Back To Bliss: A Journey To Zero by Santosh Jha (pdf e book reader TXT) 📕

By Santosh Jha

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Copyright 2013 Santosh Jha

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License Note

Thank you for downloading this free eBook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyright property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Thanks for your support.

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Disclaimer: This work is an absolute fiction, an outcome of pure imagination of perceived situations; with the clean purpose of the navigation of a set of life ideas. All characters and their portrayal are fictitious, with no intentional resemblance to anyone dead or alive. Any semblance must be accepted as pure coincidence and inadvertent.

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FOREWORD:

There has to be a humble admittance – Any word, however well meant and well spelt, is a possible suspect of misinterpretation. There is a simple reason. People are in different consciousnesses and culturally as well as personally inclined to a specific value-summation of utilities. As a writer, it is a huge temptation to take liberties, with not only imaginations but also with the words, as against their common and popular use. Do kindly accept my latitude with language and personal coinages of words, as I understand, many times, they may not conform to popular usages. I share with you whatever is part of my consciousness. All wisdoms say, what stays with you is what sinks in. Wisdom is what we internalize. I share with you whatever I have internalized in my life. This may not be mainstream but may have utility in some meaningful way. I believe, as a reader, you shall enjoy this novelty and pleasant awkwardness of the writing.

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CHAPTER 1

I is what we never acquiesces to be. Equally, we is what I eventually is seldom happy to accept to stay as. They ensures, lives do not ever run out of the energy of variance. Evolution must stay immortal; everything else has to feel incumbent upon it to burn as the fuel of cosmic conflict. Objectivity’s encores do ensure; the symphony of the quantum of earthy relativity keeps playing to eternalize sanity of senses.

The innate exuberance of realisms may truly be in its randomized super-positioning. Still, objective pattern-building of energies and un-patterning of subjective sensitivities for personalized as well as collective utilities are fruition of life and living experiences.

It seems like a mystical revelation to be in the tempest of 3Cs – consciousness, cognition and causality. The infinite possibilities of these three, engendering immeasurable, often unfathomable chunks and slices of realisms, only ensure that validity of singularity of truth remains evolutionary in time-space journeys.

Journeys need always beckon us to newer destinations of consciousness. Still, it is bliss to be back – back to home.

The mighty force of Beas River water, pursuant to the lusty pull of tangent slopes towards lower plains and sensuous whispering of thick groves of woods on both sides, as if occasioning the baser instincts to sweep away whatever comes on its way, presented this conflict to him in its entirety and magnanimity. He knew; nature was the only true Guru as, it taught without the slightest semblance of the preposterous pride and presumptuous purposes of teaching and preaching. No Guru could be as brutally objective and equally overpowering as nature. That was why he was here.

Long ago, the river, as an individual, had outscored the patient obduracy of the colossus stature of the mountain chains of Himalayas; working single-mindedly in charting out its passage, cutting through the majestic establishment and finally, moving ahead, stamping the signature of its victory over them.

Mid-stream, Mayank Mishra was sitting on a rock and continuously watching a small pebble on the riverbed, which was holding still, probably for years, challenging the collective might of the river current. The river flow was steep, yet the depth of river water was shallow and the clarity of water allowed clear view. The green moss woven around the pebble was sure indicator that the pebble was steady there for years. A small fish parked itself around the pebble, wobbling at the moss, enacting the ballet of life. He was looking at the pebble for hours. Yesterday too, he did the same.

When Mayank arrived at Manali; a lovely small town in the laps of Himalayas, three days back, virtually fleeing away from the place he lived and worked, none of his friends, colleagues and bosses had any inkling of where he was and what he had in his mind. He first headed for higher peaks of the Himalayas, spending a whole day on top of a large chunk of rock, twelve kilometers away from the nearest congregation of population. He tried to jerk off what had happened that made him to run away from his city, two thousand kilometers away and take shelter in mountains in northern parts of India.

That happened sooner than he expected as the immensity of nature, the enormity and sheer novelty of his positioning amid the inimitable surroundings unsettled him. He could not handle the trepidation of nothingness and threat to mortal existentialism as he looked down at ten thousand feet deep gorges on one side and almost perpendicular rise of thousands of feet high mountains on the other. He rushed down and found a small dingy food stall beside the narrow road. He ate a large serving of hot and roughly edged noodles with lots of chili sauce to pamper his physical poise.

