Hwa-byung will make you yell at your children fight with your family go all red in the face leap from your chair shaking knuckled fists.
This rising heart fire takes hold of you: poor and uneducated a stuck-at-home wife.
Hwa-byung will ruin your eating and sleeping grinding on old grudges seeping anger in rages too long suppressed.
The rising heart fire takes hold of men too: frustrated, mortified bad jobs with bad bosses who don’t show respect who reek of injustice until you smolder inside.
Hwa-byung is Korean for a mental disorder that may afflict anyone who withholds their anger that builds in intensity burns its way out bursts through walls tears down framing explodes like a bomb
hollowing you out in ways you don’t expect.
NOTE: Once classified under depressive disorders, hwa-byung is a culture-bound condition found only in Korea. It was thought to be limited to disgruntled housewives with passive husbands and overbearing in-laws. It is now being diagnosed in male employees who are full of anxiety, nihilistic ideas, and regret about their lives.
No Joke
On lovely Lake Victoria on the border with Uganda three female students at a missionary boarding school began to laugh and laugh
and they couldn’t stop and they didn’t stop and more students joined in and they couldn’t study and they couldn’t eat and they couldn’t sleep and they couldn’t do anything but laugh, laugh ’til it hurt ’til they were in pain and crying between laughing jags so the school closed down.
When school opened back up the laughing started back up so the school closed down.
Some girls arrived home in their small rural villages still laughing and laughing and village girls laughed too some boys, some adults and it spread, and spread to more than 200 people laughing and laughing for more than a year
and the experts blamed the emotional dissonance of a radical cultural shift from tribal communities to a modern way of life.
Laughter is said to be the best of all medicines but must always be taken in a moderate dose.
NOTE: The laughter epidemic was a mass psychogenic event that occurred in Tanganyika in 1962, soon after the country achieved independence. Schoolgirls brought the illness home to their villages and it spread wildly before disappearing.
The country is now known as Tanzania.
The Witches of Leroy
A pretty cheerleader fell down and that’s how it all began in the upstate New York town that invented jiggly Jell-O.
She screamed and flailed about cursing as if possessed cuss words she’d never say… she was not that kind of girl.
Her best friend suddenly ticced convulsing, crazed, she ran wild and sixteen other girls in town swearing, thrashing, crashing got rushed to the hospital their parents hysterical the ER in chaos the nurses, doctors puzzled as testing found no cause.
A rumor began to circulate about a toxic spill from a train derailment but testing showed no toxins on the high school grounds.
Erin Brockovich was invited to speak and attract the media declaring a chemical poisoning with opinion taken as fact.
But why only teenage girls? From chemicals miles away? Spilled four decades prior? Before the girls were born?
Time slid by as it always does the parents demanding answers accountability and recourse long after their girls recovered left for college and life away from the town that created Jell-O.
NOTE: Mass outbreaks of psychogenic illnesses have occurred in schools in many parts of the world. These events used to happen in convents and were once deemed satanic. Religious and shamanic interventions were employed when illnesses were medically inexplicable.
In the modern world, mass anxiety hysteria (acting crazy) and mass motor hysteria (sleeping sickness or convulsions) are social phenomena without identified physical pathology. Outbreaks are usually limited to the young and are believed to be triggered by issues in the community: emerging sexuality amidst social repression, poverty, dislocation, hopelessness.
(DOB 07/06/1973) is a passionate Indian Author-cum- bilingual poet while a tremendous lecturer of English by profession in the Ganjam district of Odisha.He is an accomplished source of inspiration for young generation of India .His free verse on Romantic and melancholic poems appreciated by everyone. He belongs to a small typical village Nandiagada of Ganjam District,the state of Odisha.After schooling he studied intermediate and Graduated In Kabisurjya Baladev vigyan Mahavidyalaya then M A in English from Berhampur University PhD in language and literature and D.litt from Colombian poetic house from South America.
