darshan…

14Jan09

from epics telling the stories of princes going to rescue their princesses, to those of heroic sailors braving the perils of the sea, to that of the quest of the ringbearers to the fiery ‘mount doom’, to that of the journey to see the last message left by god, to those of the poet/baul asking the majhi (boatman) to row the boat across the bhobo-nodi (the river of life), to the video/computer games where the protagonist has to be taken across lanes having traffic from different directions and velocities, the imageries and motifs of journey/quest/yatra has dominated narratives across regions, cultures and ages… those are the stories of perils and obstacles that have to be fought with and overcome/overpowered to reach at the moment of ‘darshan’, when one meets the objective of the journey… ‘meets’ in the sense of actually meeting the person or the object one seeked, or meeting/realising the goal/target one seeked…

the (sanskrit) word ‘darshan’ refers to the act of seeing, the act of meeting (appearing, either physically or fantastically, say in dreams) and also is the sanskrit word for ‘philosophy’… an interesting linguistic reminder of how the (philosphical) means are inseparable from the end that is being attempted to achieve… how the end determines the means, and vice versa… and thus how the end cannot be achieved if the means are in contradiction to it…

discussion of the word ‘darshan’ apart, this post is about a dusty streetside vision, entered into randomly while sunk in utter velapanthy along the dusty dusty dusty gurgaon road, which suddenly brought into presence this imagery of quest/yatra into an otherwise everyday experience of looking at a temple across a busy dusty road, from the opposite footpath…

suddenly the cars and trucks passing by become metaphors of the obstacles and perils, and the street become the river or the sea or the subterranean chasms of moria… the photographic vision is on a quest to have a ‘darshan’ (to see, as well as to meet) the temple on the other side of the road… as i kept clicking pics, half a bus or the entire car kept resisting the photographic vision to capture a picture of the temple unblocked by the car or the bus… so the photographic vision kept going on with the quest… to have a complete (not in complete as in ‘complete’ sense, in the sense of a pic of the temple unobstructed by any vehicle on the road in front) picture of the temple… to have a darshan…