Rain and Shiva

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Kauai, Hi
November 5, 2011

While on this island I took a trip to the local Hindu temple, a Shaiva Siddhanta temple this morning. These are the people who publish Hinduism Today. It was pouring rain throughout the visit. Going there reminded me of visiting New Vrindavan in the early days, complete with the mud, only instead of West Virginia sticky clay, it was Hawaiian volcanic mud. Much preferable, but mud just the same. Only someone who knows West Virginia will know what I am talking about. And any rate, what they have is a small, but extremely authentic, Shiva Mandir with an assortment of side shrines located taround the property in various banyan tree groves. It’s not worth the visit unless you can actually enter the main Mandir shrine, which has very limited and strict public viewing hours. However, darshan in this Mandir, if you can catch it, is spectacular. It makes a trip to this island worth it for this purpose alone. It’s that good. These people are not catering to the public. This is a monastery and they mean to keep it that way.

Shaiva Shiddhanta Temple, Entrance

The worship in the main shrine is first class, clean and absolutely punctual. Very much in the western Iskcon style. These are western bhaktas in the Shaiva tradition from south India. And like us in New Vrindavan they are convinced they hold the keys to the universe. The main difference between this place and New Vrindavan is that these people are focusing on quality instead of quantity. They have not sold out to the public purse yet. And God is blessing them!

Getting there is just like trying to get to Bahulavan. You travel a treacherous winding road up the side of a mountain, which is actually an extinct volcano. I can see the neighbors resent these people in the extreme partly because of their ‘goony’ Rip Van Winkle look, but mostly because they draw a lot of traffic, which I can see is a real problem. If we were bad with our shaved heads and white robes, these guys are worse with their shaved heads and ‘Rip Van Winkle’ beards, monstrous beads, and orange robes.

No photos are allowed in this shrine or anywhere near it. And this policy is strictly enforced. My good fortune was to arrive in a rain storm, so no one was around to interfere with the few photos and videos I did manage to shoot. I felt guilty doing this, but only a bit.

The main shrine is compose of two rooms, an outer carpeted room for devotees and a center attached shrine room, for the main deity, Annaaraj, dancing Shiva. On either side of Annaaraj are Ganesha and Karttikeya. When I was there a seriously bearded priest was doing puja and eight or nine devotees were sitting in the carpeted room, watching, listening or meditating. Half of them wore dreadlocks. This was a silent place. No tolerance for screaming children as in our temple or even chairs for the elderly. Along the adjacent walls in this carpeted room where dozens of one foot Shiva images. Would I be wrong to say there were a 108 in total on each side? The effect was powerful. So many identical images on each side of you is overwhelming. In the center of the room is a fascinating crystal Nava Graha apparatus. Each Graha is represented by a colored crystal ball that is positioned on a celestial grid about a meter in diameter with the nakshatra on the outside rim and the signs of the zodiac on the inside. There is a center globe of the earth, which suggests their view of the universe is geocentric. That would be typical. This is mediaeval Hinduism. Needless to say I was unable to take any photos within the main shrine area.

Karttikeya Swami in Banyan Grove

Outside, behind the main shrine, they have they have major construction to build a large Shiva Temple. Unfortunately the rain became so heavy I was unable to see any of this. The area was closed. I am told it rains virtually every day and many times during the day at this temple. Why anyone would want to build at this location is beyond me, but we know that putting temples in extreme places is always effective. Religion is an extreme enterprise and it always works best under these conditions.

Obama Kills Osama

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May 1, 2011

This evening I arrived home from a regular temple program around 7:30 in the evening to hear rumors that something ‘big’ was about to happen. The president was going to address the nation and the speculation was it had to do with Osama bin Laden. And indeed, at 8:30 PM President Obama gave a short statement stating that he had signed a strike order earlier in the day for special forces to go into Pakistan and get Osama bin Laden. The operation had been successful, Osama bin Laden had been killed. He had been living in an upscale residence not far from Islamabad in a highly populated area. No Afghanistan, no mountain, and no cave, as we had been told.

So this becomes another of those defining moments in history when I will remember exactly where I heard this news. I’d almost forgotten we were still searching for him; It’s been ten years. Apparently he was shot in the head and died on the spot and his body had been transported away. No doubt they wanted him more dead than alive to avoid the messy business of a trial. I’m sure they also wanted his body gone so there could be no local grave site to reduce the potential for martyrdom. Later, as I drove home to the desert this night I listened as news of the killing spread across the world and I heard how prime ministers, presidents, and kings were making statements congratulating the US for its skillful execution of justice.