He promotes his specific writings around the world literature and trades with multiple stems that are related to current issues based on his observation and experiences that needs urgent attention. He is an award-winning writer who has achieved various laurels from the circle of writing worldwide. His free verse poems not only inspires young readers but also the ready of current time. His poetic symbol is right now inspiring others, some of which are appreciated by laurels of India and across the world. Many of his poems have been translated in different Indian languages and earned global appreciation. Lots of well wishes for his upcoming writings and success in the future. He is an award-winning poet and author of many best-selling books.
Recently he has been awarded Rabindra nath Tagore and Gujarat Sahitya Academy for the year 2022 from Motivational Strips. Also a gold medal from the World Union of Poets in France & winner Of Rahim Karim’s world literary prize for 2023.The government of Odisha’s Higher Education Department appointed him as a president to the governing body of Padmashree Dr Ghanashyam Mishra Sanskrit Degree College, Kabisurjyanagar. He’s the winner of “HYPERPOEM ” GUINNESS WORLD RECORD 2023. Recently he was awarded, at the SABDA literary Festival at Assam, the highest literary honour from Peru’s Contributing World Literature 2024, the Prestigious Cesar Vallejo Award 2024, the Highest literary honour in Peru. He’s the director of teh Samrat Educational Charitable Trust in Berhampur, Ganjam, Odisha.
Vicedomini of the World Union of Poets for Italy.
Completed 249 Epistolary Poems with Kristy Raines of the USA.
Books.
1.Psalm of the Soul.
2. Rise of New Dawn.
3. Secret Of Torment.
4. Everything I Never Told You.
5.Vision Of Life National Library Kolkata.
6.100 Shadows of Dreams.
7.Timeless Anguish.
8.Voice of Silence.
9. I Cross my Heart from East to West. Epistolary Poetry with Kristy Raines
Women’s Education in Uzbekistan: Opportunities and the Path to Progress
Since gaining independence, Uzbekistan has undertaken major reforms in the field of education. In particular, significant opportunities have been created for women to gain knowledge and acquire professional skills. This is because one of the key factors in societal development is women’s literacy and their active participation in science, culture, and the economy.
Today, thousands of girls across Uzbekistan have the opportunity to study at higher educational institutions. Government-funded scholarships play a vital role in supporting them on this journey. These efforts are part of wide-ranging reforms aimed at strengthening the role of women in society and unlocking their full potential.
Scholarships and Quotas for Women
Special benefits and programs have been introduced for girls seeking education in Uzbekistan. Currently:
Separate quotas are allocated for female students admitted under state scholarships.
Through the “Women’s Register,” talented but financially disadvantaged girls receive assistance to pay their tuition fees.
Under the “Iron Register” and “Youth Register” programs, special privileges are provided to support girls’ education.
Presidential scholarships and other grants are awarded to encourage the academic achievements of outstanding young women.
International scholarships and global education programs are also making it possible for girls to study abroad.
Additionally, the number of vocational training centers for girls has increased in recent years, where they are trained in modern professions. The growing number of skilled women in fields such as IT, engineering, and business is a clear indication of this progress.
Progress in Girls’ Education
Currently, a significant proportion of students in higher education institutions are women. Across the country, many women are becoming leading specialists—not only in education but also in entrepreneurship, science, and social spheres.
In particular, recent years have seen:
A growing interest among girls in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields.
The establishment of business incubators and entrepreneurship development centers specifically for women.
Successful participation of Uzbek girls in various international grant programs.
Thanks to the reforms being implemented by our government, young women are now developing into competitive professionals not only within the country but also on a global scale.
Peace – The Foundation of Independent Learning
Today, young people in Uzbekistan have the opportunity to pursue knowledge freely in a peaceful and independent country. This serves as a solid foundation and a confident step toward a bright future.
In contrast, we see thousands of young people around the world being deprived of education due to wars, instability, and conflicts. In Uzbekistan, however, great attention is paid to education, and favorable conditions are created for the youth. As a result, our girls are realizing their potential in science, technology, culture, and various other fields.
Therefore, today’s youth—especially young women—must set high goals and make full use of the educational opportunities available to them. Because we, the youth of Uzbekistan, are learning with confidence in a peaceful nation and a promising tomorrow!
