Back To Bliss: A Journey To Zero - Santosh Jha (best authors to read .txt) 📗

and anxieties. This objectivity helped him understand the power of the conscious mind over unconscious and sub-conscious mind. Not that he could conquer all his fears and anxieties but he had better control over his fears. His conscious mind stood him in good stead with a power of analyses of what was happening to him and why. This assured that fear was never out of control to reach a stage of panic.

In the progression of time, he got inclined to the idea that fear was actually good for him, or for anybody, who could have the objectivity standards to understand it. Fear was a very positive signal about the incidence of an unattained and unprepared mind. An unknown thing or idea cannot spark off fear. A known thing or idea has the similar capacity. It is things or ideas in between the two ends that create fears. A rope in a semi-dark room makes one panicky as it looks like a snake but even an actual snake in a totally dark room fails to create fear. A snake generating fear is good thing. The snake experts also know that its venom is deadly but they do not fear it because they have complete knowledge about snake behavior and all possible dynamics of its threat perception. Fear is an instant invite for positive action. Fear makes you accept that something is wrong and negative with your mind programming. You need to delete the program and write a new one with complete and objective knowledge about something which unleashed fear. Fear is an invitation to become your own god by embarking on a journey towards the best of your own potentials.

As he developed good understanding of fear, he realized that the formlessness, or what the doctor called unreality feeling was also not a bad thing either. He actually stared to use the unreality experience as a constructive tool. The objectivity standards also made him take his formlessness as just a media, like anxiety and fear. This formlessness or unreality was value-neutral and presented an opportunity for greater objectivity benchmarks. A very beneficial proposition for humanity!

He began to understand that minus or plus; pain or pleasure; was not the ideal state of being. It had to be a zero – a truly objective, value-neutral position. Most sins and aberrations of humanity were committed when humans drifted too far either in the plus of pleasure or minus of pain. Humans committed acts of banality and benediction, omission and commission on the basis of his or her judgment of the reality he or she perceived as facing at a particular moment of time and space. Quite often, the real which was identified as real was either more on the side of plus or minus, often off target of the real.

Mayank later on developed mastery over the craft and called it a trick. He could actually help himself on the onset of the bout of formlessness. Whenever, he felt his body and senses were too overwhelming or ruffled up, in minus or plus, and he could commit a mistake, he would slip into what he called the zero-mode. He had developed a way to trigger off the formlessness bout and as he welcomed it, he gained on the objectivity benchmarks for himself.

In the years to come, he used the technique to avoid many sins and wrongdoings which men his age would commit with aplomb. As he passed his prime of youthful years he was happy to discover that he had developed two personalities. The formlessness had turned into a personality which he felt remained silent and in the backstage, giving frontstage to his physical personality which was socially interactive. He successfully used one of his two personalities interchangeably to derive best of results for him. He even enjoyed his split personalities simultaneously, realizing very well that this had made him an enigmatic person in the eyes of most of his relatives, friends and colleagues. The liberal of them would call him maverick but most would prefer a ‘confused’ tag for him.

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CHAPTER 3

Mayank was not that young to allow any momentary lapse of reasoning and take a fleeting decision. Though 34, his disposition suited a 45-year old. A week earlier, he felt an urge to do something even at the risk of being labeled hasty and rash. However, coming back from Manali, he had his mind in poise and clear on what he wished to do and how. The mountains had stoned the poise in him.

He rang up the reporter who had written the scam story and as he had expected, the reporter had been handed over transfer orders which would mean he would quit his job. Reporters are very reluctant to change their places. It takes years for a reporter to build his contacts and his worth depends on his contacts.

He could sense a shade of anger building up inside him. Perhaps, his own anger and frustration with his profession had piled on the incident. As a journalist he had so many issues which he held dear to his heart and wanted a patient hearing from his editor and owner of the newspaper. Let alone as a professional; as a social person too he believed he had genuine questions which at best needed clear answers but at least, he expected sympathetic audience to such questions.

His anger always liberated him. It gave him the energy to vent his feelings, to bring up queries. He believed that inquisitiveness was a growth sign. He would never allow his simple and innocuous ‘why’ to wither away. Anger was his critical energy that jolted him out of the inertia of status quoism that the social milieu around him would often slap on his face. Anger would give him the energy to extend strong support to his instinctive inquisitiveness by adding the stubbornness of his determined self.