Spontaneous celebrations were irrupting up all over the country. I especially listened to the celebrations at ground zero in Manhattan where the 9/11 attack took place and in front of the White House. As I drove I could hear horns and cheering in the streets. I received texts from different parts of the world acknowledging the news and sending congratulations. By the time I went to bed I heard that the body had already been put to sea. Wow! They really wanted to get rid of his body quickly.

This closes an important chapter on the 9/11 attack, but I am sure there will be repercussions for years to come. Without a doubt a great asura has been put to rest, but this is not the end of the matter. Reaction in the Islamic world seems mixed. This is also a triumph for Obama whom I am sure will be able to leverage this to his advantage many years. Just think, our first black president with Muslim roots was able to cut off the head of the snake. This is definitely a significant day in both America and the world.
———–

5/2/11

The day after…

As expected the media talk throughout the day has been exclusively focused on the killing of Osama bin Laden, the special service military unit that did it, how they did it, what led up to the event, what the Pakistanis knew, and so forth. I was particularly interested to learn that we never told the Pakistanis that the operation had taken place until after the deed had been completed and we had actually left the country. Perhaps we did this because we did not trust the Pakistanis, thinking that if they knew, someone would tip Bin Laden off. Good thinking if you ask me. Or perhaps someone in the Pakistani government decided they did not want to know. We, of course, had to invade Pakistan in order to execute the operation. How could the Pakistanis not know that Bin Laden was living under their noses? So the possibility that someone in the Pakistani government gave an unofficial nod to such an undertaking is a distinct possibility. Having Bin Laden in their backyard is obviously a huge problem for Pakistan. It was also interesting to learn that Obama and his security team was able watch the operation live, as it was occurring. There is a photo of them watching. Hillary Clinton’s facial expression is especially telling as she watched the drama unfolding. They were watching a state sponsored assassination as it was happening!

5/5/11

Five days after…

The news has subsided somewhat, but yesterday Obama announced that he would not release photos of the body, saying that the release of such gruesome images would only inflame and offend Muslim sentiments and thereby further endanger our military and American citizens. He is right. There is apparently DNA evidence to confirm Bin Laden’s death. No photo is going to offer any more proof.

There is also a raging debate within the country and around the world questioning the legality of killing Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden was apparently unarmed at the time and his host country was never informed of the operation. The US defends it’s action saying it was a military operation and bin Laden was a legitimate military target under international law. Regardless, I think Obama made the right decision. Anything less would have prevented or endangered the operation. Obama took decisive action and I am glad he did it. An asura is dead.

Conspiracy theory is a huge business in the country. Obama is being accused of staging the death of Bin Laden for political purposes. They are also asking why the body was put so quickly into the sea. Where’s the evidence for his death? They think the whole thing is just one more government conspiracy. Even some people who agree to the principle that he should be dead are questioning whether the whole affair even occurred. My neighbor is one person that I know who is a “conspirist.” He is also a “birther” and a “chemtrailer”. As a birther he doubts the American citizenship of Obama and he thinks the government is part of a secret world order to slowly poison humanity by pumping chemicals into jet trails as planes fly across the country. There are a lot of people like this, mostly on the Christian right. They also believe 9/11 was staged by the US government and Americans never went to the moon. There is no end to this nonsense. Bin Laden is dead. He was behind the destruction of the world trade towers and Obama was born in America. I just wish this country would spend its money to return to the moon instead of spending its energy embroiled “defending” the free world.

My Little town

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Phoenix AZ
Oct 29, 2011

Did I ever tell you that while in college, before I specialized in religious studies, I was on my way to becoming a professional geographer. I would have become an urban planner had I stayed the course! This is someone who analyzes space, building-codes, traffic flow and ultimately designs cities, towns, and even residential subdivisions and shopping malls. So I have special sensitivities to how towns and neighborhoods are laid out. In general I like European cities because they are decidedly people friendly.