Nozima Ziyodilloyeva
Student of Uzbekistan State World Languages University
From the soul, from the heart, not from any face that perceives itself with courage
but one that does so with cowardice.
White on black, black on white, it does not matter, we are all failures,
floating, falling, feeling the fresh hell that we inflict unto ourselves.
I am not a cynic, I am a sinner, and sin is simply the consequence of a complex mind not yet whitewashed by the weight of their words has been freed by the burden
of pure reason.
Dear Diary, I am beginning to find that in fact I was made to be broken
For somehow I cannot look in an unfractured mirror without seeing a fractured face staring back at me, and why fractured if not with reason, why fractured if not so I may one day stitch my wounds again?
So, holy conqueror, I invite you.
I invite you to rise from the perch which they tell me you hold in the heavens
And show unto me your true face,
And once you have done so you may tear me apart, limb from limb,
For I myself am divine and seem to threaten the power you hold.
Wide is your reach, Heavenly Father,
Yet shallow is the depth of your teachings, soulless is the nature of your sermons, and what they tell me is clean and holy I have found to be cursed and reeking of filth.
Let these words be my last if their nature incites your rage
And merely my most meaningless if the deity unto which I speak them has no ears to hear, as I believe He does not.
He has turned a blind eye to the wasted earth from which he has left his children to feed,
And furthermore so ancient and archaic is he
That he has gone deaf,
Deaf to the cries and to the pleas so oft spoken from dry and dirt-coated lungs
To fix this charred and barren wasteland
And restore it to the glory which it once held but no longer mirrors.
So this is my promise,
My solemn oath unto those whom Thou hath so wrongly forsaken,
Delivered in Thy place but not in Thy name.
I shall take up arms and conquer.
I shall build an army of the most unorthodox ideals yours knows for mine knows
no bounds, no bonds, no inhibitions and no prohibitions.
No longer will I look upon my own face with cowardice –
I will look upon my face with courage and yours with disgust and disdain
For it now falls to me and those whose love truly is unconditional
And those who do as they preach
And those who preach as they do
And those whose behaviors do not sorely contradict their beliefs
To take up our arms
And bring this world the holy water
Or perhaps the unholy water
Which it so desperately needs to rebuild.
No longer will I look upon my own face with cowardice –
I will look upon my face with courage and yours with disgust and disdain
Shredding his sunlit vestments, Priest’s weight silenced the equal woman. Undisciplined eyes sheathe me— a fury, charred on his pristine swords.
Deep down the abyss among nights, I wrench my self-portrait— Straddling unfamiliar blades, the realm sears my throat, and my lungs blister right to left.
My unbuttoned mouth swallows fuses from the organs of men— muffled, skinned, teeth dyed; perished, rising, fangs lit.
Beneath Damoclean pikes— each one signifying revenge. A disobedient woman, unworthy of tender touch— her infant-bloom still sealed beneath Rousseau’s tears.
They do not know this tiger-guiding woman. Fiercer than wolves through salt water, my eyes—two felines tarring raw light— He sees the afterbirth at the end of his lecture as I clutch my hip-round of thoughts.
Offering me half the sky after razing the one
I now return to Lord. Thighs vise as we roar through a venomous climax. Swords lower as the rain strikes through the force of May.
Thunder slips me from the virgin world. I swallow as if I never swallowed a man. You stand among storms —more effigial than any god. Here, goblets rise at the cross reversed.
Each wrist rises, declaring a wine coil bled from your heart, threading straight into my rib. Ha!
Spring wind ascends, —splitting me widely awake. A gluttony resurrects, a virgin undone and again—
REMADE.
Echo II: Frankenstein’s spring
Ice shatters its wintry silence. Swarthy hands—once stitched— motor themselves to sight, raving by March’s final breath toward April’s promise. Swallows slice returning paths through the thawing sky.
Green yawns from Earth’s dark mouth, my body mirroring her restoration: Spring’s underbelly upturned, while an amber glow satiates the polar bear’s hunger. In fur that held December’s darkness, sunlight reflects the sky’s refusal of night.
