In the psychological and moral quagmire that I am bulldozed in to, it is not possible to think of a school as a benign paradise. With blade-like tongue our "partners" make it impossible to have any sort of delusion about what this work entails. They want to climb the Tiger's Nest, but do not want to walk, they want things that cannot be given at costs that cannot be sustained, they want luxury in everything but charity in education.

One must realise it sooner, but he does so only at midway in life. To know that "all work that is wrought under the sun is grievous". The only river that flows through this desert is one of caprice. Let us bathe in it. And cover ourselves with the slime and mucus of this refuse of an idea. Let us beat this institution and those who are foolish enough to work in it. Let us colour it with the red of rage and the brown of muck.

Let us tie their hands and rope their feet.
Now they must dance.
I like Bharatnatyam, I like Flamenco.
Do it.
You don’t dance very well, do you?
What? Your hands and feet?
What about them?
Tied?
So what?
I am entitled to a good dance.
Shame on you.

Which circle of Dante's inferno is this?
It is only the Prelude to Hell.

Welcome to selva oscura.

School, to me, must be a beautiful abstraction. Say, for example, like the paintings of Amadeo Preziosi. Look at this one:

It shows 19th century Constantinople. Its beauty, its reality (from his perspective). But it is shown through a representation of colours and forms that are significantly removed from the "real". Perhaps, I prefer this representation to what we might call "real".

School, above everything else, must present beauty of the world to kids. And this beauty will cost an arm and a leg, it will cost tears and shocks of awakening, it will lead to a dark forest, in the morning sun of life or in the midday noon. And that forest will be dark, so dark that the midday becomes midnight. A night with heavy air and damp smell. What can make one cross through this dark forest? What will come to our aid? Perhaps, the light of our own heart and hope for seeing beautiful things in the forest and the world.

I wonder if this stanza from Baudelaire's Invitation to the Voyage would do that to you - be a revelation or freeze you at the threshold of a revelation that never arrives.

Let me share the whole poem below:

My child, my sister, dream
How sweet all things would seem
Were we in that kind land to live together, And there love slow and long,
There love and die among
Those scenes that image you, that sumptuous weather.
Drowned suns that glimmer there Through cloud-dishevelled air
Move me with such a mystery as appears Within those other skies
Of your treacherous eyes
When I behold them shining through their tears.

There, there is nothing else but grace and measure,
Richness, quietness, and pleasure.

Furniture that wears
The lustre of the years
Softly would glow within our glowing chamber,
Flowers of rarest bloom
Proffering their perfume a

Mixed with the vague fragrances of amber;
Gold ceilings would there be,
Mirrors deep as the sea,
The walls all in an Eastern splendor hung — Nothing but should address
The soul’s loneliness,
Speaking her sweet and secret native tongue.

There, there is nothing else but grace and measure,
Richness, quietness, and pleasure.

See, sheltered from the swells
There in the still canals
Those drowsy ships that dream of sailing forth; It is to satisfy
Your least desire, they ply
Hither through all the waters of the earth. The sun at close of day
Clothes the fields of hay,
Then the canals, at last the town entire
In hyacinth and gold :
Slowly the land is rolled a
Sleepward under a sea of gentle fire.

There, there is nothing else but grace and measure,
Richness, quietness, and pleasure.

Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, Luxe, calme et volupté.
There is nothing else but grace and measure. Richness, quietness and pleasure.

This Richard Wilbur translation is beautiful. Calm and lyrical.

This is what Northstar is to me and I hope someday to you. A forest of symbols, of grace, of measure, of richness, of quietness, of pleasure.

And why do we dream?

Because we must, because we can, because we cannot help it.
What happens, every day, in the real world must be counter balanced by what we can imagine, by what we can build in our mind. Not for any useful purpose. But so that we can find a corner, in our soul, that is beautiful and gives us respite when the world takes a toll on us, as it inexorably will.

I go on this trail with other dreamers, companions of the night. We walk slowly, with Aldebaran on the zenith and the North Star to guide us. We walk in the dim light of lanterns. And we meet other wanderers, who join our caravanserai. We are the Journeyers to the East, we go in search of the light in the dead of the night.

