Me, My Guru
Contd....
I spent whole
two days sitting on all these thoughts and ofcourse even Kashmir with its
beauty kept me otherwise engaged. What little time I had after completing my
office work was used sensibly to linger in the road of Srinagar.
People talked
about its beauty from time immemorial and here I was in the place that was best
described by Amir Khusrau in his famous lines
“Gar firdaus bar-rue zamin ast, hami asto, hamin asto, hamin
ast.”
“If there is a
heaven on earth, it's here, it's here, it’s here” .
If this was how
heaven would be, I wouldn’t miss not being there. Yes honestly I didn’t find it
a place worth that spot. Yes, it had its share of beauty and mountain peaks
that beckoned you to come again and again. What with deodar and chinar trees
that touched the sky it looked awesome but I didn’t experience what I expected
to. But then when Amir Khusrau wrote it, it would have not had its dump of
traffic and plastics all along...that could have been so different then. It
meant ‘that Kashmir’ was dead or dying now. Isn’t it sad that ‘We had heaven
and we lost it thanks to our greed, carelessness and apathy’!
I didn’t know
for what I was to feel bad. For having not experienced Srinagar the way I had
envisaged since childhood or to having lost it to time for all time to come!!!
Her one more
chit found its reader “Expectations are always lovelier than realizations”.
Today it stands understood and the pain of understanding also was immense. How
mixed are our feelings. There was this joy of having understood one of her
quotes. And there was also this disappointment of not being able to realize
‘Kashmir’ of my ‘dreams’. My dreams lay there shattered and scattered. But one
hope kept it alive. I told myself – maybe I have come at wrong time of the
year, yes, it is summer here and this place has to be visited during its best
season - when the snow covered mountain peaks would reflect sun rays and I let
my imagination go wild with this flow. That way my dream and hope were still
kept alive and that meant a lot to me. Did we all do this with our
relationships and lives too? Brushing the hard facts and on the face
experiences under the carpet and romanticising about it being otherwise?
Contd.....
No comments:
Post a Comment