Let me tell you about America, at least the part of America where I live. Without a car, life is almost dysfunctional. The kind of car you drive defines you. It’s your status symbol. The better the car you drive the more respect people show you. In certain jobs, even my own priestly job, you can get paid better if you have a better car! A car has a lot value in of America. This week I’ve flown from California to Arizona to perform a wedding, so I am without my car for the next few days. Not having a car means that I can hardly live. It’s hard to eat. The nearest restaurant from my hotel is 4 kms away. The nearest food store is 5 kms away. There is no metro and the bus service is so limited as to be useless except for the busiest hours. I suppose I could call a taxi, but it would take 30 mins to arrive and cost over $20 for a single trip to a store. Most of America is built on car culture. Drive a nice car, life is nice. Drive a not so nice car, life is not so nice. Drive no car, no life. This week I am suffering from car separation anxiety.

In Southern California I live near a small town about a hundred kilometers away from the Los Angeles area. Unfortunately my small town is one of the worst places I know, yet it is typical of most towns in this part of the world. The town is spread out along a wide highway that runs through the center of town. Our poor town is bifurcated by this highway. Cars and trucks roar through this town all day and all night at over 65 kms an hour. The shops on one side of the street are disconnected from the shops on the other side and so are the shoppers. The town is almost 10 kms long, so one side of town has no cohesion to the other end of town. A pedestrian on one side of the highway has no relationship with a pedestrian on the other side. In a car you can move easily across the highway or from one end of town to the other, but without the car you cannot function in this town at all. No pedestrians cross the street walking to shop on one side and then to the other. Everyone moves through this town in a car or truck! Walking anywhere in this town other than from your car to an immediate shop is unpleasant. Every part of this town is designed for car or truck movement. And because everything is designed for the personal car or truck, the existing local bus service is so limited as to be useless. Without a critical mass of users there is no way to expand the service to make it useful. My town is not made for people. It is for cars and trucks. There is no town center, no focus of commerce or community relationships.

Nor has my town any rail or bus service to the Los Angeles area. One gets to or leaves my town only by a personal vehicle. It is impossible, for example, for me to drive from home outside of town, park my car and take a train into the Los Angeles area. And even if I could reach the Los Angeles area the existing public transportation system is poor to the point of being dysfunctional. Only the poor use public transportation in my part of America.

And here’s another aspect of car culture. Driving a car makes you fat. A major reason why so many Americans are obese is because they do not walk. They are forced to drive because few goods and services are within walking distance. No one walks even to buy milk and bread. And because no one walks the streets are empty. We bank from our cars at drive through ATMs. We eat from our cars at drive thru coffee shops and fast food restaurants, we can even buy milk and bread at drive through grocery stores.

Americans actually park their cars inside their homes. They enter their cars from inside their houses and then drive to places with an enclosed parking garage. They never have to leave their car and actually be in the sunshine. So here I am for the next three days in Phoenix Arizona without car, forced to walk. I will have no life. But, ah yes, I will get thin!! Lol

Losing the Wire

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August 2011
Riverside CA

It’s official, I finally gave up my laptop. No more 3kg anchor to haul around. No more cords to plug in or chargers to carry. Today I handed my laptop to my daughter. Now I just have my iPad, the tablet. Me and the pad, that’s how its gonna be. I did, however, recently acquire a new desktop machine. I’ve not had a desktop in 20 years! Will this work, a pad and a desktop, and no laptop? I’m not sure, but a lot of people are moving in this direction, and as tablet computers improve, I suspect we are seeing the end of the laptop era and the revival of the desktop computer. The desktop machine is for the “sit-down” work, making a movie, working with big spread sheets, editing photos on a large screen, or perhaps serious gaming. It’s about monitor real estate. When you need a big screen you go to the desktop, otherwise the tablet is the way to go. Yet before I finally relinquished my laptop I kept it around for a few weeks longer and tried not to use it. So today I took the plunge, but I must admit it’s like giving up an old friend. There is a sadness.

A month ago I gave away my sound system, including an AM and FM radio along with the related antennas, a DVD and CD player, a base unit and two tweeters and “miles” of connecting wires. It was replaced by one simple unit, a wireless sound system that contains all the speakers and which connects to my local network including a large “tv” monitor. The “brains” of this new system is my cell phone or my tablet computer. From these devices can come movies, video, AM and FM radio, photographs or any kind of web content. There is no need for antennas, woofers, tweeters, CDs or DVD players or the “miles” of wires. Everything comes from a cellular network or some other wireless network connected to the Internet. It is amazing and I marvel each time I use the system. I can even talk to a person on the other side of the world and see them live on my tv monitor. My kids, who grew up with this kind of technology take it for granted; I am in awe and amazement every time I use it.

