THIRSTY BOY VERSUS THIRSTY CROW

 

            THIRSTY BOY VERSUS THIRSTY CROW

It was just a couple of days ago that I learnt from a newspaper that a 14-year-old thirsty boy who had entered a temple to quench his uncontrollable thirst was allegedly beaten up by the caretaker resulting in a ‘head injury.’

The temple authorities said that the entry of non-Hindus was barred in their temple. They may be right on their part. But I was reminded of the ages old fable of ‘The Thirsty Crow’ who, in the hottest summer weather, managed to gratify his thirst,  by raising with pebbles,  the low level of the water in the pitcher which he had sighted after a long search.

The thirsty crow of the fable was just a black bird, having no religion and no specific sacred place to thankfully worship his God. He could, therefore, go to the housetop or some other convenient place of any householder, irrespective of his religious faith, and timidly, if not boldly, pick up with his tiny beak a few drops of water to rehydrate himself.

Thirsty crows are never arrested by house-owners and beaten up even if they dare to consume some grains along with a few drops of water. They come like uninvited guests, unoffensively, and enjoy in the house of the uninformed  host whatever  they spot for their hungry and thirsty bodies. Such hosts get a God-given opportunity to offer their compassionate hospitality to the stray birds who have no kitchens or dining rooms of their own.   

 I believe that even if a temple is reserved for the devotees of a specific religion, its caretakers should refrain from hitting any person of any other religion who happens to stray into its premises just for a few drops of water,  which, in the words of the Indian scientist C.V.Raman , is the nectar of life, and is a gift of God , not of man, to our planet called the world.

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16^th March 2021                                                                G. R. Kanwal

SUCCESS DOES NOT DEMAND SCHOOLING

 

SUCCESS DOES NOT DEMAND SCHOOLING

 

Are you ashamed of your lack of schooling? You shouldn’t be, says James fox, because it is what you know, not how you learned it, which really counts.

 

One of the greatest intellectuals in human history, George Bernard Shaw, attended school for just five years.

 

Henry Ford’s formal education consisted of only a few years in a country school-house.

 

Al Smith spent less than seven years in school, yet he went on to become four times Governor of New York, and a candidate for President of the United States.

 

Cornell University was founded by a man who never graduated from any school, Ezra Cornell.  Cornell also organized the Western Union Telegraph Company.

 

Subway builder Same Rosoff never had a day of schooling in his life and reputedly could neither read nor write.  Yet he managed to amass a fabulous fortune in the construction business.

 

Robert Fulton, the Wright brother and Thomas Edison were all largely self-taught.

 

Experience is the greatest teacher and the world outside an academic institution is the biggest university. 

 

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THE LITTLE BLACK BOY

 

THE LITTLE BLACK BOY

‘The Little Black Boy’ is a poem written by the English mystical poet William Blake (1757-1827).  It is included in his small anthology The Songs of Innocence and of Experience which contain some of the most charming lyrics ever written in English. The very first song entitled INTRODUCTION runs as follows:

Piing down the valley wild,

Piping song of pleasant glee,

On a cloud I saw a child,

And he laughing said to me:

‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’

So I piped with merry cheer.

‘Piper, pipe that song again;

So I piped : he wept to hear.

‘Piper, sit thee down and write

In a book, that all may read.’

So he vanish’d from my sight,

And I pluck’d a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,

And I stain’d the water clear

And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear.

‘Innocence’ in Blake’s anthology stands for childhood and ‘Experience’ for adulthood.  The child has a pure, untainted mind. The mind of an adult is overlaid with the craftiness of the world.

While composing the Songs of Innocence, Blake himself became a child ‘living in a world of happiness, beauty, and love; and when he does  not act as  a child, he becomes ‘a loving, tender mother.’

According to George H. Cowling: ‘Blake’s Songs of Innocence are the songs of an imaginative and serious child. They are the divine voice of childhood unchallenged by the test and the doubts of experience. Contrarily, The Songs of Experience are the songs of the wounds and cruelties of civilisation, and some are satirical of the “mind-forg’d  manacles” of custom and law.  

“The Little Black Boy” is luckily a song of innocence, though most shockingly even today the  beauty, goodness and truth of human beings are judged by the colour of their skins and not by the divine souls dwelling in their bodies. Blake includes this poem in the first part of his anthology “Songs of Experience”, but “The Chimney Sweeper” – A LITTLE BLACK THING , finds place in The Songs of Experience. This poem is likely to remind some    readers of  the two  essays of Charles Lamb  (1775-1834) . The first  IN Praise of Chimney-Sweepers,   and the second Imperfect Sympathies in which he says:

            “In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearning of tenderness towards some of these faces --- or rather masks – that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls – these “images of God cut in ebony.” But I should not like to associate with them to share my meals and my good night with them – because they are black.”             

            Blake’s song” The Chimney- Sweeper, II ” reads as follows:

A LITTLE black thing among the snow,

Crying’ ‘weep!’ in notes of woe!

‘Where are thy father and mother? Say?’ ---

‘They are both gone up to the church to pray.

