Journalism of Courage
The God who lived in our conscience
Janmashtami, memory, and the childhood lesson that Krishna consciousness is not about who we worship, but how we live with one another.
This year, Janmashtami came wrapped in remembrance (Iluustrated by Suvir Saran)
“Chhotee chhotee gavve, chhote chhote gwal,
Chhote se hamre Madan Gopal…”
Chhote se hamre Madan Gopal…”
There are songs that we remember.
And then there are songs that remember us.
And then there are songs that remember us.
They wait somewhere beneath the noise of adulthood—beneath deadlines and departures, grief and geography, beneath all the accumulated debris of the lives we have lived. Then, without warning, a few notes rise to the surface, and we are no longer who we became.
We are who we were.
The moment I hear that Janmashtami song, I am a little boy again.
The house is humming. The family is gathering. The old toys are coming out.
And Papa is about to build a universe.
And Papa is about to build a universe.
Janmashtami in our home was never simply a festival we observed. It was a world we assembled.
Every year, Papa—my father, Deepak—would help us build the jhanki. From trunks and cupboards came old toys, some handed down from my grandparents’ generation, their paint faded, their limbs occasionally loose, their faces carrying the strange solemnity of objects that had survived more childhoods than one.
Little cows. Little cowherds. Little people. Little gods.
Krishna. Radha. The gopis. Animals. Deities.
An entire civilisation waiting patiently in boxes for someone to bring it back to life.
And for a few enchanted days every Janmashtami, that someone was us.
My brother Samir and I, my sister Seema, and our cousins Sumita, Sangeeta and Raghav gathered around the grown-ups with the seriousness children reserve for projects adults mistakenly imagine are merely play.
Our Bhua, Deepa, was there. Her husband, our Phuphaji, Hargobind Bhatnagar. Our mother, Sunita. Papa, Deepak.
And above all, in the great constellation of my childhood memory, there was Dadi, Kamla Bhatnagar.
Her husband, my paternal grandfather, Bade Papaji, was Bhagat Saran Bhatnagar. They belonged to that generation that seemed to carry libraries in their memories and histories in their habits.
But Dadi did something remarkable.
She told us mythology without demanding that we surrender our minds.
Who knew a grandmother could be so cool?
She did not tell us these stories as if curiosity were a sin. She taught us to wonder, to question, to listen, to imagine.
Mythology, she seemed to suggest, was not the enemy of science. Science was not the assassin of mythology.
Both were humanity’s attempts to understand what it could see and what it could not.
Sometimes mythology reached towards a truth before science had found the language to explain it. Sometimes
science arrived centuries later and illuminated what mythology had been trying to imagine.
Sometimes they disagreed.
Sometimes they danced.
And sometimes they simply stood across the room from one another, equally aware that humanity still knew very
little about the mystery of being alive.
For us, however, the mystery of Janmashtami began with atta.
The Yamuna flowed through our jhanki, made from kneaded flour.
We shaped riverbanks and bends with our hands. We painted them with watercolours—blue for the river, brown for the earth, green for the trees.
Give a child flour and water, and he will make geography.
Give him an old toy, and he will make history.
Give him a shoebox and a mirror, and he will make the weather.
Papa, Samir and I did exactly that.
The greatest thrill of Janmashtami for me was our sound-and-light drama. We took a shoebox and turned it into a primitive projector. We found mirrors, reflective glass, coloured cellophane, scraps of plastic, anything that could catch or bend light.
Blue became night.
Silver became lightning.
Grey became rain.
Darkness became danger.
Light became revelation.
We created monsoon storms with mirrors and scraps.
And somewhere in the middle of all that glorious amateur theatre, Papa would begin the commentary.
Then Dadi would add something.
Bhua would remember another version.
Phuphaji would interrupt.
Someone would correct someone else.
Someone would laugh.
And the story of Krishna would rise from the floor, the walls and the flickering light.
