Notes

This is a picture of a sparrow. The sparrow died ten years ago. Sparrows are the most ubiquitous of all birds and that's why I love them. I love things that are commonplace, things that are easily found, easily lost. Sparrows are not remarkable to look at and one cannot be distinguished from another. But I remember the sparrow from ten years ago so clearly that it seems like yesterday. The image represents its absence. And also, the infinitude of the heavens and the cosmos of which it is a part now. I remember the bird from ten years ago because of specific things. Actually, it would be nearer the truth to say that I remember one particular morning. It was a bright autumn morning, much like what you can see in the picture. I woke up and as I opened the window, bright sunshine came streaming in. As I busied myself, then, doing this and that, there came a sparrow at the window and began to chirp. It sat there, hopped a bit, kept chirping for about 2 minutes before taking to its wings

What is Spirituality? We’ve all grown up listening to the platitude: “Health is wealth.” As we grow even older, it sounds more and more true. As we enter a new phase in the history of the world with the Covid-19, both the terms, namely ‘health’ and ‘wealth’, demand to be rethought, and brought into discussions about sustainable living. While thinking about the word wealth, I keep thinking about another line: “Some people are so poor, all they have is money.” When I googled this line, images of Bob Marley were thrown up, so perhaps it is attributed to him. What is the greatest wealth in the world? Religious teachings and holy scriptures tell us that it is love. But love is not one thing: there are different kinds and manifestations of love. In Ancient Greece, at least six variants of love were extant: gápe , éros , philía , philautia , storgē , and xenia . Philosophical inquiries into the nature of love are so diverse and large that it is not possible to talk about it in a monolithic,

It’s past midnight and it’s so dark that it doesn’t matter if your eyes are open or closed. There is a power cut and the only sounds that can be heard are sounds of madly gushing wind, of things breaking, things being uprooted. It’s one of the circumstances where things contrive to force you into a corner where you cannot think because the activity of thinking is mostly directed toward the future – and you cannot think of a future. You feel as if there’s a cyclone barreling in from all directions and ravaging not only Kolkata but the entire world. You cannot imagine a place that is not affected by the cyclone at the present moment. Lying on my back, with nothing to accompany me except unfamiliar sounds, with the total absence of human voices or sounds, I begin to think of my friends and family. I try to imagine their faces – the familiar expressions of joy, or anger or pain or mischief. But I cannot. There’s only one face that emerges out of the blazing darkness – the face of a ma

In one of the more aphoristic and lyrical passages from The Poetics of Space (1958), Gaston Bachelard reminds us: “The house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” Daydreams have something in common with metaphors because both involve the idea of transport, of going outside of where one is   (of course, with the subconscious assurance that one can trace one’s way back). A house where one lives, temporarily or permanently – a house that has been transformed, in some degree, into a home – suggests the centre from which such transportation is carried out, either physically or mentally or both. A house becomes a home not only when one starts inhabiting it for some duration of time but also, and more importantly, when one makes it the ontological centre of arrivals and departures. A home becomes less home-like when one is away from it for a very long period of time. Conversely, it may also lose its home-like character if one is