Essentially, my cell phone, a tiny device that I hold in the palm of my hand, is the heart of this system. It is a stand alone unit, able to play music or video or display any kind of web content on its own, or it can connect to any network and project itself into speakers or large tv monitors or anything else connected to the network. Wow, as I was writing this paragraph a voice message from a friend sitting in a cafe in London just arrived. I can hear her voice as clear as if she was in the same room with me. I also hear the street sounds of London. I am sitting in my desert home on the other side of the world as I receive this message. This could have been a video message and I would have seen my friend in London on a large monitor. She could have shown me where she was sitting and I could have walked in the streets of London with her. I would have been in London! This is truly magic to me. Gradually this kind of digital technology is defusing across the world and changing the way we live and think. London, Moscow, Delhi, Tokyo and almost any other place on this planet are now directly a part of my world. These are amazing times indeed!

American Health Care

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American Health Care
3/13/2010
Scottsdale AZ

Many Americans think their system of healthcare is the greatest in the world. I disagree. It’s a system that fails miserably because it fails to look after all of its citizens in a reasonable way.

I have a friend whose daughter broke her arm for the second time in six months. Each time, the arm was repaired for an out-of-pocket expense of $500. The actual cost for the first break was $3500 and $5500 for the second break because it was more complicated. The family has a $500 deductible for each incident, which, given the general costs for health care, is reasonable. The same situation would have cost me $8000 because I have an annual deductible of $8000 per family member. I choose to have a high deductible because it gives me a lower monthly premium, so again, I say this is reasonable. It’s my choice.

One of our temple employees, who works full-time, has no medical insurance because she has a pre-existing condition. No insurance company will issue her a policy. In her case she would have to go to a public hospital, claim poverty, and have the arm repaired at the public expense. If she owned property the hospital would sue her and try to take her home to pay the expenses. This is not reasonable. Why should a person who is working full time not have reasonable access to healthcare? Having to go to a public hospital means being treated as a second-class citizen. It also means this person will not have regular healthcare checkups. She will only interact with the medical system at times of crisis, the most expensive way to approach medical service, and it is the public who will pay.

Finally, I have friend who owns his business and has health insurance that he has been paying for many years. He recently became ill and has medical bills that amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. His insurance company is refusing to pay because they say his treatment is useless because his condition is terminal. However, he has yet to die and his condition is in remission. The hospital is suing to take his house and other properties to pay the bills. This is not reasonable. In fact it’s immoral.

This is the American healthcare system. The treatment is good, yet access to reasonable care is not universal.

The healthcare in this country is mostly a ‘for-profit’ enterprise. In order to maximize profits insurance companies avoid paying for treatments, as they are doing in the case of my friend who became ill, and they will not give policies to people whom they feel are bad risks, as in the case of our temple employee with the previously existing condition. From a business perspective insurance companies may be justified, but from a human suffering point of view the system is unforgivable and even immoral.

There is not a single ‘first world’ country on this planet, not the UK, not Germany, not Canada, not Australia, France or Japan, that has a medical system like ours. People lose their homes and businesses if they become sick and fail to pay their medical premiums, and often even when they do pay, insurance companies refuse their claims and still they lose their homes and businesses. For almost a hundred years presidents have tried to fix this system, yet have failed. Our current president is trying to fix the system and give us a system similar to the rest of the first-world and I support this cause.

I am writing this note on while I am visiting Scottsdale Arizona because on the street corners all over Scottsdale there are protesters opposing this recent attempt to modify the medical system in this country. As a Canadian it is a strange thing indeed to see people on streets corners holding great banners condemning a medical system as communist and un-American. To me universal healthcare is a no-brainer. Opposition to universal healthcare is like opposing women’s suffrage, or public education, or national defense. It astounds me that such a wealthy country as the United States still has failed to guarantee one of the basic needs of human life. Just like it’s in the national interest to provide public education to its citizens, it’s in the national interest to provide healthcare. Something like healthcare should never be totally controlled by private enterprise, neither should education, social security, or national defense. There are just certain aspects of human society that need to be mandated by the government for the public good, and healthcare is one of those things. Until this country can come up with a system of medical care that covers all of its citizens in a reasonable way, I cannot consider this country fully first-world. It’s true we may have a good medical system, in the sense, it can deliver a high quality of technical service, but if that service is only available to individuals who can pay, and whole sections of society are left without any care, this is a failed system. In some ways this is still a third world country and the street protesters are perpetuating backwardness.

