Rising up early may not be such a big deal for a generally lazy fellow. I do not find it difficult to wake up at soon after five and before six. Of late I have begun Pranayama again, but the reason for my early rising is quite different. Let that pass, because it may be trivial for people with their own reasons to rise-up v early.
I get out around six and ride down the straight AV road which at that early hour is refreshing. The dust of previous day has settled or has been blown away westwards by the night sea breezes from the bay and I realize how nice it is to breathe clean.
All that apart, on some mornings a hasty driver of those horrendous "pick-up" trucks devilishly overtakes me but I do not feel like cursing! Mornings are good (I wonder why the English practiced wishing everyone good morning? To my mind it is like meeting someone in a cinema who asks you whether you have come to see the film playing in there! Well, a bit far fetched allusion I admit but mostly I almost say, "No, I will only have some pop-corn and leave the cinema!")
Again, that is not what I want to write...
This morning I heard a horrible Vrooom close behind me and before I could glance at the r v mirror this common, mean pick-up scraped a piece of my personal ether. I looked at its behind. There was a picture of a blue boy, who I surmised, from the iconographic symbols, to be Bala-Krishna. It wasn't bad kitsch although being rather familiar with the art of painting faces his os nasale or the nasal bone was quite misplaced. It made Bala-krishna look unduly embarrassed for no fault of his. In his pink palm he held the flute, and he had a plastic peacock feather tucked through his curls. As the vehicle carried further and further away from me my embarrassed looking Krishna I felt glad. More for him than myself, because the worst depiction of the Lord to my mind is beautiful. He is Vasu-deva, the God of delight. Depicting Krishna beautifully must always be relative, I think, for who can conceptualize His absolute form? That embarrassed looking Bala-Krishna to me was as delightful as any Kishangarh portrait of the blue God for He resides not so much in the image as in the hearts of men. Pictures, even bad pictures, invoke the dormant reality within. Lord Krishna's darshan this morning kept my day bright. I was not embarrassed for any act of mine today.
I get out around six and ride down the straight AV road which at that early hour is refreshing. The dust of previous day has settled or has been blown away westwards by the night sea breezes from the bay and I realize how nice it is to breathe clean.
All that apart, on some mornings a hasty driver of those horrendous "pick-up" trucks devilishly overtakes me but I do not feel like cursing! Mornings are good (I wonder why the English practiced wishing everyone good morning? To my mind it is like meeting someone in a cinema who asks you whether you have come to see the film playing in there! Well, a bit far fetched allusion I admit but mostly I almost say, "No, I will only have some pop-corn and leave the cinema!")
Again, that is not what I want to write...
This morning I heard a horrible Vrooom close behind me and before I could glance at the r v mirror this common, mean pick-up scraped a piece of my personal ether. I looked at its behind. There was a picture of a blue boy, who I surmised, from the iconographic symbols, to be Bala-Krishna. It wasn't bad kitsch although being rather familiar with the art of painting faces his os nasale or the nasal bone was quite misplaced. It made Bala-krishna look unduly embarrassed for no fault of his. In his pink palm he held the flute, and he had a plastic peacock feather tucked through his curls. As the vehicle carried further and further away from me my embarrassed looking Krishna I felt glad. More for him than myself, because the worst depiction of the Lord to my mind is beautiful. He is Vasu-deva, the God of delight. Depicting Krishna beautifully must always be relative, I think, for who can conceptualize His absolute form? That embarrassed looking Bala-Krishna to me was as delightful as any Kishangarh portrait of the blue God for He resides not so much in the image as in the hearts of men. Pictures, even bad pictures, invoke the dormant reality within. Lord Krishna's darshan this morning kept my day bright. I was not embarrassed for any act of mine today.
1 comment:
I think it depends on the state of mind or being that you are in. You were obviously in a a euphoric though tranquil one.
For us Krishna is so charged with meaning, resonance that like you said the form in which he is depicted is relative. It is obviously not the same for someone from another culture who would respond to an exquisite stone carving of Krishna in the Ranganathan temple for example, nuch more enthusiastically than a blue Krishna with pink palms painted on the back of a truck.I personally find these reproductions delightful.But as I said it's part of being Indian. I payed with clay idols of Krishna as a child. But I am equqlly attrected to clay statues of Virgin Mary clad in blue, her bent head draped in a white veil.
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