Enlightenment

There is compassion in destruction
The flyaway ashes reveal an ancient fire
The mirror that shows my ugly parts
Becomes my guardian angel.

Not long ago, staying high on bliss was home
I found darkness a trace of sunlight, just painted black
Now, crystalized scales fall off my eyes
I wake up and panic in the abyss
Should the choices remain the same?
Well, what's your poison?, the voice asks
A pleasing lie
Or an ugly truth
I ask for neither
The truth was always there
And, the lie was my set of blinkers
Break those horse tacks
But give me a new set of eyes

I could go back to sleep
Color nightmares into my personal rainbow.
Make demons my dream-catchers
And, when a skeleton lurks in the darkness
Shout in jest 'Happy Halloween to you'.

I could remain wide awake
Burn hot in the embers of truth
Hedge my bets
Sharpen the spears
Wage my battles from an unstable, bleeding, dark crevice.

Or
I could watch the battle but know it's futile
Forgive myself and strip off the straitjacket
Lift myself up from the crevice to the Summit of the mountain
Oh, I will break my spear into the staff of Moses
Part these Oceans into two
And reach the promised land


What is enlightenment?
Recognizing the illusion of it all
To see a rose, not the thousand thorns
Seeing the psychedelic notion of reality that changes like a chameleon on steroids
Seeing all that from a distance, with a new set of eyes
Finally, offering my totem pole as homage to this never ending journey
For the journey is within
And, so is the promised land

-Sajithra

Modified India - In the name of Cow

Aug'17- 2 Muslim men lynched for transporting cattle 

24 Muslims lynched, 124 attacked
In Hindutva we trust, proclaim their tweets
Protesters murdered, Farmers shot
Just another hill of discarded meat

Media is dead
Bought or bled
They gouged their eyes out
but gave them a new mouth
Slipped on with no teeth and they all look the same
Reasons aplenty when the weak leads
Roars are pitch-corrected to friendly bleats

500 people died in flood, we cry
The sin against the Cow, they say
Rupee at an all time low
They laugh
Congress in 1947 caused the fall

We close our windows
Keep blood out the doors
It stinks still
The flies buzz around

They walk with sickles in hand
Pied Pipers lay claim to our land
Become a zombie or pretend to be one
Don't talk, don't see, don't feel

And, yet
Heroes rise
To pay the price
With Love
With Life

They fall with a smile
They are crushed into divine light
We feel
We see
Crimson clouds everywhere!
It thunders
It rains


The windows break
Illusions melt
Sound of freedom reverberates
Another day, Another dawn
Here for Freedom, Here for us!

-Sajithra

5 questions to ask yourself before signing up for a self-help program

The internet is replete with a number of self-help gurus. Most have a predictable template that cults typically follow for mind-control, albeit with varying degrees. I am super cautious of people I listen to because the most dangerous factor that distracts us from following our path is bias. Bias primes us and can impact our decision making process and actions in every possible way. It's impossible to be free of bias but we can always try to limit its hold on us.

1) What is the 'hook'?
What made you notice them? Marketers trade emotions. The easiest way to get someone's attention is working with their fear and guilt. If a self-help guru starts with your fear and build that to evoke guilt for doing something, run fast! Away, NOT towards them!!

2) How much freedom do you have?
If they have figured out the finer details of how to live your life, their intention is to control you. Good teachers would only offer broad guidelines that can be broken down to granular details by the users. If they give you a set of rules to follow, it's not a good sign.

3) Are they credible?
 What is their mission statement and what kind of work they have put in to get here.

4) Are power rituals part of the plan?
There is something comforting about rituals. If this makes you identify with an exclusive group and you feel proud about doing that, it's the first stage of a cult.

5) Is it sustainable?
If they offer you free programs and later hook you into a steady stream of paid projects, you just became justifiable fodder. Leave!

The Hu and the Sun

The violent counter part of this poem is here
The Sufi's notion of Love is seeing God as the beloved. More often than not, God is the lover in Rumi's poems.

The earth kissed her feet

Warm, Tender, Soft

She slipped
Slid into the belly of a wet, paddy field

Its scent on her back
Coarse sand on her neck

She took a breath
Hu!

The sun touched her brows

Draping its rays as a veil
It dripped down
Like a runnel of desire
A thousand caresses
Sieving through her breasts

Her tummy squeezed out a breath

Hu!

She stretched out her hands
Her fingers found the palm of wind
It tip toed around her body
And touched her tongue
Slowly at first and then like a storm
A blaze of sweet trickle pressed her mouth
Her throat felt a ball of fire
That stretched her body out
Like a bow

A breath sneaked in
Hu!

She saw the stars
She saw Time
The Universe
She saw Love itself
A song without words
And, it covered her
With a glimpse of an ancient memory
She tried to move back
It pulled her in
Tighter, Stronger, Harder
She became pleasure
She became Love

Breathless!

She rose
She stayed
Hu!
-Sajithra

American beauty: What Brigitte Macron could have taught Lester Burnham

I watched American Beauty last night and was fascinated at the depth of its character arcs.

Spoilers ahead but that shouldn't matter since the movie is almost 2 decades old!

The good: Mid-life crisis is often misunderstood. As per Jung, this is the time people start working towards self-realization but most fail when they let the social constructs hold them back. The conflict between the collective reality as we know it and the inner person makes it a traumatic experience when it doesn't have to be one. This is that linchpin moment that catapults people to incredible growth. This can also potentially throw them down a deep, dark abyss. A difficult subject deftly handled by the creative team.

