Sunday Thoughts By Kunal Roy

The Bitter Irony

No acrimony. No shudder. No ecstasy. She is inscrutable. She is inexplicable. She is inexorable. She functions silently. She is attired in white. Her hair is unkempt, disheveled, resembling Manead. She connects herself with life in an incredulous manner. Short life succumbs to her. She is countable for her supremacy. She is none but Providence. Destiny, what we all pronounce in the midst of crisis. She even jeers at us during the hours of distress. Yet during delightful jiff we never bear her profile in our heart. Indeed a conventional faux pas!.

Arun Kolatkar, a poet of eminence has talked on the endless cycle of creation and destruction in his “A Low Temple”. ‘Destruction’ which resurfaces time and again to haunt us is synonymous to death. Famed as the final Odyssey of life. It is quite undeniable that if life is there, death must make its presence felt as the latter often reminds us of the futility of passionate love and obsession for any earthly object. Everything will bite the dust in the not too distant future. But the homo sapiens always indulge in self possession! Clinging to any object of liking has turned out to be a prime component of the ‘red fluid’. Ruled by ignorance, helplessness, we often inspire ourselves to stay at arm’s length from the pure truth that peeps through the brittle glass of our life. Discordance replaces harmony, ego is reduced to grey ashes and the invincible soul surely slips out of this fleshy, sinewy structure to mingle its voice with the echoes of the extra- cosmic force- the unreachable one for the ordinary, poor selfish mortals! Self assessment is another sphere where the bitter pill of irony creeps into. To emerge as the “best” has become the very target without pondering over the axiom revolving around the innate ability, which if absent would make you a loser! Ordinary beings always seek the best opportunities, the best garments to put on, the best victuals to consume and the best inn to confine. Little do we realise what fate has in store for us! However, an untiring effort moves on without any hindrance and the practice of assessing oneself invariably possesses a back seat. Years ago I was flipping through the dull, white smooth pages of Sukhi grihokon and the eminent reporter and the founder editor Late Barun Sengupta was the focal point. The longish tribute to the legend drew the heed of the readers, not only for diction but the sincerity, veneration and profound pathos glued to the entire gamut. One of the articles revealed, Barun Da, just a couple of days before his untimely death desired to have a discourse on the layout of Sukhi grihokon. But what an irony! -the day fixed for the round table conference was proclaimed as the time of deep anguish, splitting the soul into two!

Eliot’s “The Waste Land” illustrates the status where everything dissolves into mere barrenness intertwined with grave spiritualism. Irony rules the roost. Identity becomes a far fetched term. It is an abstract power, an unseen force upon which we all bank, perhaps to breed an instance of pathetic failure. Does it suggest to eschew the Karma Yoga, which confidently paves the path to rediscover the soul? Any explanation?