Sūtrajālam

We have given the main aim of Sūtrajālam, which you would have read in the opening page against the backdrop of the Milky Way and those magnificent and miraculous Sandhill Cranes. The opening page was sculpted by my daughter Kavita. When it was shown to me the first time, I was profoundly moved because it reflected in one glance the essence of a whole philosophy of life experienced by me in the last 60 years or so. Kavita is the inspiration, the brain, and the architect of Sūtrajālam. She has spent a lot of time, effort, and love to get this Site going with the able, and eager assistance of her technically savvy children. I will come back to it in my next post.

A visitor may well want to know why another Web Site when there are so many on the Internet. What is so unique about Sūtrajālam that anyone should find it interesting enough to be persuaded to allot a quantum of precious time in a busy world to something one amongst so many clamouring for attention? The answer is that there is nothing special about Sūtrajālam. The whole idea of being special and having a USP to sell something goes against the philosophical grain of my family including my dear wife Geetha, Son Nakul, Daughter Kavita, Daughter-in-Law Saritha, Son-in-law Vasan and my grandchildren Arav, Aranya, and the four-legged ravishing Nimi with gorgeous cat’s-whiskers. My other grandchildren Krtin, Krteyu, and the four-legged furry Scruffy with that deep baritone, are still in the zone when the gunās, which are the painful instruments of the ego, assail one. As a result, one comes to believe that to be special would yield more joy than to be ordinary. Our heritage will eventually triumph and they too will outgrow the need to be unique or to be different from the herd to find happiness and fulfillment in life.

The Sage Milton has said in his peerless Sonnet entitled “On His Blindness” that, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” When my father first introduced me to this poem about 55 years ago, I was greatly moved. It struck a chord in me and the vibrations generated then have not died down yet. It gave me hope that I do not have to torture my body and soul to be the best to find happiness. Similarly, our aim in Sūtrajālam is to serve by just standing and waiting. If someone comes to us while we are waiting thus, we will try to share some of our experiences of the Universe with our fellow human beings. It would be like handing out a leaflet for one interested in the face of it. We are not trying to sell an excellent product per se in a pro-active and marketing-driven manner. We are selling a product for no reason other than the hope that it might give the ‘buyer’ the same kind of wonder and joy we experienced. The idea is that everyone should share with everyone else such enriching experiences in life for no reason other than that it is there.

Each person’s experience of the Universe is different and possibly unique. Our aim is not to immortalise ourselves using the electronic medium. Let me explain with the help of some tenets of Hindu Philosophy with which I am most familiar. We will be covering aspects of Yoga and Hindu Philosophy and Religion in this Web Site in due course. When the Prāna or the Life-Force has departed, consciousness also leaves with it leaving the Body made up of Matter behind to merge with Prakruti or Primordial Matter. Attempts to perpetuate the delusion of immortality by building statues and leaving behind works of great excellence would be futile because we ourselves would not be there to savour praise and adulation in the future. People have not stopped praising the 5th Symphony since it was written. But the great Master became deaf in the latter stages and could not hear the resounding and interminable applause of the audience. He is not there to savour any kind of adulation today. Similarly, we will not be able to stroke our egos in the future having left our mortal frames taking our Praana or the life-force, our Consciousness, and our Karmas and Vāsanās. Karmas will dictate the kind of fruits we will get in the next embodiment and Vāsanās will dictate our instinctive propensities for good and bad karmas.

We urge our visitor to relax the Mind and the Body and to keep the doors of perception open for whatever may come calling. It is my good fortune that many of the things my family enjoys as experiences in life, also figure in my list such as the love of Nature, the great need to exercise compassion; the fondness for all life whether animals, birds, insects, or other forms of life; fondness for classical music and poetry; for science and the scientific spirit; for the joys and mysteries of mathematics; for chess, painting, and parlour games and so on. For instance, they experience delight and wonder each time they behold a bird, big or small, colourful or drab by chance or the same bird repeatedly on innumerable occasions. They admire art and artistic works even as I do. They listen to classical music just as I do in rapt attention. I am lucky and blessed. What my family achieves in the future or fails in their attempts, they have already made the grade in my Books of Account for the small but wonderful things they do in the ordinary course of their daily lives. You do not have to be unique or the best to find happiness. It is statistically impossible. The odds are one million to one for; that an individual will find his statistical dot around the center of the Poisson Distribution Curve. I am not decrying excellence. I am merely warning the ambitious boys and girls of the World and their tiger-parents that setting targets is fraught with the sorrows of failure and shortfall because the Poisson Distribution is applicable not just to population distribution but to excellence and uniqueness of all sets of human endeavour.

Strangely but luckily, our World has reached a stage where the commonplace has become unique. You do not have to struggle to be unique. If you find a bloke who has time to appreciate a flower in the garden; to listen to the singing of a bird or to the chords of the Moonlight Sonata that a young person somewhere nearby is learning even as one is getting ready for work or business; to say a kind word to one’s own parents or to your elderly or your young neighbour or to the hawker or the Cop on the street; that bloke has the QR for happiness. You are unique but your happiness will come not because of being unique but from the little things you do. I cannot explain the mystery any more clearly. A butterfly flapping its wings in a quiet garden in your suburb could be linked to a hurricane in another part of our Planet. We are all joined together by the underlying common fabric of the consciousness of all sentient entities whatever the body, its form, colour, shape, construction, or other biological features. Human beings are not unique and we do not have the exclusive right to life, intelligence and feelings.

As you explore Sūtrajālam, we hope you will get into our minds and hearts. If you do that we would have our customer in the bag. “There is nothing Great or Small in the Universe”. Are they my words? No certainly not. These great words full of the Wisdom of the Upanishads was uttered by an Englishman often denigrated by Indians as the upholder of the British Raj. These few words of Rudyard Kipling encapsulate the deepest philosophy of our Web Site. We have a separate page on this matter. John McEnroe once said, “I’ll let my racket do the talking”. I like to fondly suspect that he too must have read some Upanishad for him to utter such deep words of wisdom. We will let Sūtrajālam do the talking.