 

‘Because I was happy upon the heath,

And smil’d among the winter’s snow,

They clothed me in the clothes of death,  

And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

 

‘And because I am happy, and dance and sing,

They think they have done me no injury,

And are gone to praise God and his priest and king,

Who make up a heaven of our misery.’

            The song points out that priest and king, the representatives of the moral and civil law see only the momentary happiness of the chimney sweepers and turn a blind eye to their unending painful slavery.

             The text of THE LITTLE BLACK BOY  is as follows:

MY mother bore me in the southern wild,

And I am black, but O my soul is white;

White as an angel is the English child,

But I am black, as if bereav’d of light.

 

My mother taught me underneath a tree,

And, sitting  down before the heat of day,

She took me on her lap and kissed me,

And pointing to the east, began to say:

 

‘Look, on the rising sun, there God does live,

And gives His light, and gives His heat away;

And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive

Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.

 

‘And we are put on earth a little space,

That  we may learn to bear the beams of love;

And these black bodies and this sunburnt face

Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

 

‘For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear,

The cloud will vanish, we shall hear His voice,

Saying : “Come out from the grove, My love and care,

And round My golden tent like lambs rejoice.”

 

            George H. Cowling observes that like some of the philosophers of the eighteenth century, Blake regarded savages as noble children of nature  and agreed with Rousseau that “the first impulses of nature are always right.”  However, he feels that Blake has perhaps idealised the black boy more than he really deserved.

Cowling rightly notes that towards the end of the poem Blake skilfully passes from a pagan to a Christian conception of God and though the god of the black boy becomes a sun-god, children become His lambs.   

 

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15^th March 2021                                                                                 G. R. Kanwal

           

Key Traits of Scorpio Personalities

 Key Traits of Scorpio Personalities

The Zodiacal sign of the Scorpio personalities born between 23 rd October and 21t

November is scorpion. Their Zodiacal lord is Mars, while their Zodiacal limb is rectum.

The gem that brings them maximum good luck is topaz.

The best marriage companions of the Scorpio personality are Taurus and Libra. They are

born between 21 st April and 20 th May and between 22 nd September and 22 nd October

respectively.

For friendship and business partnership, Scorpios should seek Taurus or Pisces. The

latter are born between 19 th February and 20 th March.

Scorpios, says Marc Jones, are always the authors of their own destiny, or at least they

strive to be, and so they play a self-schooled part in life, even down the most minute of

everyday details. They have a reason for everything, but are themselves inscrutable, or

possible to understand, if any effort is made to uncover or analyse their inner process of

self-orientation in an abstract way, that is, as generalized and divorced from their own

special personality. They are always subjecting life to some one or another test of their

own devising, constantly putting experience under the microscope in a lesser if not

greater degree. They delight in bringing things to a conclusion, or in picking up the

strands of relation left loose by others, in order to weave them into a fabric of their own,

and they will often tear things down in order to reconstruct them more efficiently.

If they are taken on their own really creative talents, they are the most simple or obvious

of all types. However, they are elusive if they are asked to be something in particular, no

matter they are. They are wholly beyond comprehension if interrupted seriously in their

favourite game of making it their business to be buy, or conversely, seeing how far they

can refrain from all activity except in connection with some entirely private enterprise.

They are, without exception, the mot self-intent of the twelve types of personalities. They

always posses inner, idealistic and wholly unlimited resources of motivation and

judgment. Anything coming from the exterior and the narrowed world of less-

introspective people seem thin, transitory and inadequate to them.

They are wholly generous and co-operative when other meet them on their own basis, but

they can be rigorously unswerving in their course, or downright cruel, when thwarted or

forced to act in any way that leave them divided in their own minds.

They are possessive in an utter disregard for everything but themselves, since their inner

sense of completeness makes it impossible for them to realize that anyone else might be

emotionally dependent or psychologically helpless. They are strangely adult from

infancy, and assume all their fellows to be equally able and willing to look after

themselves. But they have a curious capacity for fighting without enmity, and expect

others to understand. They are exceptionally fair-dealing in a sense of strict equity, but

they set their own standards and will not have them questioned.

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REVISE YOUR GENERAL

LOOKING FORWARD

 

LOOKING   FORWARD

Looking forward is the theme of a poem written by the English poet Robert Browning (1812-1889).  The title of the poem is Prospice. It  is a dramatic monologue and was written in 1861 soon after the death of his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The poem not only pays tribute to the dear memory of his wife but also shows his optimistic faith in the immortality of the soul.

            According to literary historian William J. Long of all the poets in English literature , no other was so completely, so consciously , so magnificently a teacher of men.  He felt his mission of faith and courage in a world of doubt and timidity.

            ‘Prospice’ is a poem of fearless self-assertion. It teaches the readers to be bold and heroic, and  not to be afraid of death. They should confront it courageously like fighters  because they will be winners and will be reunited with those whom they loved, who were their souls of souls but are now cut off from  them.    