The first walker I meet is Borges. It couldn't have been anyone else. There must be some of his acolytes behind him, they must join us too. Reid and Giovanni and Zamana. Many others whose names are kept hidden.

Now that I am already walking, I think I need not walk all the way. I can ride too. An antelope, perhaps a spotted deer. No, the tiger needs to eat too. May be bog deer. The kind I saw recently, escaping a tiger's hunt. Perhaps a horse with three legs. A mule rescued from ferrying invalids and kids. A centaur. A dragon called Smaug. Or an elephant. A little gnome or a giant Djinn. I will think of something.

Let us read a poem from a collection called El otro, el mismo - The Self and the Other. More accurately it can be translated as "The other one, the same one".

Who is this 'one', is that me? Is the other same as me? Is my dream your dream too? Or is yours mine?

As I spend more years with the children and with the adults of the school, I slowly dissolve into a new world, unbeknownst to me. The boundaries of my selfhood become more porous. I become amorphous. I must keep a kernel of me somewhere. And that must be a kernel of love and softness and kindness. Of the warm light of winter morning. Of those words, those mediocre words, that are still mine.

Let us return to this poem by Borges. Though he is made of mirrors and labyrinths and dark materials, he must join us because he loves. And here's what he wrote:

The useless dawn finds me in a deserted Street-
corner; I have outlived the night.
Nights are proud waves: darkblue topheavy
waves laden with all hues of deep spoil, laden
with things unlikely and desirable.
Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and re-
fusals, of things half given away, half with-
held, of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights
act that way, I tell you.
The surge, that night, left me the customary shreds
and odd ends: some hated friends to chat with,
music for dreams, and the smoking of bitter
ashes. The things my hungry heart has no use for.
The big wave brought you.
Words, any words, your laughter; and you so
lazily and incessantly beautiful. We talked
and you have forgotten the words.
The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted
street of my city.
Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to
make your name, the lilt of your laughter:
these are the illustrious toys you have left me.
I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them, I
find them; I tell them to the few stray dogs
and to the few stray stars of the dawn.
Your dark rich life . . .
I must get at you, somehow: I put away those
illustrious toys you have left me, I want your
hidden look, your real smile—that lonely,
mocking smile your cool mirror knows.

Our life in school is bound only by love, of various kinds, mostly of the selfless kind. How we must continue, despite every incentive to stop.

That yellow.
Golden yellow of the morning sun
Amber yellow, that pure chroma, that nostalgia of headlights of old cars
Safety yellow of our school bus
Imperial yellow of Gustav Klimt and the fifth emperor of the Ming dynasty
Moccasin yellow of the worn out leather shoes
Saffron yellow of the bounty of mountains of Kashmir
Mustard yellow of the Eucalyptus lined fields of Northern India
Jasmine yellow, the colour of that fragrance of childhood
Kesar yellow of the Mangoes of Raga that trace direct lineage to heaven
Sunset yellow of the momentarily dying sun
Sunglow yellow of the Sal trees in forests, when sunlight breaches canopies.
And
Northstar yellow
The colour of the days of our lives
Drenched in Northstar yellow
I dream of all colours.

10 years of Northstar
A decade of discovering my Svabhava
A century of subjective time, of collective lives
A millennium of despair and exaltation and rapture and damnation and salvation.

S. Radhakrishans himself said, "Again and again... when traditionally accepted beliefs become inadequate, nay false, on account of changed times, and the age grows out of patience with them, the insight of a new teacher, a Buddha or a Mahāvira, a Vyāsa or a Śaṁkara supervenes.... when at the summons of the spirit's breath, blowing where it listeth and coming whence no one knows, the soul of man makes a fresh start and goes forth on a new venture.."

Chesterton would say that every remedy is a desperate remedy, every cure is a miraculous cure. In the same vein every walk is a pilgrimage and every line a poetry and every utterance a song. So I would think that every teacher is a potential Buddha and Mahāvira. Only if that potential is accepted, not the actual realisation, only the possibility, then we might have a chance, a very small one, to leave the world better than we found it.

