maula ~ arziyaan

For those who know me, a part of my personality is inextricably linked to Bollywood or the Hindi film industry. I have often found in some of the richer stories the industry has told, a sense of solace and peace - and more often than not, I have also found a guiding light in dialogues, situations, place, characters and mostly songs and lyrics. While it is dangerous to base your life decisions to a dialogue you hear someone on screen narrate, i believe that inspiration and guidance comes from everywhere and everyone -  you only have to be open to it. A quote that is attributed to rumi says - your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.  I believe that quote can be applied to many things in life - in your search for creativity, in your journey to find the divine, in your spiritual quest for the unknowable & unreachable, in your progress towards your career or craft - everything. We merely need to seek and find all the barriers within ourselves that we have built against it. In some of my writings, I have spoken about how life has flowed for me, often like water, which when sees hindrance in it's designated path, simply finds another way to flow and continues on towards it's ultimate destination and destiny. I have never been one to plan, a couple of years back at work we did an exercise where we had to partner with another team member and formulate a "5 year plan" and then share our plan with this colleague, who would then keep us honest, with monthly or quarterly check-ins, to eventually reach this goal we had set for ourselves. And this included personal as well as any career goals in the company, or even outside it. It was a lovely exercise frankly, just spending a few hours formulating  plans and pros and cons and your primary enablers and fears around it. I am ashamed to say that while my colleague has achieved all of his goals - getting married, having a child, getting promoted & even joining a start-up, I somehow haven't made any progress on mine. Call it my laziness or lack of direction or constant flexibility with respect to how I myself view this plan, I couldn't achieve any of the metrics I had set for myself. I am sure from a yoga point of view, I would have set aside an asana goal for myself like being able to do the mayurasana or one of the other fancy poses. I am no where close to it even today and in fact I no longer deem it important enough a goal to be pursued anyway - I have other more important tasks that I want to achieve and levels I want to cross in my yoga journey and less and less of it has to do with asana as time goes by.

Why am I talking about this? Because i have once again found myself on crossroads where I set out this year to achieve things with well defined goals and timelines and success/failure metrics and so far I have nothing to show for it. Other than my personal learnings and a more relaxed but confused state of mind. I have many stories to tell, I have made new friends, and also a new family, I now know what definitely does not keep me happy & what I will not do for sure. On what I should do I am as clueless as January of this year, if not more. And this time not because I was afraid or lazy to chart out my own course, I truly did, except that the universe had other plans. 

I have also always been a believer of the quote from the alchemist - when you truly want something, the universe conspires to make it happen. It has given me strength on dark days when I have found my courage to be in short supply. But this time around, as much as I truly wanted it, looks like the Universe was in no mood to relent or to conspire or to set up a path for this journey to unfold on. So was the philosophy around The Alchemist incorrect? Maybe not. Maybe something else lies in store ahead - maybe what I thought I wanted was an illusion, something distracting me from my true path? Maybe these temporary defeats have been deliberately put in place not to deter me but to egg me on. Maybe each failure teaches me and uncovers, layer by layer my true quest. Maybe I am meant to tread these roads to get rid of the anxiety and fears that have always enveloped me ? Maybe I am meant to let go of the sense of self as "Me" or "I" or "Mine" and find a deeper understanding of what lies within - which is always in connection and union with the larger cosmic magic and the movement of the stars.  Quoting Enya: who knows ~ only time.

Only time will tell what awaits me, how the decisions I make today will play out tomorrow, what avenues it might open up and which ones it might close shut tight. I was with my foot reflexology uncle recently in Singapore and he knows me well enough to know I wasn't keeping well emotionally and was feeling stuck about certain decisions in my life. He looked at me and said "what's happening?", I knew I would be found out if i went to him, so I actually debated whether I should go in the first place, but maybe I needed guidance and so sub-consciously I pushed myself to go anyway. So I smiled at him and he smiled back and I said " I don't know what God wants me to do, which route he will lay out for me" This was literally short of me asking him "What shall I do?". He said something I have literally always believed in, so much so that I have used this explanation in debates I have had with people over the supposed enmity between the strength of fate over will or vice versa. He said "But that will never happen, you will always be given two choices, and YOU are the one that needs to choose, the paths will be laid out, but you have to pick one and tread on it, it's you not anyone else that will make that call". 

In that moment I realised what I was doing. I had starting  doubting my intuitions so much that I didn't even want to make the calls in my life anymore, I wanted them made instead, because I did not trust myself with these kind of decisions anymore - after-all look at where i was in life. I was taking the route of detachment, but in a harmful way - you become detached to a certain entity or life choice or situation not by avoiding it wholly, or being dispassionate about it altogether, but by engaging with it and knowing by trials and discernment that something is not meant for you and hence there is no point in being attached to it and causing yourself grief and pain over it.