My Story, My Mythology

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June 29, 2012

I love my desert home. Originally I purchased this property as a getaway place, my writer’s sanctuary, a place where I could come and escape from the noise of Los Angeles. At first it was just land, 5 acres of California desert, rocks and dust on planet earth. There was no road onto the property, no water, no electricity, no telephone, no buildings, and certainly no Internet, that conduit to the universe. It was just an empty piece of land, a blank canvas. I had found this property while I was riding my motorcycle on one of my days off. While I was living at the Placentia Temple in Orange County in the 1990s, I had no personal space, my family lived on the temple property, which I found suffocating. To relieve my stress I bought a motorcycle for my days off to escape from the temple and visit Southern California. I was doing dig-vijaya, a Sanskrit expression meaning “conquering the directions.” On these days off I would travel all over Southern California, and during one of my dig-vijaya adventures to the east, I found my desert home in the high desert near Joshua Tree. I was actually looking for a cabin on a couple acres of land, something already built, yet because I was unable to find such a place I began to think about land and building my own place. I became intrigued and fascinated by the idea of building my own place. It seemed like the ultimate creative act and at the time I was reading a biography of Carl Jung, who had also built a getaway property on the shores of Lake Zurich in Switzerland. He too had purchased land and gradually developed it as his getaway. Yet he framed the development of his project not simply as building a home, but as creating his own story, his own personal mythology. This was the reasoning behind the purchase of my desert property, to create my personal mythology from my own hands. I wanted to mold and sculpture this land; out of sand and rock and consciousness I wanted to create a world that was uniquely mine.

Turtle soup

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Most people know what a canoe is. It’s a boat originally used by the tribal peoples on the east coast of North America for hunting and fishing. It’s a long and thin boat pointed on both ends. You kneel in the boat and propel it by the stroke of a paddle. It takes some expertise to do this, particularly to steer the boat. I was born in a canoe. I may even have a photo of my birth, but if I don’t I at least know that I have a photo of my cousin and myself in a canoe as proof. As I mentioned a canoe is generally a thin boat, but on the east coast of Canada, wider ones were made for salmon fishing so you could stand up and spear the fish. My father had one of these east coast canoes custom made out of canvas and cedar-wood. It even had ribs made with strips of cedar. You can hardly find a real canoe made like this anymore, and if I know my father that canoe is still hanging in his garage somewhere. The special thing about a canoe is that it can travel in very very shallow water and it is absolutely quiet. It is perfect for fishing and hunting in marsh areas.

As a boy one of my favorite past times was to take this canoe into the marsh behind my grandfather’s cottage and catch mud turtles. My cousin Kenny and I used to do this quite often and on a good day we could catch 20 or 30 turtles! We would quietly drift into the marsh and if we were careful not to stir up the water we could see the turtles actually swimming right below us and reach down quickly and grab them out of the water. An average mud turtle had a 6 inch diameter shell. It would be our contest to see how many turtles we could catch in a day. After a few hours it would be quite a scene to see 15 or 20 mud turtles crawling in the bottom of the canoe at our feet. I only wish we had photos of this. So what would we do with so many turtles? Do you think we made them into turtle soup? Noooo, we would always return them to the swamp once we were done; our goal was just to see how many we could catch, not to eat them.

The Farm Hand

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February 8, 2012
Riverside CA

Who has ever heard of stooking? Some of the best years of my youth were spent toiling in the fields near my grandparent’s cottage stooking grain. During the August harvest season the oat and wheat crops that had grown from seed since spring needed to be cut and dried in the sun. A machine called a sheaver would cut the grain stalks and tie them into bundles called sheaves. My job was to follow behind this sheaver and pick these bundles off the ground and set them up so they could lean together and dry in the sun. This was called stooking the grain and I remember doing this even with my mother and brother.

Have you heard of thrashing? About two weeks after the stooking, when the sheaves of grain had dried in the late summer sun, the thrashing process would begin. A huge smoke belching clanging monster of a machine called a thrasher would arrive to strip the grain from its stalks on these sheaves and then separate it from its husks. My job was to feed this brute of a machine all the sheaves it could devour. From one end of this monster machine would pour the golden grains of oats and wheat and from the other end the chaff and straw would spew out. Stooking and thrashing grain became one of my routine summer jobs growing up at my grandfather’s cottage. In those days I was a farm hand who also bailed hay, milked cows, fed chickens and pigs, repaired fences and shoveled a lifetime of manure. It was often back breaking work, but it made me strong and capable.