Illumination penetrates like truth: hillside and mosses couple among wetting rocks; frogs mount their hunts across waters freed from ice. But even in renewal, Death persists: monarch butterfly wings tweezed mid-flutter, the deer’s neck snapped in wolf’s jaws,
beggar’s rocking hands trampled in Mayfair, daffodils unfurling between crushed bones and gold. While jungle creeds drum through survival’s hierarchy, labours’ palms rekindle the drowned sky.
Have we forgotten the passion Winter set ablaze? My body once dedicated as Christmas Solstice,
now binds Betelgeuse to Venus across the horizon’s clearing dome.
Did we crown the butcher and betray the jingled vows? Did we kneel like the red star towards love when Santa vanished in the hearth?
Swells from a distance—starmounds quicken in unrest—rise through paint-oil gleam, inciting sparks from Earth’s own burning door. How sorrowful to forget the constellation’s inferno that trudged through a vast night, their beckoning thin as woman’s sigh when newborn tears press against the womb that once sheltered.
Beneath black palls, Fear crawls: yet glazed eyes pump first blood through roots— juvenile Frankenstein awakening. We ask for nothing better than a spadix-like thrust from corpse flower’s wound, slicing through the tendon that no longer feels.
Dawn undresses seed from shell, and Earth unwinds her clock— not a second more, not a day less.
Water returns to water. In the bluing luminescence, faces buried
by last season’s sickle shield my sleet-rent mouth while I await youthful lips beneath yellowed marshland— breathing, at last, the fresh world April promised
and I… reel alone.
Echo III: On the shores we lived
In woods where history hangs itself, laments are sung for the chased skulls— each a foreign season’s anthem, even as they were broken in two themselves. The collapsed libraries and lovers’ bridge gutted the Sava River— the mirror of Sarajevo’s wounds.1
How far does hunger drive flesh across borders?
Waves return wearing feathers of the condemned. Seagull wings command tides that swallowed my first home. I, ransacked, kneel while only the dead giggle at their release;
torch half-bare against icons gone cold in the blitz while the spring winds lord over votive racks, counterfeiting peace that was never mine nor yours. Steamboat hulls and exposed fish ribs testify against empires of deception, splitting history’s amnesia awake.
I stand shrouded in that shiver that follows bombardment— water carrying us all, merciless as governments, toward shores that reject our names. Certainty arrives unwelcome as midnight deportation—
neck of movements snapped by yellow boundaries, the twilight of our homeland forced down our tongues. They promised us a land of honey and milk;
as diplomas vanish at customs, and CVs rot in mailboxes.
They seduced us with wages in car wash’s suds, rockstar’s fingerprints orphaned from guitar chords and drum’s lambskin. They wheedled away our rights to leave from contracts, dreams of dancers and singers turned wannabes beneath Soho’s red lights.
Tiny, tiny…, far away from the wonderland of bow-tied gentlemen and English tea. Faint… faint… breathing small and counting the untidy tips in the folds of whipped breasts. The beggar’s hands, cauterized by childhood’s exploding fuse,
deafened us from omens whistling through bullet casings. Dozens of hatchlings canned in shells watch mothers wade into the machine-gunned distance. Their children—jagged languages— face the Black Sea’s cargoes salivated by traffickers of breath and skins.
They whisper, thin as rationed bread: “In March, swallows will carve us into petitions on camera-ready banners. In May, peace doves will harvest our skulls for museum’s sorrow.
When we all lie alone beneath this river’s militarized belt, our blood will finally transmute into moribund blue—
connecting soils of countless unremembered cities beneath a single bank that unites all our scattered bones.”
Echo IV: Knotting Hands Under the Red Sky
Red rages rupture—a birth scream with no mother— existence a slit throat under seagulls hovering like scalp-white mourners.
Hair and fire snarl— crooning ghoulish requiem through the gust’s sudden tug.
Speech drowns in its own soliloquy: blackened ribbons crystallize on the survivor’s cheeks.
Bones in gloves, bluing fists, nails preening through handcuff rust.
The hands know what the mouth won’t. Stone lions’ neck serrated by two million fingers’ knots.
