in the woods located almost amid the urban sprawl. Anyway, those animals can’t be more dangerous than the sapiens, or can they?      

Bearing with chattering and fighting monkeys and chirpy birds is no problem for humanity – at least for a while – that has been bearing with far more than permissible limits of noise pollution in the concrete jungles that are rising even on the foothills of these woods.  You might think: Only if I could build a house around here to soak in the sun and fresh air, extract groundwater, fell some of those trees for fuelwood and hunt those birds. An orchard of my own and I will be set up for life. That is, of course, the short-term plan, isn’t it?  

In the long run, of course, you would like to have the woods for yourself. Of course, we will not admit but we are no different from all those 'corporate giants’ that are busy capturing one lush-green hill after the other, conserved with great efforts from local communities, with little help from ‘very competent authorities’ in very high places. You see, anything goes in the holy name of development in this country.   

Strolling around, I get a fresh reminder that huge human footprints are already there in these woods. There are modern centres of faith that look almost like luxurious hotels. Ever wondered why people, who have literally abandoned this world in their quest for higher ideals like liberation, need such facilities? Won’t five-star facilities come in the way of attainment of higher ideals like liberation?
Did the Shakyamuni Buddha attain liberation amid the luxuries of the palace and not under the shade of a tree?  Close by, there’s a dilapidated house and I enter it to have a look. This one too was a centre of faith once, in those days when monks used to live in modest dwellings?           

My mind is still foggy, so I dunno. Anyway, this only adds to ever-piling stack of questions bogging me down. Close by the ruinate, the clearing is full of human footprints: Bottles, plastics and what not.  I try to meditate a while, but seem to sink deeper into the tunnel of darkness. As nothing works, I give up and head back towards civilisation through a very circuitous path – I have lost the way but I am not lost -- thinking that a concoction of Mozart, Beethoven, Vivaldi and Tchaikovsky is what I will need to clear my mind.