We were not reading mythology.
We were staging it.
There was Kansa—evil, frightened, furious Kansa, haunted by the prophecy that a child would one day bring about his end.
There was the prison.
Devaki.
Vasudeva.
The newborn Krishna.
A child whose first breath was taken in captivity.
And then came the great crossing.
Vasudeva carrying the baby in a tokri.
The storm.
The river.
The danger.
The darkness.
The desperate journey towards safety.
The danger.
The darkness.
The desperate journey towards safety.
And there, inside our jhanki, the Yamuna waited.
Made of atta.
Painted by children.
A little river carrying the memory of the river that carried Krishna towards life.
Painted by children.
A little river carrying the memory of the river that carried Krishna towards life.
There is something beautiful about that image to me now.
The sacred story survived because generations kept remaking it.
Each generation used what it had.
The sacred story survived because generations kept remaking it.
Each generation used what it had.
Perhaps Vasudeva had the Yamuna.
We had atta.
We had atta.
Perhaps Krishna had a storm.
We had cellophane.
We had cellophane.
Perhaps the gods had thunder.
We had mirrors.
We had mirrors.
And yet the miracle remained.
Then came Gokul.
And with Gokul came joy.
And with Gokul came joy.
“Chhotee chhotee gavve, chhote chhote gwal,
Chhote se hamre Madan Gopal…”
Chhote se hamre Madan Gopal…”
What do the gavve eat?
What do the gwal eat?
What does our little Madan Gopal eat?
What do the gwal eat?
What does our little Madan Gopal eat?
The gavve eat grass.
The gwal drink milk.
And Madan Gopal?
Madan Gopal steals makhan.
Of course he does.
The gwal drink milk.
And Madan Gopal?
Madan Gopal steals makhan.
Of course he does.
What a glorious god.
A god who steals butter. A god who is naughty. A god who plays, teases, runs away, and gets caught. A god whose mother complains about him.
A god who is divine and deliciously human.
Perhaps that is what made Krishna so accessible to me as a child.
He was not an abstraction sitting beyond the clouds, inaccessible and austere.
He laughed.
He played.
He loved.
He longed.
He misbehaved.
He understood friendship and family, desire and duty, joy and jealousy, war and wisdom.
He was a child stealing butter before he became the voice of the Bhagavad Gita.
He was a cowherd before he became a philosopher.
He was a lover before he became a teacher of detachment.
And perhaps every one of those selves was necessary.
Because what good is a god who understands nothing of being human?
He was not an abstraction sitting beyond the clouds, inaccessible and austere.
He laughed.
He played.
He loved.
He longed.
He misbehaved.
He understood friendship and family, desire and duty, joy and jealousy, war and wisdom.
He was a child stealing butter before he became the voice of the Bhagavad Gita.
He was a cowherd before he became a philosopher.
He was a lover before he became a teacher of detachment.
And perhaps every one of those selves was necessary.
Because what good is a god who understands nothing of being human?
Then came Vrindavan.
And Radha.
There are some loves too large to fit inside the ordinary architecture of possession.
Radha and Krishna have always represented that mystery to me.
I do not want to reduce their story to theology because, for me, their presence in Janmashtami was emotional before it was intellectual.
Radha was there because love was there.
The gopis were there because devotion danced.
The women of Vrindavan did not simply move around Krishna. They moved towards something within themselves. They danced in reverence, in surrender, because music sometimes makes the body understand what language cannot.
And Radha.
There are some loves too large to fit inside the ordinary architecture of possession.
Radha and Krishna have always represented that mystery to me.
I do not want to reduce their story to theology because, for me, their presence in Janmashtami was emotional before it was intellectual.
Radha was there because love was there.
The gopis were there because devotion danced.
The women of Vrindavan did not simply move around Krishna. They moved towards something within themselves. They danced in reverence, in surrender, because music sometimes makes the body understand what language cannot.
And perhaps that is Radha’s great lesson.