This ties in fully with Hindu philosophy, where to pursue a spiritual life, you need not be an ascetic leaving behind all material possessions and family ties. You can live in the material world and yet be detached to it in a healthy manner. The term for detachment comes from a Sanskrit word called "Viraga" which can be split into two words "vi", meaning "without" and "raga", meaning passion, feeling, emotion. Viraga also means "to go beyond colour" and "to be uncoloured" - which translates to dispassionate engagement with life and the material world by not avoiding but by engaging in it. I wanted to follow the path of avoidance assuming that i was being unattached to things, but obviously I was missing the whole point of viraga. Lesson learnt, point noted. So i merely have to undo the barriers I have myself built around my life, my creativity, my decisions, my path.

The title of this post as well as the picture I have relate to a higher spirituality. I'll talk about the picture first. When I was living in Bali for a few months, i traveled with my balinese keluarga to the temple of besakih in the north-east of Bali. Pura Besakih is often termed the mother goddess temple amongst the balinese, it is the highest in the order of all puras in this island of Gods, full of temples. When the balinese pray, they bring with them to the temples, offerings for the Gods - these will be fruits, flowers, some form of rice, sweet desserts, money, incense sticks. These are kept inside these really pretty ornamental bamboo baskets called keben. In this picture you see the balienese women carrying colorful keben on their heads in pura besakih.

Also in their baskets are their wishes and their prayers and their requests for the gods and goddesses. In Urdu, we call these request/wishes arziyaan. AR Rahman, one of my all-time favourite composers, composed a song called arziyaan written by Prasoon Joshi for a movie called Delhi6. It is a based on the sufi tradition where the devotee approaches the shrine of his/her beloved god, asking this divine being to heal him/er, to ease his/her pain and to guide him/her to the right path. I have often found solace in this song, because it speaks of complete devotion, almost a surrendering of self to God, of asking to be shown the light of truth when in the presence of this divine energy.


अर्ज़ियाँ साड़ी मैं चेहरे पे लिखके लाया  हूँ
तुमसे  क्या माँगूँ मैं
तुम खुद ही समझ लो मौला
मौला मौला मेरे मौला

मौला मौला मौला मेरे मौला
दरारें दरारें हैं माथे पे मौला  
मरम्मत  मुक़द्दर की करदो  मौला
तेरे दर पे झुका हूँ, मिटा हूँ , बना हूँ
मरम्मत  मुक़द्दर की करदो  मौला

जो भी तेरे दर  आया 

झुकने जो सर आया 

मस्तियाँ पिए सबको झूमता नज़र आया 

प्यास लेके आया था दरियाँ वह भर लाया 

नूर  की बारिश में भीगता सत्तर आया 

हो  एक खुशबू आती थी 

एक खुशबू आती थी 

मैं भटकता जाता था 

रेशमी सी माया थी 

और मैं ताकता जाता था 

जब तेरी गल्ली आया 

सच तभी नज़र आया 

मुुझ में ही वह खुशबू थी 

जिस से तूने मिलवाया 

टूट के बिखरना 

मुझको ज़रूर आता हैं 

वरना इबादत वाला शहूर आता हैं 

सजदे में रहने दो अब कहीं न जाऊँगा 

अब जो तूने ठुकराया तो सवार न पाऊँगा 

सर उठके मैंने तो  कितनी ख्वाहिशें की थी 

कितने  ख्वाब देखे थे कितनी कोशिशें की थी 

जब तू रूबरू आया 

नज़रे न मिला पाया 

सर झुका के एक पल में 

मैंने क्या नहीं पाया 

I do not know where to start translating this song or which verse to pick as the one I most relate to - because i relate to all of them at once and also relate to each line individually. I am each word, but I am also the sentence and the whole song. But for the sake of writing about this gorgeous piece of art and music, I will pick one. 

टूट के बिखरना मुझको ज़रूर आता हैं - I do indeed know how to break and shatter my self.

वरना इबादत वाला शहूर आता हैं  - but I also know the insight and devotion to prayer,

सजदे में रहने दो अब कहीं न जाऊँगा  - keep me in your light, where I bow continually towards you

अब जो तूने ठुकराया तो सवार न पाऊँगा  - for if you banish me this time, I won't be able to mend or heal again.

OK, maybe I will pick just one last one 

सर उठके मैंने तो  कितनी ख्वाहिशें की थी  - I lifted my head towards the skies & wished for so much

कितने  ख्वाब देखे थे कितनी कोशिशें की थी  - saw all these dreams and struggled for so much

जब तू रूबरू आया  - but when you appeared in person, in front of me,

नज़रे न मिला पाया  - i couldn't meet your eyes

सर झुका के एक पल में  - I could only bow

मैंने क्या नहीं पाया  - & in that moment of bowing I found so much

I am at that point, where I am close to being broken and shattered, but I also know that the answer is to keep walking and to keep going with prayer on my lips and dedication in my heart, I also want to be healed and protected by a guiding force, without which i find myself clueless. i too have pushed and asked and struggled for something, a dream, but in that failure, I have found greater understanding and a sense of divinity, and only in that moment when I was humbled with my head bowed and my hands in prayer, did I find peace. 

~ namaste