There are two persons in this co-existence and there is only one scribe. It is like an inspiration that exists and expresses itself through the inspired. Both the inspired and the inspiration are indispensable for the process and so are the poet and his beloved.

It is an irony that most of times we have talked about the beloved’s influence on the poet and we have seldom thought about the existence of poet to his beloved. Today as we have pondered over it, let us go a little ahead and let us see them together, only then will we understand what a poet to his beloved is.

However there is another angle to this relationship and that are feelings. Like every other relationship it is there but its intensity and expression makes it special. Poet’s expression makes the beloved special in the beloved’s own eyes and there is a constant feeling of self-beautification.

However it depends upon the level of communication between the two and the reality of mutual co-existence. A beloved can also be a poet’s imagination and may bear no similarity with the existing one.

It all started when I was a child. I didn’t know how to be doubtful, I was open and loving. Yes, this did make me vulnerable but this vulnerability became my ability to believe in the gifts I’m endowed with, it made me love my own self.

I became aware that I’m capable of love and moreover I became aware that love doesn’t mean being loved but love means ‘loving’. I simple enjoyed myself.

It all started with a belief that ‘God loves me’, today I can call that God, the divine or I can simply enjoy the feeling that it brings to me. Yes, the belief has evolved and I feel I’m loved, though I don’t have any person or object to point at. My love is just ‘love’ or you can say I love ‘love’.

Beliefs are very important. They are like the raw stones, which if put in apt temperature turn into faith and that faith lives itself to become a diamond.

Believe in ‘That’ which speaks to you,
Believe in ‘That’ which stares at you,
In silences lies the truth of love,
Believe in love that’s there in you.

Let there be more and more love everywhere,
With prayers and Love

Innocence apart many children also have an inherent mental, emotional and spiritual makeup and until and unless we don’t aspire for the same innocence and beauty we can not appreciate and understand them.

Now a days we often hear parents complaining, “Oh, we didn’t want to have a child but it happened by accident.” I feel sad when I hear this! Can anything beautiful be an accident? Is it that all of us are accidents? No wonder many of us feel unwanted and unloved.

If a woman is not able to accept pregnancy and is forced to deliver the child, the child will throughout his life feel unwanted, until and unless he/she sees light at some end. Imagine how many children come into the world like this.

The Indian rishis have given lot of insights on child bearing and child rearing. When one aspires for a beautiful child and conceives a child with this awareness, the child will undoubtedly have the qualities aspired for by the parents.

Let us take this example. When we are intensely looking for Krishna, we find Krishna in everything. The animals, flowers, rivers and people will become Krishna because we aspire for Krishna. If we don’t doubt our feelings the entire universe will come together to fulfill our aspiration and the same can happen when we decide to have a child because we really want to.

Now a days “Child is a blessing of God” is merely used to clarify to others and to oneself the birth of an unwanted child. There are others who have made it into a slogan to convince couples to have more children. The result is that most of us have nothing beautiful to share with our children. We will not have the time, understanding and nor even the inclination to grow along with them.

Every aspect of life is a blessing if we are aware about its importance in our life. We are what we aspire for and every things in life revolves around our aspiration. Children are surely a blessing but are we also a blessing for them?

Well! a friend of mine often says that a cat is a cat and a cat is a cat and I’m saying that a fish is a fish. Intriguing it may seem, but a little fish in my pond has shown to me that a fish is a fish. While you make sense of this parable, I’ll take you into the world of my blue fish, let us call her – Rana.

We purchased Rana and her (it may be ‘his’) companion, another similar species blue fish, for a small pool in front of our office. This pool housing seven fish has a twin pool with an aquatic plant in it.

One day as usual when I put food to the fish, I observed that Rana and her beloved are not there. Thinking that a cat would have eaten them up, I made my way into the office. The next day as I came to feed the fish again, I saw Rana and her companion back into the pool. 

Their secret became know to me when I saw them in the adjacent twin pool (about 5 centimeters apart). Rana and her beloved continued this ‘to and for journey’ till the day Rana’s beloved stopped feeding. From then on, the beloved remained in one corner of the pool and didn’t come to the surface to feed. Every morning when I put the food, I saw Rana going to her, touching her with her mouth and then coming alone to the water surface to feed.

This behavior continued for many days and I feared that Rana’s beloved is dead. However when I waded a twig through water, she jumped to her life and I decided never to disturb her again. She seemed to be so meditative; she was smaller than Rana and her mouth always pointed towards the corner, she never moved.

Days later I observed that Rana had stopped going to her. I refused to believe that she is dead because unlike other dead fish in the pool, her body was not floating on water. Two days passed by and I found her at the same place, her head was pointing towards the earth and she didn’t move. When I tried to move her with a twig, I realized that she was actually dead.

Whenever a fish dies in our pool, I throw it under the coconut tree for the crows to feed on, however I felt that Rana’s beloved is special and I let it be in the pool. For few days it remained where it was, there was no foul smell emanating from her (which was not so in the case of other dead fish in the pool); she looked the same but had shrunk in size. In her shrunken state she looked special; it was as if she was holding a different life.

Rana continued to live and continued to jump from one pool to the other, until our pool started leaking and we transported all the fish into a small tub. Rana was picked up alone from the adjacent pool and was put in a separate bucket.

The day monsoons stuck the kerala coast, I couldn’t find Rana in her bucket. The tub with other fish was 7 feet away and there was no question of Rana jumping into it….…….But I was wrong!

Rana was found on the floor, just 1 feet away from the other fish. Her color was not the usual blue. She was a beautiful violet color fish; since she was not moving, I thought it to be dead.