The best part of the movie is when Lester admitted that he didn't always feel this sedated. That's a great place to be in. The truly sedated ones wouldn't know.  

I consider Ricky's character the most impactful one in the movie. I am in awe of him. He knows exactly what he wants out of life and he owns it with aplomb. Confident. Unabashed. Guilt-free. He is grateful about everything, even the beauty of mortality found in a dead 🐦 He is not grateful because his life is happy. He found happiness because he is grateful. And, he lives in a state of constant bliss despite his circumstances of an abusive home, a distant mother, and a father who committed him to a mental institution to break him. Thug life!

He is also the catalyst responsible for most of the plot lines.

• Jane came out of her shell when Ricky recognized her beauty. His fascination with Jane's beauty made him approach Lester.
• Lester was inspired to quit his job when he saw the flamboyance with which Ricky quit his catering job.
• Ricky's father's obsession with Lester started when he mistook Ricky's relationship with Lester.
• Angela felt insecure when Ricky called her ordinary and that made her vulnerable before she approached Lester.

The supporting characters are well thought-out. 'Gun' happens to be a supporting character as well with others engaging with it in different ways.

The bad: Inspiration that sets someone on their life's purpose always starts with Love - Love for beauty/a person/pet/art/altruism/ideology....And, it's strong and majestic when it is unconditional. That's the energy that makes strangers lay down their lives for a greater cause. We see love as a positive energy but not a powerful one. It's not the most positive energy in the world that takes over. The most powerful one does. Recognizing the power of Love is creation. When we pigeon-hole love into boxed roles and make it about possession, yearning, and weakness, misery follows.

The way Lester deals with the Angela situation has its high and low points. I loved how he embraced the moment without guilt and turmoil. That kick started his purging. They both were not promiscuous though she tends to project a different image. So, there was a lot of innocence and tenderness in that fantasy. However, he made that about his obsession with sex alone when what he gained from her energy was a disregard for social image. He was able to peel off the layers one by one till he literally went back to his child hood and flipped burgers. She introduced him to his authentic self.

The highest form of romantic love as per the Sufi philosophy is not about posession. It sees God in someone. The absolute form of Love has nothing to do with another person. It's about remembering the authentic self, finding the divine within, and finding completion with self-love. It's a human construct to equate pain with Love when all the mystries of the world are hidden in finding it without the pain. 

Rumi's mentor Shams Tabriz was the one who introduced Rumi to himself. Shams was traveling in search of 'something' that he was supposed to find in Konya. One day, he found Rumi riding a horse. After their first conversation, Rumi felt struck by light ande remained unconscious for an hour. When he woke up, Shams grabbed his hands and took him to teach him in seclusion for 40 days. 

The period after this teaching was described as Rumi's mysticism. The sufis danced, played music (rabab), and drank wine. The concept of "whirling dervishes" originated after this. 

Rumi, an orthodox Islamic scholar became a lover, a poet. Rumi ended up writing 70,000 verses after his encounter with Shams. Rumi's family and disciples were jealous of Shams and that prompted Shams to leave him after staying with him for 2 years. Rumi was awakened by then. 

Rumi would later write this about Shams:-

These are two straight men, one young Islamic judge and one old nomad. There was no hint of a sexual relationship either. However, if we read this with bias, it sounds like something straight out of a fantasy scene from American beauty.


I am not one for ageism. Our society gives undue importance to age difference since the life expectancy has significantly increased. LEB (Life expectancy at birth) was 26 during the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Age of consent remains a cultural construct. The magic number is 15 in France and 18 elsewhere. Our educational system ensures that the teens are babies who don't need diapers. Of course, there are predators who groom and take advantage of young people for their sexual needs. And, that deserves the harshest punishment. This isn't the case with Lester. So, the scene where Lester sees Angela as a 'daughter' figure looks forced. It was too sudden, too soon, and his character arc left no clues that could have led to this. 

The original screenplay had Lester running away with Angela. The makers were afraid of pushing the boundaries further. The movie would have been like Citizen Kane, considered one of the greatest movies ever made though it flopped when it was released in 1941. It would have won over the continuum of time. But, our current social standards meant that the audience had to see Lester redeeming himself with a fatherly turn coat moment. And, for the movie to become a hit, we needed to see him punished. He paid with his blood. It was gruesome. And, it was glorious! That expunged his guilt and ours for rooting for him . The world is changing though. Brigittete Macron could teach Lester how to have his cake and eat it too ;-)

Brigitte and Emmanuel met when he was 15. She was 40. Apparently, they waited till he was 18, often long periods when Emmanuel was sent to a different school and they tried to figure out what it all meant. Social expectations build a heirarchy of different forms of Love. I remember reading about a stranger who took a bullet to save a woman and she had said that she felt the need to do it since the woman had young kids. How do we quantify a Love like that. Jesus said 'Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.'

If Lester had asked himself what made sense for Angela and donned the role that Angela really needed at that point, perhaps they would have got the gift of time to figure out if it was a sexual relationship or a platonic one that they needed. And Oh, he wouldn't have to die  ;-) 

If it was really about a perfect partnership, Angela would have channelled Macron because she had gained a mate + mentor with life experience and Lester would have gained someone who brought forth his younger self without any boundaries. The alternative is Lester living his life the way he wanted and Angela finding a way to break away the illusion of beauty and its hold on her other choices in life. Perfect options.