He used his anger to ascertain that at least things were seen in right perspective. He was always very clear in his mind about the fact that judgment about a justified action can be postponed but not the judgment of a justified thought position. A fact will remain a fact even if its practice be procrastinated or even stopped. What irritated Mayank most was that most people, who were in the positions from where taking right judgment and that too at the right point of time would make the world a better place, would simply not do it. The tragedy is that most often, they would use all power at their disposal to kill the question itself. Naturally, the questioner became first victim.

For the larger society, rooted in inertia and status quoism, a question is like a poisonous snake. People with baton of socio-economic and political authority are so panicky of the venom of non-conformity, which a question has the potential to unleash, that they are quick to thrash its head. Often, innocuous and well-meaning questions and questioners are killed in the panic over the threat to peace and order of suitable conformism.

Questions are important. God is the biggest question. The religion is the mother of all questions. The greatest tragedy of humanity is that today religion smothers more questions than it was suppose to answer. Regrettable it is that on the name of religion, mediocre and conformist answers are being forced on masses and many meaningful questions are not even allowed to breathe.

Since his childhood, Mayank had witnessed his family members stifling questions which he asked innocently. He would be hushed up and told that it was bad manners. Often, discipline was considered the primary virtue and even his innocuous curiosity would be bracketed as undisciplined behavior. Discipline as the greatest morality was not always acceptable to him as he saw it as a non-reciprocal tool of outdated notions of societal conformity.

Even later, in his school, in college and in his career, he would be faced with the authoritative structure that emphasized and enforced discipline, pouncing on any chance to kill even the most innocent inquisitiveness. A slap would always save the burden of thousands of unconvincing words for the authority. And why would anyone anyway consider it an authority if it didn’t slap!

This only made him become sure and more confident of the righteousness and justification of his natural inquisitiveness. The nervousness that he could see his questions generated among those who were responsible for answers assured him that righteousness was on his side. If not, why would questions scare? The force with which the authoritative layers attempted to smother questions only reflected the reality that there was something that they feared the questions would expose – either their incompetence or ignorance to answer them or the larger hypocrisy of humanity.

He grew up to the realism that asking question was a greater virtue than giving answers. Keeping a question alive, not allowing it to die prematurely required a lot of courage, character and conviction. Almost everyone claimed to have the answers; some of them probably had. Most of them even fought for their answers to be the only justified one. Many had the authority to impose answers or the refusal of it on people. Only few however had questions and the courage to stand them. He realized, if necessity was the mother of inventions, inquisitiveness was the primary energy behind all inventions, all creations.

He refused the socially popular notion that a question was a sign of weakness as it exposed the ignorance of the questioner. He learnt it quite early in his youthfulness that a question is sign of innocence and courage. It required childlike innocence and courage of highest order to rise above the fear of being labeled an ignorant, to face the taunts of peer group and society to be a duffer, even retarded. He had made up his mind to always be on the side of questions. He had accepted that if something had fear in its side, it was good as it would lead to the ultimate truth.

He opted for media as a career primarily because he felt the profession would provide him a good platform for raising his questions. He also believed media had the responsibility to find the right answers. He thought he was naturally inclined to be in media as inquisitiveness was the core character of a good journalist and he had it. He had also learnt that media was feared just because of its freedom and privilege to ask questions to the high ups and mighty. He chose the print media, a newspaper, as he always believed in the power of the printed words.

In the first three years of his career in media, he had realized the gap between the fiction and the fact. Within media, more questions were killed than given life. Media itself killed a lot many questions as either it would be detrimental to its own economic health or too troublesome to ask. He learnt it later that this was not a very depressing fact. All goodness has to operate within the confines of practicality. Idealisms too have to be sustainable. What troubled him however was that valid questions were being shunned because of sheer ignorance and inflated professional ego and pride of media people.

Early in his career as a journalist, he asked his chief reporter why he allowed so many crime stories in local news. Mayank also complained to him that rape stories were being written with unnecessary graphic details that put victim in very poor light. He showed him a story published a day back which narrated in detail that the rapist gagged the mouth of the victim with one hand and that of her small child sleeping beside her with another hand. He then raped her lifting her sari to her stomach. Mayank told the chief reporter that the story not only was in very poor taste as it unnecessarily presented graphic details of a heinous crime, it was also factually wrong as such a chain of incident could never have happened. He reasoned that