A World of Overcoming

"Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it."- Helen Keller

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I have listened to the lives of three women who brave every breath of oxygen they inhale. Exhaling a moment of pain and un-uttered grief. A simple smile shines through. You know it is an effort to search for acknowledgment - they too have a soul that burns silently, just like the one staring into their face.

The eyes of a ‘watch’ scans through and through, wanting to pin down an argument of knowing what lies beneath the skin. There lies nothing beneath the skin, really. It is the same blood. The same red fluid pumped by the heart, runs through the veins of every individual of every colour, race, ethnicity, man, woman, child, un-man, un-woman, un-child. It is the same oxygen that runs through the blood vessels. Yet every puff of oxygen inhaled is different. Unknowable. Unseen. Unfelt.

I lived the lives of three women – only partially. I can merely fathom the surface of the life that has been lived. I wonder what life of a past is lived through the present for Radha, Swetha and Kaumudhi (Names changed here).

Radha and Swetha are placed in a man’s body, but have a soul of a woman. Kaumudhi is a woman living with HIV. She has to care for her husband and child who live with HIV too. Three lives. Three worlds. Three languages. Yet one now. Yet many then.

I know their pain in snatches. I know it because I too search for a world that can be a garden of different hues. That is a world I wish to live in. I am different yet one.

Radha and Swetha are women who live a life of dignity despite rape. A rape that goes beyond the physical. A rape of an identity thrust upon them. A rape of forced name-calling: queer, different, strange, weird, freaks, hijra, eunuch. A rape of isolation. A rape of pushing their body to the periphery of life. They fight the rape. They fight the language of conquest, of captured assault. Their body snatched, conquered, besieged, injured, rived, torn, ripped, scared, penetrated, forced. That is how their body was treated. That is their body. The outer layer. The house where resides the soul. The flesh that will decay, perish and die. The soul sees a flight of freedom and liberation one day.

Their spirit cannot be touched, tampered or raped. The spirit that carries a dignity of defiance, equanimity and courage to hold on to claim a world of love, kindness, acceptance of them and of all the souls that feel trapped in bodies that don’t belong.

I know their pain in snatches. I know it because I am the same. A soul that is housed in a mere body that will one day decay.

Radha and Swetha were born boys, who felt trapped in their body. They try to break free from a patriarchal, masculine language, thus creating a language of their own.

There is Kaumudhi, who listens to Radha and Swetha, as she runs her past through her present one more time. She is them, and yet not. She shares the same language of discrimination. She lives with HIV. Her little child lives with the same. Her husband lives the same. Three lives to lead in one life span.

I know her pain, in snatches. I know the pain of all of them put together. I know it because each one of them, just like me, long to be held, listened to and respected.

I have felt pain in my heart. Sharing two days with Kaumudhi, reliving her journey and her struggle of what millions around the world go through, fighting discrimination against HIV leaves me numb. It was time to say goodbye. I hugged her with the only thing I knew I could come to express- compassion, loving-kindness. That was all I had to offer of myself to her, her child and her family and thus it was in a way an offering of my pained self to the world where free spirits suffer everywhere.

These exemplary women epitomize for me one of my favorite quotes of Helen Keller again, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

Living a snatch of the daring is promise. Breaking superstition of the forces of the cosmos is liberating. Understanding a language through stammering is freeing. Listening to the churning stories is living a life through three lives and yet a zillion lives in a single stroke, as one inhales a puff of air that is everyone’s.

I realize there is more to life than seeing sunsets and sunrise fade across the horizon.

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Death of an Unknown – The Preserver of Life

Am quietened by an email that I received this morning that grieves of a young farmer, Jambana Goudaru, from Sindanur Taluk in Raichur District, who died of a “freak electric mishap”. But what struck me most was that here was a man who was a committed seed saver and cultivated over 51 varieties of rice. His commitment to preserving seed diversity is one that he will leave behind – in an age where genetically modified grains and powerful corporations are taking away this diversity that is a life giver. Beeja in Sanskrit means life. It is a metaphor for the origin or cause of things.

We have one life to preserve. Sri Lanka in 1959, for example, some 2,000 varieties of rice were cultivated, whereas today, there are fewer than 100, and some 75 per cent of agro-biodiversity has been lost as a result of the pressure towards to the adoption of uniform improved seed varieties.

Diversity is the core of life and diversity is the core to nature – through “beeja” or the life giver the principle of traditional agriculture has survived. The word culture meant, “Tending to nature” - that speaks for the word “agriculture” too. This is best seen in India where farmers have worshiped the land as life force – the giver and bearer of life. It is here that every tradition of farming has been common knowledge to every “tillers” of the earth for time-immemorial. This common knowledge is today taken for ransom by large corporations, thanks to the free-trade agreements and patenting laws that snatches this common knowledge from the very custodians of this traditional knowledge.

“India is a centre of genetic diversity of rice. Out of this diversity, Indian peasants and tribal’s have selected and improved many indigenous high yielding varieties. Comparative studies of 22 rice growing systems have shown that indigenous systems are more efficient when inputs of labour and energy are taken into account” (Shiva, Vandana, The Green Revolution in the Punjab, The Ecologist, Vol. 21, No. 2, March-April 1991)

The fundamental “right to life” is being snatched by the design of globalization and there is much to be done to resist the colonization of multi-nationals taking claim of the traditional –hand- me- down-knowledge.

The green revolution and the aftermath of this has seen the effects that are of far reaching consequence – agrarian crisis, farmer suicides due to indebtedness as farming practises have changed to now depend on fertilisers, pesticides and excessive use of natural recourses, thus harming the fertility of the very earth that is the life-giver; usurping of tribal lands in the pretext of “special economic zone development projects”; building of large dams that submerge fertile habitant land, and displace millions of people; global warming; poverty and hunger.

It is not co-incidental that India has over 2.5 million children who die of malnutrition and the latest UN Human Development Report 2010 states that eight Indian states have “poverty as acute as the 26 poorest African countries” and this is “home to 421 million multi dimensionally poor people, more than the 410 million people living in those African countries combined”.

If one were to look at life as being too short – what about that seed of life that has in its power to germinate to pass on life as a healer to the world. Many lives strung together means living a million lives in one breath. This needs to be preserved in our conscious minds.

One is often bogged down by the powerful harangue that we often tell ourselves that a perfect world cannot be realized, but we should be able to soften that statement and tell ourselves that, that should not distract us (ME-YOU-US) from doing what is possible to bring about change.

If only death can lead to inspiration, and life a purpose!

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The Buddha's Words on Kindness (Metta Sutta)

This is what should be done
By one who is skilled in goodness,
And who knows the path of peace:
Let them be able and upright,
Straightforward and gentle in speech.
Humble and not conceited,
Contented and easily satisfied.
Unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways.
Peaceful and calm, and wise and skillful,
Not proud and demanding in nature.
Let them not do the slightest thing
That the wise would later reprove.
Wishing: In gladness and in saftey,
May all beings be at ease.
Whatever living beings there may be;
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,
The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and far away,
Those born and to-be-born,
May all beings be at ease!


Let none deceive another,
Or despise any being in any state.
Let none through anger or ill-will
Wish harm upon another.
Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child,
So with a boundless heart
Should one cherish all living beings:
Radiating kindness over the entire world
Spreading upwards to the skies,
And downwards to the depths;
Outwards and unbounded,
Freed from hatred and ill-will.
Whether standing or walking, seated or lying down
Free from drowsiness,
One should sustain this recollection.
This is said to be the sublime abiding.
By not holding to fixed views,
The pure-hearted one, having clarity of vision,
Being freed from all sense desires,
Is not born again into this world.
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