Love does not always mean ownership.
Devotion does not mean disappearance.
Longing does not necessarily mean loss.
Sometimes longing is evidence that love has outlived proximity.
Sometimes separation is not the opposite of connection.
Sometimes the people who are no longer beside us remain most alive within us.
I understand Radha differently now because I understand absence differently.
Love does not always mean ownership.
Devotion does not mean disappearance.
Longing does not necessarily mean loss.
Sometimes longing is evidence that love has outlived proximity.
Sometimes separation is not the opposite of connection.
Sometimes the people who are no longer beside us remain most alive within us.
I understand Radha differently now because I understand absence differently.
This year, Janmashtami came wrapped in remembrance.
Mama, Sunita, was in Florence with Seema. Samir and I were in Delhi with our nephew Karun, Khaggi, and his family.
And we celebrated.
Not as children.
Not with the exact jhanki of our youth.
Not with every voice that once filled the house.
Too many of those voices now live in memory.
But memory, I have discovered, is not an empty room.
It is an occupied country.
Papa came alive.
Dadi came alive.
The stories came alive.
Panditji came alive, especially in the memory of the extraordinary charanamrit he made.
And oh, the charanamrit.
Yoghurt. Milk. Honey. Nuts. Kishmish.
A small bowl of sweetness that somehow contained an entire childhood.
There were puris. Aloo. Kaddu ki sabzi. Makhane ki kheer.
And kasaar—that humble, beautiful little dry halwa made with flour, sugar, and love.
And oh, the charanamrit.
Yoghurt. Milk. Honey. Nuts. Kishmish.
A small bowl of sweetness that somehow contained an entire childhood.
There were puris. Aloo. Kaddu ki sabzi. Makhane ki kheer.
And kasaar—that humble, beautiful little dry halwa made with flour, sugar, and love.
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Food has always known what memory sometimes forgets.
One taste and the dead sit down beside you.
One smell and the past opens a door.
One spoonful of charanamrit and suddenly you are looking for Dadi.
One bite of kasaar and you wonder where Papa has gone.
And then you remember.
He has not gone anywhere.
Not entirely.
One taste and the dead sit down beside you.
One smell and the past opens a door.
One spoonful of charanamrit and suddenly you are looking for Dadi.
One bite of kasaar and you wonder where Papa has gone.
And then you remember.
He has not gone anywhere.
Not entirely.
That is what Janmashtami taught me this year.
Krishna was born again.
Not in a prison cell.
Not in Mathura.
Not in a jhanki made from old toys and atta.
He was born in memory.
Krishna was born again.
Not in a prison cell.
Not in Mathura.
Not in a jhanki made from old toys and atta.
He was born in memory.
And perhaps that is where the story becomes larger than one family, one country or one faith.
Because for me, Krishna is not simply God.
Krishna is conscience.
Krishna consciousness is not about asking the world to become Hindu. It is about asking ourselves to become more human.
It is the recognition that consciousness itself demands consideration.
That life recognises life.
That the creature looking back at us, whether human or otherwise, is not merely an object placed upon the earth for our convenience.
It is a being.
It has existence.
It has experience.
Because for me, Krishna is not simply God.
Krishna is conscience.
Krishna consciousness is not about asking the world to become Hindu. It is about asking ourselves to become more human.
It is the recognition that consciousness itself demands consideration.
That life recognises life.
That the creature looking back at us, whether human or otherwise, is not merely an object placed upon the earth for our convenience.
It is a being.
It has existence.
It has experience.
And if Krishna consciousness means anything to me, it means this:
We are required to notice.
To be mindful.
To be conscientious.
To understand that dignity cannot be distributed according to religion, race, caste, class, gender, nationality or usefulness.
Dignity is not a prize.
It is a birthright.
Respect is not selective.
Grace cannot have a guest list.
Compassion cannot check passports.
And equality cannot mean equality only for people who resemble us.
