Sahyadrica

A subtle scent of Alstonia still lingers on the road I take to work – a leftover from the winter when these avenue trees had filled the air with their sweet, intoxicating scent. It lingers only in one particular place, near a secluded street that leads away from the main road where vehicular exhaust slaps against your face. As I meander through this road every day, I see more and more of lone parakeets darting through the air, squeaking as they fly to get somewhere in hurry, rather than flocks of them. I also notice more crows than sparrows. And I feel the exhaust and the aftertaste of being blasted by the soot of vehicles more strongly, piercing my lungs and leaving me breathless. My senses are heightened only when I experience these things as an outsider. If I were to sense it as a part of this landscape, I’d be seeing, smelling, and feeling the flavours of the city every night and every day, and so I would never have smelt the flowers, nor seen the birds nor tasted the fetid toxi...

It is hard for a person to put the human experience in perspective. A person will describe his experiences as a human experience, so will a community, and the experiences between two people and two communities will differ immensely. And they will differ between two cultures by leaps and bounds. To put it in a perspective, the human experience is a collective wisdom of not one but many individuals, communities, and cultures, with every bit from here-and-there. If someone asked you to put the human experience into words, your account will be different than mine, than more-or-less anyone’s – it will be heavily biased on a side you identify yourself with, whether that side is religious, spiritual, natural or philosophical. To get a fair view of the human experience, the perceiver needs to be a non-human. No intelligence has taken birth – or has been found – that can put human experience in a perspective. Yet some can, and we can more-or-less interpret it from them. A dog itself would...

[This post is part rant part figuring-out- life. It imparts some strong personal views vis-à-vis my own experiences in the wild or otherwise, and are not intended to be imposed upon the reader.] Cogito ergo sum ; I think, therefore I am; is a philosophical argument first made in 1637 by René Descartes. Simply put, to doubt one-self’s existence is to exist. It is said to be philosophy’s keystone from which one dives into the swirling thoughts of existence and nonexistence, of truth and lies. But if you think you exist, and therefore exist, you must also think others exist, but they may or may not indeed exist, for that thought is only applicable for yourself. If every person thinks the same, you could, like them, may or may not exist. With all its beautiful fallacies, the thought alone is enough to push you onto the next level of self-realization: that we all exist. And once you’re here, and you believe you exist, and so do others, self-realization is not only about yourself o...