This is how I heave myself out: Change this. Change that. Don’t look back— or it drags you down, ankle-first, into the gullet of the shuckled shore:
Beating death on their own breasts, three borders sing in C minor under a mountain’s whole rest.2
2 Whole Rest: In musical notation, a whole rest is a silence lasting the duration of an entire measure. It is visually represented as a small rectangle hanging from the second line of the staff. In poetic terms, it can suggest a full pause—a complete suspension of sound, breath, or motion.
Echo V: Red Beacons
Waves shudder—flee from shore’s dominion. Salt voices whine when I ride the mirror of my reflection. Night’s sharp anchor holds while fire ruffles water; Dreams sob crimson through swamps of endless vision.
Across my untidy skin, mothers’ breasts were steadfast— Flanking a silver of silence with their immovable tenets. The feelings elders lack, carried forward by a whirlwind And lording about lands; the barren eternity That draws back the sky—afraid of its cadence.
Solstices wheel wild on butterfly wings! A kaleidoscope Writhed in greenhouse glass, while the pale moon—hermit Drained in dust—watches red beacons spin: Too hot for earth, they fall, bleeding a colour of thunderous years Into my waiting veins—
Pulse rising from the inner sea; shanks thinning beneath pants. How many times has mortal clay rotted in terrible silence? Passion greets desolate solitude like mirror-faces On their nocturnal tasks—watching animals relish Their breath and death at whistles before storms.
Eye to eye, the borders churn through waves—no rest in light or wind! Red beacons burn eternal; moving water whispers to graying ears: “There you are on the lighthouse—small hands, small reach, against what sky and sea have always been.” But this flesh-cage I consecrate, blazing, until mountains Bow their lava crowns to the same brief fire.
Let the cosmos witness the dusk and dawn I kindle
That make all exiles sacred, equal and glad In the wonderful Divine: All flesh a temple, all darkness a doorway To light that owes no century—knows no time.
Echo VI: Fell in love with the alpha wolf
Who would have known—a man’s violence, the strike from the love of your life, Could spare the woman’s need for the presence of a proper shaman, the bells and sages from the nature’s rogue, to enter into a trance.
The fire the matriarch refused to teach coming not from distrust, But a glimpse she saw through: Another woman, mistook a wolf’s fangs in a deer’s throat, A man’s fingers into a smuggler’s eyes, and a gun raised on all the unfairness’s skull— As her fire because he turned and whispered: here, their apologies and flesh are your feast.
What about the law of the world that protects millions of both the good and the damned? What about the order of yourself that once brought you to reclaim all the fairness?
Gone. You became the exhausted Prometheus who put hope on the hawk and Zeus Who were supposed to prey on his liver and soul.
But— How the hell did you end up here?
You have seen the ugly face of the world at an age too tender to even know it’s beautiful.
Parents wrapped you in burlap and sold you to the Bluebeards— for not being a son.
The policewoman who saved you, sent you to sanctuary, but never once showed her face—never once anchored who you are.
Then, hand to hand. From home to home. Foster parents visiting your room, shaking their heads: “We are not responsible for her trauma.”
You saw love in the steam rose through rice—a wife made for her husband without his thank you, without his eyes lifting from his phone.
A husband came home carrying too much alcohol, too many cigarettes, but praised for not carrying another woman’s perfume on his collar.
The Zhongkao teacher cracked your stepsister’s canvas in half for sleeping in math class.3 And you understood: this is what love should look like.
Women bleed. Men feed.
Friends—called distractions before even being made.
Boys—entitled to belittle you until you had to throw a dagger at their skulls.
Is that a lesson they teach? A decree to stop you from finding yourself?
Among all the predators in life, you were left with no choice but to love the king of them all.
By the moment he liberated you through palms that lifted your hips— blood bled from others poured into your mouth like communion wine.
But the tingles you felt in your hips—were not electricity. The rumble from his mouth was thunder before the lightning struck.
Still you clung to the bruised color of the sky—so desperately.
For the luck you had—swirling Baileys he bought in his bedroom, watching rain hammer the windows like fists.