But my husband told me to put her into the tub and I did so. The moment Rana’s body touched the water, it started swimming. While I marveled at her dive, I kept wondering about how she perceived the location of the tub housing other fish and how she managed to keep the correct direction. (The other fish were not visible from outside and the tub was high)

Rana is back in her pool and she continues her usual travel. I marvel at her fishness and I wonder about her beloved.  I feel inspired……… A fish is a fish!

How about visting a temple and getting stuck by an idea that strikes the intellect more than the soul or both together. For many it would be common, for others it may be rare but for me today, it was another ‘Daily Nuance’.

I often go to the temple to look around, wink at the kids playing unmindful of the importance and rules suscribed to the place, pat the cat sitting at the temple door or talk to the trees around. Many a times, I have picked up a flower from one point and dropped it at the other while circulambulating the shrine. However never before while doing so, did I observe the granite flooring so closely as I did today.

I observed that the older flooring had granite slabs of various sizes and shapes fitting in like a puzzle, to form a neatly laid path. It occured to me that everybody and everything like each of these granite slab is unique in its composition and purpose and everybody/everything fits into each other perfectly to form a bigger purpose.  I remembered my guide telling me about understanding the ‘bigger picture’.

There was a time when situations happening in my life, didnot make sense to me. They were like many chunks of a puzzle, which I feverently tried to fit into a picture, I couldnot see or could only partially comprehend. However gradually in course of time, I was able to understand where the path is leading to. But unlike the garnite floored path in the temple, my path is not pre-laid, everyday a slab is being laid on the path and everyday a step is taken towards the only goal in life.  

Moreover the daily nuisance doesnot end here. I have to bring into picture another thing I saw in the temple. The new floor laid to replace the damaged one, was laid with equally measuring granite slabs, somewhat like the tiles in the modern bathrooms. I wondred about the need to cut them into uniform shape and size.

It may be easier for the contarctors and the workers, but somewhere it didnot match the feeling of the older one. Today’s man creates everything in factories with machines and in the process, himself, gets into the same mold. The uniform system of education is all about churning out candidates with uniform abilities and skills to fit into a very predictibale pre-planned path. Predicatable is always easy and so is uniformity. They may tone up the skills and knowledge currently relevant to the existing market, but they seldom nurture the life-making factors.

However for those few walking on an untrodden path, life is all about laying a slab each day and taking a step. For such people there is no confirmity with uniformity, things fit into perfect patterns and a path is created. Needless to say such a path is always unique and those who create have an added responsibility!

I have often seen islands surrounded by the sea but today was my first visit to an island surrounded by wetlands and that too when the monsoons are at their peak in Kerala. What may signify a simple family visit turned out to be a marvelous experience of Madukara, the ancestral village of my husband.

My husband had never being to his ancestral village; ancestral here means the one from where the family has actually originated and not the grandmother’s home. My husband’s community is a matriarchal community and his family owes its origin to three sisters of Madukara. While in North India the only possibility of knowing about one’s forefathers (great-grandfather’s great-grandfather and so on) is by the records maintained at the time of performing death rituals in Haridwar, in Kerala one’s own name bears one’s ancestral roots.

My husband’s name is M M Vinod Kumar and since our courtship I have wondered about what this M M means (In north India, names contain only one suffix and the suffix denotes the Varna). However in Kerala the name of non-Brahmins particularly Nair-Menon community also contains an additional suffix that denotes the place of origin. So yesterday I came to know that M M, means Madukara Moothedath; Madukara the village of origin and Moothedath, the name of the home. This name helped us to locate the home we had never visited earlier.

Our purpose of visiting Madukara was to pray to the ancestral mother goddess and we were not dissatisfied. We were greeted by an inquisitively looking cow and an over-excited dog. The courtyard had a small Holy Basil (Tulsi) bush and a tree laden with red flowers almost touched the ground. We made our way into the house through a narrow door and an old man reclining on a chair greeted us. He was sick but was happy to see us around. His wife came up with some tea and home made delicacies. While we were nibbling at the jackfruit chips, a lady in green saree came and hugged my mother in-law. She was over-whelmed to see us there and her love poured with the same intensity as the monsoons outside. Irony was she had never met my mother-in-law earlier.

I remembered the sophisticated city lifestyle and the cup and saucer mannerism. I wondered if sophistication and love can go together and if stress is one of the manifestations of this sophistication. Meanwhile the time for praying at the ancestral goddess had come and we were led to a scared grove at the back of the home. The grove was a flowering tropical tree which in north India many people plant as an ornamental plant. The priestess believed that the prayer has to be started from the sacred grove. Any attempt to light the lamp fails if it is not lighted for the grove first.

Freshened by the subtle fragrance of the flowers and vibrancy of the grove, we made our way to the ancestral goddess chamber. A narrow cabin in the middle of the home, the chamber had no visible image of the goddess but only three pidams (anointed seats) signifying the Goddess. It was lighted by an oil lamp and a wooden sub-chamber lay two feet above the pidams. This sub-chamber is used to store food grains. The priestess told that the annual pooja at the home is not done by a Brahmin and a different system of worship is followed.

After praying and offering money for buying oil for the Goddess chamber, we made our way back home. For all these years we remained unaware of our cultural heritage, but today was a different day. The current system of worship in temple seemed to be very different from the one we had just watched. Many say that Kerala before the coming of the Namboodri’s from north India was predominantly a tribal community.

Obviously like other tribal communities, these indigenous people of Kerala were having their own faith and ways of worship. They were mostly nature (sacred grove) and mother goddess worshipers. We were lucky to have a glimpse of this long forgotten tradition today. The house may not stand there tomorrow and the almost secret chamber may also meet the same fate, but I’ll always remember the vibrant experience owith the sacred grove and my tryst with the secret chamber. Well! that’s a different story.