a girl is not a wife waiting to happen...

If a girl is brought up to respect herself, uphold her dignity, cherish her dreams and be happy, then she will certainly fulfil with élan the roles assigned to her by nature. She should be brought up to be a fine human being, and not a fine woman who can be easily ‘gloved' into the mould prepared for her by social convention. There is no need to train a girl to be subservient, to suffer in silence, to be meek and humble and bear her lot without complaints in order to make a marriage work. Instead, she should be motivated to be a person of integrity, with a keen sense of social values and a sense of responsibility. We should bear in mind that a girl is not a wife waiting to happen. She is first and foremost a human being, and therefore must be brought up to be a good and self-sustaining person.

It also made me wonder whether wedlock is truly marriage or bondage if the wife alone suffers in silence and willingly obliges every single wish and whim of her husband and his family, and endures all humiliation stoically and uncomplainingly. Will there be true happiness in such a marriage? If this is what made marriages in the past work, then they should be called by any name other than marriage.

And to think that marriage is the only trade where the purchaser is not the privileged owner!

The Hindu : Opinion / Open Page : Not a wife waiting to happen

On Him...!

This dusk shall pass,

And tears may flow,

The night will fall,

And stars will glow.

Wilt there be a new dawn,

Wilt my despair be gone,

Wilt the birds sing a new hymn,

For earnestly I long to be with Him.

Yes, Him!

Coz the universe and the nature,

Causeth no joy unto my being,

For my soul yearns to be with Him.

Yes, Him!

He who doth naught slumber,

He who loveth to be selfless,

He who worketh with a sincere zeal,

He who liveth every moment surreal,

He who wilt naught forsaketh me,

Perhaps He shalt be blest with

A nature, likened to The Nature,

For She alone doth naught

Betray the soul which loveth Her.

Yes, Love!

Love, Impeccable!

Strength to Love - My Reflectionz!!!

Strength to Love by Martin Luther King is a prophetic text and a primer in the principles and practice of nonviolence. Fifty years since its publication, the book is significant as an anthology of his sermons, delivered over a span of a lifetime, marked with epochal struggles. Yes, Sermons intended for a discerning ear rather than the reading eye. In the preface, Martin Luther King admits his reluctance to have the sermons printed, yet accepts, with the hope that the message should come alive to speak with the readers.

Undoubtedly, the speaker is magnanimous enough and his venture into printing sermons is a successful one, as the voice could be heard when one starts to read the discourse consciously. A conscious reading leaves no shadows between the power of his oratory and the power of the text in the book Strength to Love. The text immortalizes his speech, even as it continues to inspire humanity, for to love is human; and appending strength to love invokes courage and a rise above the ordinary.

Martin Luther King is a product of his circumstances and consciousness, a fact revealed throughout the book. In the book, one finds sermons he had preached during and after the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama; three sermons while he was in Georgia jails; few sermons he preached to congregations throughout the nation in the days of grave crises, clouded by social evils of his time. His unassuming nature manifests through an acknowledgement to his parents, who gave him an inspiring example of the Strength to Love.

Martin Luther King appeals to the readers as an author, as an accomplished reader, as an Orator, as a persuasive speaker with a gift of a heart which voiced the right words and verses. Repetitive and rhythmical in few places, yet his words retain emotive charge till the last. The ideals are lofty, the text is of undying quality, and the spirit is powerful – power drawn from the depth of his commitment and the strength of his courage.

Martin Luther King outlines his political ideology, as he explores the conflicts between totalitarianism and democracy, capitalism and communism, as forms of governance. The debates surrounding various other topics – colonialism, materialism and humanism also find place in the book. The philosophy of fatalism and the framework of freedom steer his dialogue. Slavery was inhumane for he considered nothing more tragic than to be divorced from family, language and roots into the drain of resentment and bitterness. And Freedom, to him, is the act of deliberating, deciding, and responding within our destined nature.

Lines from the book reverberate ceaselessly as they have universal applicability and timeless relevance. King delves into the power of Man, the human spirit – which, according to him, transcends time and space. Asserting that ‘man is much more than a tiny vagary of whirling electrons’, he ascertains that the abiding expression of man’s higher nature lie in his freedom, his ability to reason, his power of memory and his gift of imagination.

One also finds timeless quotes of Ralph Waldo Emerson in the sermons. One of the significant quotes is found in the chapter on the ‘Three Dimensions of a Complete Life’. It reads “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door”. Appreciating human excellence, learning from experiences and traversing through philosophical thought seems to be in the trails of King’s nobility which can be gathered from the references to Shakespeare, Beethoven, Michelangelo, Bach, Nietzsche, Sartre, Tolstoi, Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, et al.

The title Strength to Love can be viewed anti-thesis to the title of a chapter in the book ‘Antidotes for Fear’. He condenses this idea in this particular chapter and in his lines ‘hate is rooted in fear and the only cure for fear-hate is love’. He contextualizes this in the political situation of the U.S. and recognizes that not arms, but love, understanding and organized goodwill can cast out fear. King stated ‘Only disarmament, based on good faith, will make trust a living reality’. This certainly ushered new thinking in international relations and the own problems of his American brotherhood, the problems of racial injustice and social segregation.

The message throughout the book is lucid. For an appraisal, King, through his words, attained the eloquence of his speech for his tone echoes unceasingly. Though King seems to be admonishing, his words reveal the substance of one’s being, the purpose of one’s doing and the context of one’s living. Through his writing, he offered special notes for young people to ponder and reflect upon. The human and emotional dimensions of his writing make the readers conform to become transformed nonconformists, as Martin Luther King envisioned individuals to be.

References from The Bible and spiritual connotations in few sermons also strike another chord – of the ability of Martin Luther King to weave Biblical teachings and social consciousness into a remarkable Social Gospel.

The books ends with the chapter on ‘Pilgrimage to Nonviolence’ where in he fondly records his pilgrimage to India – as a privilege, where his skepticism concerning the power of love diminished gradually; and as an intellectual accord, as he resolved his ideas on Nonviolence – long after he gave intellectual assent. Preaching excerpts on love and nonviolence, in the conclusion, Martin Luther King clarifies to the readers that he is not a doctrinaire pacifist but embraces realistic pacifism, and gives a call for modern nations to find alternatives to war and destruction. King averred "Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit."

To end with, here’s the quote, which invited me to read this classic:

 “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, “Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Revisiting Among The School Children...WB Yeats

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way - the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire. a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy -
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t'other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age -
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler's heritage -
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

Her present image floats into the mind -
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once - enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts - O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise -
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?