Shivering at his sublime. His rage. The necks he snapped unashamedly— in front of you and for you, like gifts.
3 Zhongkao is China’s high school entrance exam, a nationwide academic test taken by students at the end of middle school to determine placement in secondary education. It is intensely competitive and often shapes a student’s future trajectory.
And his plea for love made you almost forget his belt was meant to strike you—
until his hand landed on your throat, his belt on the shoulder he once fed his own blood to like a sacrament.
You were once again forced to confront all the pieces you evaded before meeting him.
In a system that never asked you to heal. Never spared punishment when you tried to.
And made you fall in love the moment a man appeared to take care of your evasion.
Because that’s the only option you are given— so long as it doesn’t compromise their kingdom.
So that the fire of your own—won’t burn their empire down.
Author’s note
I execute literary devices in two very different classrooms. The first was Mandarin, where meaning ripples under the surface and readers are trusted to swim toward it themselves. Poetry was not encouraged there—our exam rooms preferred formulas to metaphors—so a poem had to live in the margins of notebooks, in whispers after lights-out.
The second classroom was English, which I entered at eighteen when I left China for London. English came with its own gatekeepers: libraries full of classics, critics ready to decide what counted as “literature,” quick to stop at the first layer of a line. Between those two worlds I have spent years running— from place to place, from one set of rules to another—looking for a page wide enough to hold both silences and storms.
If these six Echoes feel restless, that is why.
Akhmatova’s sorrow and Lermontov’s thunder travel with me. From Akhmatova I borrowed restraint: her way of hiding whole seas of grief inside a single tide-line. From Lermontov I borrowed motion: the urge to pace a frontier even while the sky is cracking open. Their voices taught me that a poem can stand absolutely still and still feel like a journey, that it can whisper and still shake stone.
You will meet that balance in Echo I, where the first woman does not fall but walks away; in Echo III, where a war-scarred river refuses every border drawn across it; and in Echo IV, where a human chain of protest hums with contained fire. Even the red beacon of Echo V carries both lessons: it burns in place, yet its light travels farther than any fleeing ship.
Nature appears as a teacher too. An English Dot rabbit, a red signal light on the sea, the quiet orbit of a whole rest in music—all remind me that endurance can be tender, that flight can be faithful, and that silence is often the strongest note.
So these poems speak in two tongues at once. They keep the Mandarin habit of suggestion—letting objects do the feeling—and they lean into the English hunger for direct address. Between them, I hope, stretches a common ground where a reader may pause, listen, and choose their own depths.
Thank you for sharing the path. If the poems leave you with a sense of movement held inside stillness, of fire banked beneath calm, then Akhmatova, Lermontov, and every hurried mile between languages have done their work.
1 Refers to the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–1996), the longest siege in modern history during the Bosnian War, marked by relentless shelling, sniper attacks, and civilian suffering.
the derkes sea, hard no sound piece or clam to found
coul and tamoil spinning round
from blow light biging to raise.
I was lost but returned with strength.
Found a fact of life fill truth in lose.
Asma’u Sulaiman is a poet from Gombe State, Nigeria. I lives with my brothers and sisters in a close-knit family rooted in love and culture. My father, Sulaiman Ibrahim, and mother, Aishatu Sule, have been strong influences in my life. I finds inspiration in my surroundings and expresses my thoughts, dreams, and values through poetry. With a voice both humble and reflective, I uses my writing to explore themes of identity, hope, and purpose. My work reflects a deep sense of awareness and a passion for storytelling.
There are so many things which turn irrelevant when they become outdated, and are, therefore, dusted out. It is very important for every young man to decide what is of relevance and what has lost it. Prioritizing is a very professional game in the present milieu, and even where things seem to be irrelevant, we make a list of the irrelevant, the more irrelevant and the most irrelevant. The most irrelevant things are considered obsolete, and then consigned to the dustbin. Our minds too have a trash box where we place most of the things which are not required in our daily transactions. Sometimes, when we have time, we sit and delete them.