            The poem runs as follows:

                        PROSPICE

Fear death ? --- to feel the fog in my throat,

The mist in my face,

When the snows begin, and the blasts denote

I am nearing the place,

The power of the night, the press of  the storm,

The post of the foe ;

Where he stands,  the Arch Fear in a visible form,

Yet the strong man must go :

For the journey is done and the summit attained

And the barriers fall,

Though a battle’s to fight ere the guerdon be gained,

The reward of it all.

I was ever  a fighter, so --- one fight more,

The best and the last!

I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forebore,

And bade me creep past.

No ! let me taste the whole of it, far e like my peer,

The heroes of old,

Bear the brunt, in  a minute pay glad life’s arrears,

Of pain , darkness and cold.

For sudden  the worst turn  the best  to the brave,

The black minute’s at  end,

And the elements’ rage, the fiend voices that  rave,

Shall dwindle, shall blend,

Shall change, shall become first  peace out of pain,

Then a light, then thy breast,

O though soul of my soul ! I shall clasp the again,

And with God be the rest !

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12^th March 2021                                                                     G.R.Kanwal   

 

           

THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD

 

AN EXTRACT FROM

THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD

‘The Mirror of True Womanhood’ is a book by the Australian author Rev. Bernard O’Reilly (1803-1856). It  was published in 1883 and because of its eternal relevance has been reprinted many times.

The extract that follows illustrates the beauty of simplicity in dress.

Beauty, the highest beauty, does not consist so much in outline and form as in expression; and what  ineffable beauty does not the expression of purity and holiness give o the homeliest countenance of the frailest figure? Certain old earthen earthenware vases were covered with designs of so exquisite, and in colours so cunningly disguised to an ordinary observer, that, in his estimation, they possessed neither beauty, nor value. But, when, at night, a light was placed within them, the whole artifice of the maker was plain, and they were pronounced most beautiful and f inestimable price by the beholder.

            Be ambitious to pace that light --- the light of that supernatural love you know of --- within your daughter’s soul; and fer not but when lighted up with it face and figure will charm all who look upon them. This first labour of yours will only be the beginning of the formation of

                        “A perfect woman, nobly planned

                         To warn, to comfort, and command –

        And yet a spirit still and bright,

        With something of an angel light!”

             If you continue to add to this simplicity and purity of soul that other sister and guardian virtue, self-denial, rest assured that at fifteen and sixteen, your child will add to that angelic expression of countenance

                        “The reason firm, the temperate will,

                         Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill,”

everything, in one word, which can make her “a phantom of delight” to the beholder.

            What man, no matter how high-born, if his heart has not been corrupted by various indulgence, would not prefer such “a vision of purity,” though wearing the simplest attire, to a gaudy worldling dressed out in robe and jewels worth a fortune, and from whose eyes flashes only the fire of earthly passions.

             If you are a wealthy mother, you will understand that by insisting on this this early lo end practice of simplicity, we do not condemn the richness of attire suitable to one’s condition, or the occasional wearing of suitable ornaments.

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8^th March 2021                                                   G.R.Kanwal

 

 

 

 

A TRIBUTE TO OBAMA

 

A TRIBUTE TO OBAMA

 

“I salute you, Barack Obama, for winning the Nobel Prize for Peace.  By winning it you have made the White House an eighth world wonder of peace and a point of pilgrimage for humanity longing for a new century of lasting tranquility on earth.

 

“Our human universe is a divine creation, the celestial manifestation of happy habitation for all mankind.  But by the accumulation of power and aggravation of development through science and technology, and intoxicated with power, man has converted the good earth into a vast crematorium of humanity, where progress spells carnage and human right are alien to the new generation.  “

 

“If each one of us be the abode of God, it is to preserve for the maker’s project a dynamic philosophy of jubilation as against widespread destruction.  The biggest power of nuclear disaster must undergo transformation by a magic of work, wealth and happiness.  Such a metamorphosis is possible only if a million Mahatma Gandhis, a trillion revolutionary Jesus Christs and countless Vivekanandas and Obamas consecrate this planet.  And how the biggest power on earth has produced in a decadent hemisphere and in a white country of white power an enigma in the shape of Mr. Obama.”

 

“Mr. Obama, you are no longer only an American but a world wonder with a new vision and promise of peace on earth.  You are destined to convert great America into an inspiration for peace everywhere, even beyond the earth and the moon.  A celestial power has whispered into the White House what Mahatma Gandhi would have deserved.”

 

“Mr. Obama, as an Indian at the age of 95 who is committed to cosmic peace, I plead with providence to give you the creative verve to be the divine engineer to save our morally declining planet controlled by the whites into a society free from race, colour, caste, communalism and corruption  --- so that all living creature may feel a new biosphere where God is no myth but a live force that is materialist at the base and appareled in a moral structure.  You be the prince and make the United States a land where God trod.  You are great and often misunderstood, but you are a beam of light and harkened the dawn of an Advaita world.  There may be critics, but truth I God and you will win at last.”

 

Emerson wrote: “I it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?  Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.  To be great is to be misunderstood.”

 

“Your noble incarnation has a purpose – a passion for execution of the termination of terrorism, not by war or arms but by farewell to blood and iron.” (Courtesy: The Hindu, October 15).