A room in my school is named "The Sunrise Hymn". Here is a poem for that and for teachers.

A hymn to the sun
A hymn to the rising
To the birds who sing
Upon the east-rising
To the leaves of the Saman
Waking up, uprising.

A hymn of congregation
A hymn of reflection
A hymn of contemplation
A hymn of meditation
A hymn of insurrection.

A word game of creating portmanteaus of Greek origin words suffixed with phobia. An image game of finding these phobias in imaginary tales.

We live our lives in fear or in search of fear. We look for them in other people and in stories about other people. DSM-5*, the scripture in which these fearfuls find their code of conduct, tells us of these wretched creatures who have a "marked fear or anxiety about a specific object or situation" and that "the phobic object or situation is actively avoided or endured with intense fear or anxiety."

Let us turn to the first of these - Alice, the one in wonderland. What do we see in Alice? What does she fear?

Coulrophobia - the fear of clowns, or perhaps, Oneirophobia - the fear of dreams.

Our second fearful friend is actually in a group and has a shared phobia. The hobbit party, having been instructed by Gandalf to reach the Prancing Pony, in the sleepy town of Bree. What do these hobbits fear?

Anthropophobia - the fear of other people.

The last of our friends is Joseph Knetch from the Glass Bead Game. Having lived an austere life in the "order of intellectuals" at Waldzell in Castalia, what does our friend come to fear? What does any thinking man fear?

Autophobia, of course.

He fears himself more than anything. The possibilities of other fears open up, engulfing and colouring everything that one encounters.

*Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)

I was travelling to Konya in late winter on a clear morning. The fields on the sides of the road were light brown. And far off on the horizon, a little house, barely visible. Perhaps, the house of the farmer tending to these fields.

I took the image of the semazen (in the cover) during a sublime performance in a caravanserai.

It takes 2 hours and 5 stories to reach the "village-at-no-place". Some of these stories are told out loud, while some play out in your mind. The words being told mingle with the stories being made up. The largest small town near the village I just mentioned above (which you've probably never heard of) is Gondal (which you've probably heard of) and smallest large town near the said village is Vasavada (which you've probably never heard of either).

Gondal has one large road cutting through the town which is lined with majestic old Banyan trees. I have never seen a road lined with such beautiful grand old Banyans. As with all that is sublime, the locals probably don't find it worthy of attention anymore. Small towns have big stories shared amongst the townsmen. Probably to get a feel of the grandiose. A particularly scandalous story involves a prominent temple, a riverside land, and murders. Land grabbing is of universal interest. An aside question, why is the rich temple the centre of the town life? A public space owned by quasi public holdings, emanating the virtues of public space while harbouring demons in private inner sanctums.

After a particularly abundant monsoon, the check dams are full and the Gando Baval (Prosopis juliflora) shows what it is capable of. This mesquite invasion is so commonplace that this foreign species is a part of the normative landscape. When I was young, I used to wonder why this ugly looking tree is so abundant and grows where nothing else grows? Indigenous species can't compete with this species and are duly "rooted" out. So many parallels with today's world. Anyway, I'm digressing.

You know you've arrived at the "village-at-no-place". There is a sangam (confluence) of open gutters. That must be the village square. Gutters running crisscross mimicking the madness of the electric lines above.

It’s a strange world, rural hinterlands of India. Not too far from the unliveable madness of the city, lies the unbearable quietude of a village. Modernity gave a passing visit to the village. It gave all its discontents to the village and left without saying a word. The conglomerate reached where the collective could not. Here in the derelict streets you can find a bottle of coke but no covered sewer lines. You can find snacks from global brands and also of sparsely trustworthy local ones, but not a street without at least five varieties of animal excrement.

But the thing that subtly but surely leaves you with a sense of defeat is the unbearable silence of a sunny afternoon. A boy sitting in an unlit shop selling snacks, waving off flies once in a while. An old lady walking on a deserted street which has nothing on the other side for her. Old men sitting under a tree, not talking, just waiting.

Many have left these villages. They’ve gone to the towns close by or cities a little further away. Having lived the city life, do they wonder that the trade was perhaps a not a good one after all?