The Relevantia
What is important for this society and, therefore, relevant? For a common man, the essential issues have often been associated with his living, his survival. When survival is assured, he starts thinking of living beautifully. Aesthetics comes in, when he has free time to think for himself. The third stage which often does not come in the case of majority of people [because the second phase draws on too long] is thinking dutifully. The second phase was the phase of self-decoration, self- enjoyment and self-improvement. In majority of cases, things stop here.
In fact, in case of millions of people, things stop with gaining a capability to make both ends meet. If they have shelter, a wife, a few kids, and work, they are satisfied. They can lead a life of eighty years without thinking a word about others. Religion plays a great role in keeping them subdued, and under fear of the gods, and it makes them do some good deeds also. If they do not think too much, it gives them a coarse happiness too. We can think of those also, who are born in torn families now a days, who do not have a home, who do not have siblings, who do not have complete set of parents, and who do not own a home [living on rent in flats] which means they have no permanent affiliation with any place. They belong to no village, no city, such is this age of transition and trans-movement. Those who are denied these basic certainties of life, often turn loose, and start their forays into the underworld. There is no one to check them. Parents can stop them, but parents, who are victims of this ‘surplus economy’ which denies them essential services, themselves indulge in wrongful deeds, and have no moral authority to stop their kids when they go astray.
What is relevant for the lowest strata? Food and a poisoned mind, against those who have everything. Those who can manage these foundational necessities, have a little bit time at their disposal, in which they try to make their living aesthetically fulfilling. Education, art, culture lend beauty and charm to people who have modest means, coupled with a hazy understanding of what they have and what they have lost. These people are thinking beautifully, and all their efforts are centred at their self.
Thinking Dutifully
The third phase sets in when people start thinking dutifully. If seventy percent people belong to the first category, twenty percent to the second, then only ten percent people are those who belong to the third category, the people who think dutifully. These are the people who have transcended the limiting boundaries of knowledge, and realized their interconnection with the superior forces of creation, which are benefic to all creation including animals, birds, and rivers, winds and mountains.
Darkness
These people know what is darkness. When the light has gone, and you are running for a matchstick, it is not darkness. Darkness is the absence of light. Even when you can see, still there are things which you do not see. This is darkness. If you see injustice before your eyes, and you move forward, this is a cryptic case of darkness. We have within us vast reserves of darkness. Education, knowledge, and all training which makes us insensitive to the created universe, add to the universal darkness.
If we look closely at ourselves, we will see how many of us are living, growing and dying in darkness. Light belongs to the Buddha. Light means you know what is where. If you become aware of your priorities, if you know what is necessary and what is unnecessary, you have light. Knowledge should have this property, but alas! Knowledge, as it is the preferred domain of the Devil, does not let us pass into the domain of light. It closes our mind to impulses which are divine in origin.
The Relevant and the Irrelevant
The milieu in which we are living is not the making of one day or of one person. Year after year, decade after decade, country after country, and leader after leader, have contributed to this collective blindness of human race to the impulses and urges which are divine. Knowledge, books, libraries and teachers are used to check all the sources of inspiration so that the reserves of natural wisdom among the students remain untapped, and ultimately go dry. Finally, we have to decide what is relevant for this milieu which has turned absolutely irreverent to the things which still have divinity around them. Here is a list of the irrelevancies which our young men can skip without hurting their career prospects. Tick out Parents. Tick out Teachers. Respecting parents or being obedient to them, tick it out. Knowledge is the most preferred item on the agenda. Wisdom, a dangerous proposition. Tick it off. Goodness, Honesty, Integrity – all apply brakes on your speed. Tick them out. Remember, this world basks in the glory of power, success, wealth and fame. Good bye to all great traditions of the past which believed in humanity, human dignity, human goodness, and godliness. If you consider yourself a good man, there is fear of your son or daughter moving you in the trash box. Beware!
Dr. Jernail Singh Anand, [the Seneca, Charter of Morava, Franz Kafka and Maxim Gorky award and Signs Peace Award Laureate, with an opus of 180 books, whose name adorns the Poets’ Rock in Serbia]] is a towering literary figure whose work embodies a rare fusion of creativity, intellect, and moral vision.
