How we look away from self-serving sectarianism and open our minds to introspective reflection

I learned from Urdu poetry that our lives are verdant valleys and impenetrable citadels of boundless hope and eternal love. I learned that life is the sum of our romantic interludes and joyous longings, of passionate pain and fulfilling suffering, of endearing pangs of anxiety and thrills of nervousness, of heart-wrenching ecstasy and soul-stirring despair. I was taught that it is for us to make the most of any situation. To eke out the best of every moment that we live, every breath we breathe. To turn dreams into reality and challenges into advantages. Loss, in its poetic metre, becomes an opportunity to love further, despite the one being loved having left us by. Death becomes an opportunity to realise moments, wants, fantasies, and hankerings that we couldn’t live while living.

Hindi connected me to the rich antiquity of our national past. It was the hipper sister to Sanskrit that I studied and recited and that connected me to sanatan dharma, the universal, eternal truth. I found in these most ancient verses the most dynamically young messaging anyone might hear even today. In these texts of the Hindus, I found acceptance and celebration of the world. These words from the mother-language Sanskrit freed me from myopic thoughts and bigotry that divide us, based on caste, creed, colour, religion, belief, gender and geography. Difficult ideals these, but I was lucky to have elders that chased them and taught me to put them to use over the arc of my own lifetime. In Urdu, I found a welcome partner to keep my journey of self-growth and discovery poetically rich with metaphoric allegory and richly nuanced with the sophistry of deeply felt and moving words.

Urdu gave me pride in the land of my birth. Its poetry bursting with layered emotions, fleshed out the glee, joy, melancholy, and heartbreak that came my way. Reading and writing Urdu was an adventure, one I wish I had spent more hours and years pursuing. How I wish I could do the kalam pooja like my now-deceased paternal uncle, retired chief of Border Security Force, Hargobind Prasad Bhatnagar, did. He would write all our names, stories, dreams and aspirations in Urdu, as my paternal grandfather had done before him. How delicious it was to be celebrating a Hindu festival and marking its rituals with Urdu lettering, which is indelibly stained into our family’s collective psyche and familial scroll.

Conscience is the bright light of enlightened thinking and gives us the guiding principles and the roadmap for our personal journeys to maturity — wiser years where we become one with richer versions of ourselves, where our faith won’t allow us to rest as we need to keep marching on. Where our Mecca is the deepest sanctum of our hearts, where we are not afraid to seek out newer and bigger storms. Where tsunami waves of disappointment do not overwhelm us with the flood of mindlessness, that derail us from the mindfulness that makes us one with the other, and in doing so one with self.

Dadi, my paternal grandmother, would rejoice in my singing the poem by Nasir Kazmi that includes the lines I open with. Here Kazmi looks into the mirror and wonders where he has disappeared. Where is the man with a visionary mind, with daring audacity of thought, word and deed? Where was that tireless professional with a mendicant’s devotion to the Hindu way of life, who loved and lived with the passion of a Sufi poet and celebrated the world’s plurality like a Sufi saint? The Muslim who drank at the Hindu tavern of enlightenment with thirst for knowledge, where was he? Where were the Hindus who were lucky to have been born to plurality of thought, action, and deed, who’d revered Sanskrit as children and thanked their stars for tutelage in it.

Over the years, the respect for this mother language of Hindustan, the one we worshiped Maa Bharati with, had opened them to introspective reflection, heartfelt mindfulness and left them hungry for meditative growth and wisdom. Why were these children of a nation, as old and blessed as India, now so lost to this oldest and most naturally pure way of being? Why had they suddenly gotten distracted by the noise of self-serving sectarianism that was hugely rewarding in the mindlessness of the present but fleeting and unfulfilling in the long run?

To become one with the world and the master, to be able to read, recite and understand the heft and depth of the Vedic texts that inspired Henry David Thoreau, who, in turn, was the muse for Mahatma Gandhi, it isn’t enough to practise the rituals of any one religion. One has to evolve daily and learn to live in the holistic spirit of sanatana dharma, become Hindu, and in doing so, become one with the world.