By Rajat Subhra Chatterjee
0077
We, the super senior citizens of this time, must all have fixed our present priorities in lives, whatever left to be lived. Rich, very rich, middle class, upper middle class, poor and not so poor, all have experienced enough in our lives through battles fought at different stages with different adversaries for different reasons. Some won, some lost but those of us still living, have not yet lost the war of lives. Some living happily, some not so happily. Some managing to live in their own manner. But most of us are trying to live on our terms and not by any dictum.
While trying to map the mindset amongst quite a large cross section of friends, known people apart from members of our own families and larger families, one aspect is crystal clear that hardly there is a family where full happiness exists. At least, yours truly has not found such a single family amongst known and not much known, where there is some kind of pain has not entered. It could be financial, relation centric, children centric, environmentally or socially inflicted, and most unfortunately through political bias. We may sweetly remember Bhagaban Buddha when He was asked by a poor mother who had just lost her son to revive the dead child being the God, Buddha smiled and asked the mother to go around the village and fetch handful of mustard seeds from any house where there is no grief. The mother failed to find even a single such house and came back to Buddha, who smiled and said, happiness and sorrows are part of life. All have to accept. ….
In the present socio economic structure we belong to, we get one useless replaced by another who have been ruling the country and states for the last 76 years. For these impotent and unworthy rulers since independence, we have mercilessly been butchered and battered to the extremes of a kind of corruption, nepotism and vulgarism that have very little peer in the universe. The dream once dreamt by Rammohan, Vidyasagar, Vivekananda, Netaji & Tagore has not only vanished, but those never took any shape to be materialized.
However, in the midst of all these calamities and existence of unhappiness, there still is rainbow behind the cloud. It is interestingly found that some of us, I would say – quite a few of us- have tried to accept life with our personal, social, cultural grief to embrace peace in our own way. That is amazing. Few also have found out what should be our priorities for the rest of our lives. In that list of priority, very factually and fortunately, most of us have not prioritized party politics at all. There are exceptions. But by a large margin of such super senior citizens, this has been kept at arms length. This mind set must have been the result of long years of keenly watching how these social useless creatures have ruined the society and converted the very noble place into a place of hell ! Watching from a distance and now exasperated, are this large cross section of super senior citizens of the nation.
As we haplessly watch brutal happenings throughout the country in every nook and corner in such alacrity and regularity that one gets lost to react. Most of us, the very senior citizens have remained non- reactive in public to any such violence because most of us have set our priorities in lives. And for most of us, priority number one is, fortunately to devote our concentration and time for our own Idol ‘ Ista Devota ‘ at this age of ours. This does certainly not mean that we are not conscious about recent happenings around us. On the contrary, we are more conscious and concerned but have been able to restrain ourselves not to react because, we find that much younger lot are their in the society to combat the situation. We had our time and days. Now we must not get involved with such things, however brutal and sad the incident could be, so that our set priority does not get disturbed and imbalanced.
We have learnt to distance away from getting intimate. We have learnt to get away from ‘Maya’. We have learnt to talk less, see and hear more and react even least. We have learnt how to get aggressive towards our priority. We have learnt how to overcome anger and ignorance and convert these into our happiness. As lot of stones had been thrown at us during our long haul, and as we have tried to take up those stones to create our own milestones, now we have learnt how not to react to any such pelting of stones or brickbats. These lesions have been obtained through devotion and ‘Satsang’ with our ‘Guru’ through meditation.
In the context of the above, I personally find no happiness in getting involved in recent brutalities around us ( though highly concerned and disturbed ) as these no longer startle me. I have had seen and experienced of such madness enough in my life. That is why any commentary, pros, poem, song describing these brutality does not appeal to me any more. Much better offerings are available elsewhere which we are still searching !
NO DESIRE: NO SORROWS.
Let there be Peace ! Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.
….concluded….