We are required to notice.
To be mindful.
To be conscientious.
To understand that dignity cannot be distributed according to religion, race, caste, class, gender, nationality or usefulness.
Dignity is not a prize.
It is a birthright.
Respect is not selective.
Grace cannot have a guest list.
Compassion cannot check passports.
And equality cannot mean equality only for people who resemble us.
The Krishna of my childhood belonged to cows and cowherds, kings and queens, mothers and mischief-makers, Radha and the gopis, Gokul and Vrindavan.
He moved through a world of extraordinary difference.
And he belonged within it.
He moved through a world of extraordinary difference.
And he belonged within it.
The world today is increasingly anxious about who belongs.
Who is native?
Who is foreign?
Who is pure?
Who is permitted?
Who is inside?
Who must remain outside?
We build borders around nations.
Walls around neighbourhoods.
Fences around faith.
And increasingly, frighteningly, barricades around our hearts.
But Krishna consciousness, at least as I have come to understand it, asks a more difficult question.
Who is native?
Who is foreign?
Who is pure?
Who is permitted?
Who is inside?
Who must remain outside?
We build borders around nations.
Walls around neighbourhoods.
Fences around faith.
And increasingly, frighteningly, barricades around our hearts.
But Krishna consciousness, at least as I have come to understand it, asks a more difficult question.
What if there is no outside?
What if the illusion of separation is the beginning of our cruelty?
What if the illusion of separation is the beginning of our cruelty?
The Hindu may call him Krishna.
The Muslim may call the divine by another name.
The Christian may pray differently.
The Sikh may find sacredness elsewhere.
The Jew may carry another history of God.
Someone may believe in no God at all.
The Muslim may call the divine by another name.
The Christian may pray differently.
The Sikh may find sacredness elsewhere.
The Jew may carry another history of God.
Someone may believe in no God at all.
And still, all of us can understand conscience.
All of us can recognise suffering.
All of us know the difference between cruelty and kindness.
All of us are capable of dignity.
All of us are diminished when another being is denied theirs.
All of us can recognise suffering.
All of us know the difference between cruelty and kindness.
All of us are capable of dignity.
All of us are diminished when another being is denied theirs.
That, to me, is why Janmashtami can belong to the whole world.
Not because the whole world needs to worship Krishna.
But because the whole world could use a little more Krishna consciousness.
A little more mindfulness.
A little more mercy.
A little more moral imagination.
A little more grace.
A little more courage to see ourselves in those we have been taught to consider different.
But because the whole world could use a little more Krishna consciousness.
A little more mindfulness.
A little more mercy.
A little more moral imagination.
A little more grace.
A little more courage to see ourselves in those we have been taught to consider different.
My childhood Janmashtami was, without anyone announcing it, my first education in plurality.
Our family did not sit us down and lecture us about diversity.
We built it.
We practised it.
We watched mythology unfold through the voices of different generations.
We learned that stories had more than one version.
We learned that elders could disagree and still belong to one another.
We learned that a river could be made from flour.
That science and mythology did not have to murder each other to make room for reason.
That old toys could become new worlds.
That food could be philosophy.
And that perhaps the greatest projector in the world is the human imagination.
Papa helped us make lightning.
Dadi helped us make meaning.
And Krishna, somehow, helped us understand conscience.
Our family did not sit us down and lecture us about diversity.
We built it.
We practised it.
We watched mythology unfold through the voices of different generations.
We learned that stories had more than one version.
We learned that elders could disagree and still belong to one another.
We learned that a river could be made from flour.
That science and mythology did not have to murder each other to make room for reason.
That old toys could become new worlds.
That food could be philosophy.
And that perhaps the greatest projector in the world is the human imagination.
Papa helped us make lightning.
Dadi helped us make meaning.
And Krishna, somehow, helped us understand conscience.