Half an hour later, he reached back to the top again, this time, a warm packet of Momos tucked in his pocket as his life support mechanism. After an hour, a sheep wandered near him. A boy with his herd was nearby. He offered a Momo to the sheep but it refused to eat and moved towards the steep slopes leading to the deep gorge. He could not dare peep down to see where it went. Soon, the rest of the herd followed it.

The shepherd boy came near him and sat near the Momo on the ground. He offered Momos to the boy and asked him did he fear living in such conditions? The boy took a Momo but said nothing. From his face, he could read that the boy had not understood the question. He felt embarrassed to have asked such a stupid question.

He looked up to the blue sky above. It was immaculate with not even a spot of cloud. It was mesmerizing. He kept his gaze and started to feel that he was actually rising high above and penetrating the depth of the blue stretch, which first looked to him only like a thin sheet of clothe. He felt his consciousness becoming light like a feather and surging above to sway past the thickness of the blue sky to transcend into a world beyond.

Suddenly, he felt something pulled him down and he found himself crashed to the rock top, where he was sitting moments before. The shepherd boy was pulling his hands and asking a Momo for his little sister, probably a year younger than him. The girl was looking at him and innocence was writ large on her face.

A strange feeling engulfed his consciousness. It was not happiness, not satisfaction, not thrill, not affection, not compassion, nothing which he had ever felt. It felt he had landed in some dimension, which could make him see not only the little boy and girl, but also himself from a distance. It was like he was watching a theatre where his character was in a role-play with the two kids. He saw, he took both the kids in his lap and made them eat Momos with his own hand. He saw the three chatting and laughing. He wished to clap in joy but could not find his hands. Two hours later, he was back in his hotel room and slept for hours; first time in the last one week.

A week back, it was that fateful night and the tumultuous dawn.

The mobile phone buzz stirred him in the bed but he ignored. Half asleep, he closed his eyes in desperation to extend the inevitable. Minutes later, the landline phone started ringing and he could no more carry his pretentious sleep. Still in the bed, he looked beyond the windows to ascertain the march of the morning and the faint light outside made him uneasy.

Instinctively, he moved out of his bed and dragged himself towards the door to look for the newspaper but it was not yet delivered. He felt relieved but quickly got irritated. Another bad start of the day, as usual, even when the dawn had not yet smiled on him and said good morning.

Life throws up a queer spectrum of desires. As you are born, everyone desires that you wake up, open your eyes and deliver a playful smile. But as a new born, you are mostly asleep as your blank head ensures that you do so and you do so because sleep comes natural to you. As you approach your death, all you want is a sound sleep and its natural prerequisite, the blank and unburdened mind. But, in between the two points, you do not sleep well and even do not want to sleep well as your desires make you awake.

It is probably this desire of humanity that has led to the coinage of the word good morning. People desire to attain a lot and as time is always running away, they wish to compromise on their sleep. That is why morning becomes so important in a person’s 24-hour journey of the day. Morning ends the ‘undesirable sleep’ and starts the chase of desires afresh. That is why in all civilizations, people say good morning to each other even when most people would admit that there is nothing so good about most of their mornings. Actually, there is only a valid good night as it invites the sleep and halts, at least temporarily, the desire chase.

Mayank Mishra was irritated. The phone calls so early in the morning had its clear signals. As he checked the missed incoming call on his cell phone, he got doubly sure that his irritation was not misplaced. The mobile phone screen flashed ‘missed call from editor’ and he instantly knew something was terribly wrong with the newspaper that hit the stands. As the News Editor, Mayank was practically responsible for selection, placement and display of all news stories and pictures accommodated in the newspaper he worked with.

Irritated he was, not because his morning sleep was disturbed, for he had adapted to sacrificing his sleep for his professional commitments. He was irritated as he could not see the morning newspapers to know if anything else went wrong, apart from what he already knew.

He expected the call from the editor and was even braced up to face his usual annoyance with something ‘wrong’ he had done. But a call so early in the morning made him a bit scared of some other error which he did not know of. He knew it well that once he got wind of the mistake, he would certainly devise his response.

The first important lesson he was taught as a journalist was how to pass the buck on others and save his skin as committing errors in the pressure deadline business like newspaper was a routine affair. Only later, he realized that almost in all jobs, the mastery of art was not in allowing your creativity a free flight to produce an innovative cut. It was rather in playing safe to avoid unproductive and wasteful cuts.

That’s why; the genius in all organized works around the world had devised production strategies that valued safety and conformity to fixed mechanical patterns more than anything. The standardization of production process is the established benchmark; liberty to