This blog is about my son - Prashanth. Wordsworth in a poem said “The Child is Father of the Man”. There are different meanings attributed to this sentence. I think he meant that even as an adult, there are many lessons we could learn from a child. It means a child teaches the father with its own innocence and its intelligence (and also probably thru’ its stupidity!). Throughout my life, this quote from Wordsworth revisits my mind at unexpected times to remind me about the weight of that poetic insight.
This morning just before he left for the College, he was frantically searching for something. This is nothing unusual since he is accustomed to misplacing things and searching for them endlessly. My wife, with the intention of helping him, asked what is that he is looking for. His ego didn’t allow him to admit that he has misplaced something. So the answer was ‘Nothing’. Again when my wife was persistent in her query, there was an irritated and emphatic ‘NOTHING’. My wife decided to assist him by joining him in his search. By then he was so furious, he glared at her (like Shiva opening the third eye) and said “I am looking for NOTHING” and left for the College.
I was mulling over this ‘Nothing’ incident and it struck me that probably every one of us in our life is chasing and looking for this ‘Nothing’. I remembered the ‘Chidambara Ragasiyam’ (for those who are non-Hindus and who do not know Tamil, it is ‘The Chidambaram Secret’ meant to reveal the meaning of life in the famous Nataraja Temple in the city of Chidambaram in Tamilnadu). It is an empty space you see in the temple and this ‘nothingness’ is supposed to be the secret or meaning of life.
Similarly during my father’s death ceremony, seeing and hearing about the various rituals, which were to our convenience (and also to an extent to the purohits’) truncated or diluted or modified – Prashanth said, “Daddy our Hindu rituals are like the open-ended Linux Operating System where the source code is free and we can modify it to suit our convenience and comfort”. To ensure the passage of the soul during its voyage to the Otherworld, an eleven-day ritual called shraddha is performed. The moot question (Moot? or Mute?) is whether shraddha (dedication) is there from all quarters concerned?
Another incident to exemplify the prophetic poetry line happened 15 years ago. I bought an apartment in Nungambakkam and the builder was carrying out some final embellishment work in the kitchen. A few granite and marble chips were lying around and Prashanth picked up a few for playing. One day my wife while in the mood of cleaning spree (it’s occasional that she gets into such moods!) bid farewell to those stones and chips. Prashanth, being a 4-year-old then, threw tantrums that evening. My wife, unable to control him, shouted that they were just sand and stones and his attachment to them is meaningless. Something struck me then. Are we, the grown-ups, any different? Having attachment to the material things in this world including the house constructed of sand and stones…
This morning just before he left for the College, he was frantically searching for something. This is nothing unusual since he is accustomed to misplacing things and searching for them endlessly. My wife, with the intention of helping him, asked what is that he is looking for. His ego didn’t allow him to admit that he has misplaced something. So the answer was ‘Nothing’. Again when my wife was persistent in her query, there was an irritated and emphatic ‘NOTHING’. My wife decided to assist him by joining him in his search. By then he was so furious, he glared at her (like Shiva opening the third eye) and said “I am looking for NOTHING” and left for the College.
I was mulling over this ‘Nothing’ incident and it struck me that probably every one of us in our life is chasing and looking for this ‘Nothing’. I remembered the ‘Chidambara Ragasiyam’ (for those who are non-Hindus and who do not know Tamil, it is ‘The Chidambaram Secret’ meant to reveal the meaning of life in the famous Nataraja Temple in the city of Chidambaram in Tamilnadu). It is an empty space you see in the temple and this ‘nothingness’ is supposed to be the secret or meaning of life.
Similarly during my father’s death ceremony, seeing and hearing about the various rituals, which were to our convenience (and also to an extent to the purohits’) truncated or diluted or modified – Prashanth said, “Daddy our Hindu rituals are like the open-ended Linux Operating System where the source code is free and we can modify it to suit our convenience and comfort”. To ensure the passage of the soul during its voyage to the Otherworld, an eleven-day ritual called shraddha is performed. The moot question (Moot? or Mute?) is whether shraddha (dedication) is there from all quarters concerned?
Another incident to exemplify the prophetic poetry line happened 15 years ago. I bought an apartment in Nungambakkam and the builder was carrying out some final embellishment work in the kitchen. A few granite and marble chips were lying around and Prashanth picked up a few for playing. One day my wife while in the mood of cleaning spree (it’s occasional that she gets into such moods!) bid farewell to those stones and chips. Prashanth, being a 4-year-old then, threw tantrums that evening. My wife, unable to control him, shouted that they were just sand and stones and his attachment to them is meaningless. Something struck me then. Are we, the grown-ups, any different? Having attachment to the material things in this world including the house constructed of sand and stones…
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