“Ab to Shri mukh se Govinda naam boliye,
Govinda naam boliye, Gopala naam boliye…”
Govinda naam boliye, Gopala naam boliye…”
I hear the song now and think of all those voices.
Of Deepak.
Of Kamla Bhatnagar.
Of Bade Papaji, Bhagat Saran Bhatnagar.
Of Samir and Seema.
Of Sumita, Sangeeta and Raghav.
Of the children we were and the adults we became.
Of Deepak.
Of Kamla Bhatnagar.
Of Bade Papaji, Bhagat Saran Bhatnagar.
Of Samir and Seema.
Of Sumita, Sangeeta and Raghav.
Of the children we were and the adults we became.
And I realise that the Janmashtami of my childhood was never really about preserving the past.
It was about passing it on.
It was about passing it on.
One generation handed another some toys.
Some songs.
Some stories.
Some recipes.
A little flour.
A few mirrors.
A shoebox.
And an idea of God.
Some songs.
Some stories.
Some recipes.
A little flour.
A few mirrors.
A shoebox.
And an idea of God.
We took those fragments and made a universe.
Perhaps that is what every generation must do.
We inherit fragments.
We create meaning.
And then, if we have been blessed, we leave behind enough love for someone else to build with.
Perhaps that is what every generation must do.
We inherit fragments.
We create meaning.
And then, if we have been blessed, we leave behind enough love for someone else to build with.
This year, I did not need the old jhanki to find Krishna.
I found him in Samir.
In Seema.
In Karun.
In Khaggi and his family.
In Mama, far away in Florence.
In the remembered taste of charanamrit.
In the kasaar.
In the songs.
In the ache of missing Papa.
And in the certainty that love does not disappear simply because the people who taught us how to love are no longer standing beside us.
I found him in Samir.
In Seema.
In Karun.
In Khaggi and his family.
In Mama, far away in Florence.
In the remembered taste of charanamrit.
In the kasaar.
In the songs.
In the ache of missing Papa.
And in the certainty that love does not disappear simply because the people who taught us how to love are no longer standing beside us.
Perhaps that is the final miracle of Krishna consciousness.
The divine does not ask us to look only upward.
It asks us to look around.
And then inward.
To recognise that conscience is sacred.
That consciousness deserves consideration.
That life must be valued, appreciated, celebrated, preserved and protected.
And that the most meaningful prayer may not be the one we utter.
It may be the life we live after we have finished praying.
The divine does not ask us to look only upward.
It asks us to look around.
And then inward.
To recognise that conscience is sacred.
That consciousness deserves consideration.
That life must be valued, appreciated, celebrated, preserved and protected.
And that the most meaningful prayer may not be the one we utter.
It may be the life we live after we have finished praying.
“Chhotee chhotee gavve, chhote chhote gwal,
Chhote se hamre Madan Gopal…”
Chhote se hamre Madan Gopal…”
The little cows.
The little cowherds.
The little Krishna.
And us.
The little Krishna.
And us.
Still small somewhere.
Still gathered around Papa.
Still waiting for the lights to dim.
Still watching lightning dance across a wall.
Still believing that a shoebox can become a cinema, atta can become a river, mythology can become memory, memory can become meaning, and love can make the dead return.
Still gathered around Papa.
Still waiting for the lights to dim.
Still watching lightning dance across a wall.
Still believing that a shoebox can become a cinema, atta can become a river, mythology can become memory, memory can become meaning, and love can make the dead return.
Perhaps Krishna was never asking us to find him in a temple alone.
Perhaps he was asking us to find him in the conscience with which we enter the world.
Perhaps he was asking us to find him in the conscience with which we enter the world.
And if we can learn to recognise ourselves in one another—across religion and race, borders and beliefs, species and selves—then perhaps we will understand what that little boy in the Janmashtami jhanki was trying to teach us all along.
There is no one outside the circle.
We are all standing inside it.
And the music has been playing all along.
We are all standing inside it.
And the music has been playing all along.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
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