Another of my farm jobs was less savory. It was to evict groundhogs from their homes in the grain and hay fields. A groundhog is a gopher like creature that lives in Eastern Ontario, except it’s many times the size of your average Southern California gopher. It’s immense, the size of a small dog, and it borrows tunnels and lives in the ground in colonies like a gopher. The problem is, it creates an extensive network of tunnels and mounds the dirt up from these tunnels. It’s almost enough to fill a small a dump truck. These mounds create a dangerous situation for a loaded hay wagon and tractor. They can easily upset the whole load and these holes can break the legs of cattle and horses if they step in them when they are running.

What is the procedure to evict a determined groundhog colony from its home? Its certainly not a task I enjoyed, but it was something that brought joy to the heart of the resident farm dog. The way a dairy farm worked in those days was after each milking the milk would be stored in huge metal containers and submersed in a vats of cool water. Every two days this collected milk would have to be trucked to a local cheese factory for processing. One of the byproducts of making cheese is whey, lots of whey. My job was to take this milk to the cheese factory and then return with a huge tank of whey pulled on a wagon. I would then tractor this wagon of whey out to the groundhog colonies in the fields and then pump liquid whey into their burrows to force them out. Once they came running out, the farm dog would chase them down, catch them and break their necks. It was a gruesome, but an effective process. And I hated it. I don’t even want to think about the karma I must have accrued.

Sarah’s America

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April 18, 2010
Reno Nevada 4:45 AM

I’m sitting in the airport returning to Los Angeles having performed a wedding in Reno Nevada, the blue collar gambling capital of the America. The wedding went well. It was standard and basic, but the interesting thing about this trip was my stay in the Grand Casino Hotel. The place was huge! The whole bottom floor was one massive array of buzzing, clicking, whirling, flashing, eye popping, slot machines and card tables. It was dizzying. I’m sure by Las Vegas standards it was tiny, only 3500 rooms, but to me, that’s massive. It was hilarious to see the people so glued to these machines as if they were in deep samadhi, engrossed in the reality of gambling. And the casino was rolling in the cash. I saw men flashing massive wads of hundred dollar bills, yet the oddest and perhaps the saddest thing of all were the leathery old ladies hooked up to oxygen tanks totally glued to these slot machines. They were there at 9PM and still there at 4AM as I checked out for my flight home.

On this weekend the hotel was hosting a gun convention. I saw men walking in the casino lobby sporting huge hunting rifles and even assailant weapons, pistols and what appeared to be machine guns. I’d never seen anything like this anywhere, not to mention a hotel lobby! It was disconcerting. With all the liquor, just one head going wrong could cause a massacre. So between the gamblers, the gun owners and all the smoking, drinking, rock ‘n roll along with the beeping, clicking, whirling and flashing slot machines, there was me, the white Hindu priest. On my way to my wedding walking in the lobby, dressed in my flowing Hindu robes, I was thinking, “Who are these people? They are so bizarre and strange”! But then it occurred to me, no, it’s not them, it’s me, I’m the weirdo here! These guys with the guns, this is the Sarah Palin America, the cowboy America, the Tea Party America. They’re the ones who’ve conquered this land. They own this place. It’s me who am the freak. And yet they looked at me in my priestly robes as if I was just part of the scenery, another guy doing his thing. You have to love these people.

Bharat

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To my love,

All night I have been dreaming of Bharat.
I want to bathe in her Ganga.
I want those sacred waters to wash over me.
I want to drink and taste those sweet waters.
My desire is to kiss the ground of Bharat and envelope myself in her land.
I wish the wheaten dust of Bharat to cover me head to toe.
I want to feel the mountains of Bharat against my chest.
I want to be in her arms. I am home sick for my Bharat, the land of my soul.
I want to go home.

And yet I live in exile, outcaste from my home.
Perhaps in the past I lived in the land of Bharat, but I took her for granted.
Perhaps I walked on her sacred land without caring.
Perhaps I took her for granted so she sent me away to the land of the mlecchas,
To learn respect and to learn love.
Please take me home. Wash me in your sacred waters.
Invigorate me and never let me go.

Your lover