It was March last year and the national lockdown had just begun in India, when Guha saw scores of people, young and old, begging for food and money on the streets. He was almost moved to tears and uttered the following:

I remember UG used to say, "If there is a nuclear holocaust, we will all die but along with us we will take almost all the other forms of life. The only creatures that will survive are the cockroaches." I feel Mother Nature is a great equalizer. After we are gone, it will keep the people we treat like cockroaches, whose lives don't matter to our society, whose health, education, food, clothing and shelter are of no importance to the modern civilization. Those people have never used sanitizer on their hands, never had access to clean drinking water, unlike me, who has been using bottled water for ages. They are the ones who are going to survive. Some of them will die, but we have never cared for their death anyway. They die on the streets in the shanties and ghettos. But they are the ones who are going to come out of this onslaught. If there is a "survival of the fittest", if the theory is right, they are the ones who will survive. We, the so called protected ones, with all the modern technology and everything, are the ones who are going to go kaput in one shot. There is still time for us to ponder and find out what is greater, humanity at large, or our greed for advancement, our greed for knowledge of the universe, our effort to find the fundamental truth or our effort to be immortal. I don't know. But nature doesn't care at all. It'll show us what it cares for. I am in awe of the glory of Mother Nature.

Date: 27th March, 2020
Place: Kolkata, India

Photo by Revathi Iyengar

Phone conversation dated 5-Aug 2018:

Guha: This is no ordinary thing. When it happens it will be self-evident, you will not need to tell anyone nor need any explanation. There will be a joy like you have never known before. And you will never know the reason because it is acausal. The old man of Dakshineshwar used to talk about this acausal love or joy.

When your hunger is great, what will you do when you see food? You will devour it, no?! Similarly, when your innate desire for harmony is intense, and when such a person comes into your life, what will happen?! You will forget everything else! Then there’s no thought or time! But you are always thinking when you read the scriptures or about the spiritual experiences of others or when you go to gurus. They are either dead or fake. They cannot produce anything. Only the real thing works. But I cannot create that hunger in anyone. 

Tanusri: I have seen you have no discrimination. Your door is open to anyone who is serious.

G: Should I tell you something?

T: Sure, please.

G: Where there is love, there can be no fear!

T: There can be no darkness near the sun!

Later …

G: I discovered that our ideas about spirituality mean nothing. Whatever happened to me was acausal. Life does not depend on anything. It is like a river in spate. It doesn’t care about the bank. It will flood everything and move like crazy as it wants. It doesn’t care about what we think or want. It has its own flow. Nobody can inhibit it!

T: How soon will I see you?

G: See, I have a strange confidence. Life’s innate demand will work things out for itself.

T: You know, I never went to any gurus in the marketplace. I used sit in my room and cry wishing for someone real to show up in my life! Then suddenly you came! You say, “Even if a flower blooms in the desert, bees somehow find their way to it!”

Later …

G: You know, all the spiritual people in the market have read about this state and its signs like one cannot eat, can sleep very little, cannot have sex, have no fear etc., and they try to imitate or copy these behaviours to gain social favours and prestige. And gullible people give them money. There is nothing more to it. For me, I don’t need anything or anybody, not even UG!

T: Although I had read about UG so intently, the moment I met you, I forgot all about him.

G: How can you think of anything else when something so engaging is happening in your life?!

T: That is true! I am writing down everything you have been saying over the last few days. They are hot, fresh out of the oven!

G: Very good! What is that song by Meerabai which you sang, in which she says, “Father, mother none are dear to me …”?

T: “Taat maat bandhu bhrat, aapno na koi, chhaar dayi kul ki kaani, kya karega koi” (sings)

(Father, mother, friends or brother, none are dear to me
Family name and prestige have lost their value,
What can anybody do about it?)

G: I always wonder what you see in me. I don’t see anything in myself!

T: Like the fire cannot burn itself!

G: You should write about your life. Write about everything just the way you feel.

T: Whenever I try to write I am overwhelmed by the thought, “How can I express something that is so beyond my comprehension, yet as real as daylight?”

G: Just start writing and it will flow.

Photo by Radhika Venugopal

***

All your effort to stop ageing makes you age faster!

Guha

Guha wrote his last poem UG Krishnamurti Laho Pranam (UG Krishnamurti, My Oblation to you) around the year 2002. In April 2020 when we were in the middle of a nation-wide lockdown and stuck in Kolkata, one day he asked me to see if his poem could be made into a song. He told me that he had showed this poem to many of his Bengali musician friends over the years, and although everybody agreed that it should be turned into a song, no one could compose the music for it. I can sing but I had never composed any music in my life. I didn’t think I had the talent for it. Guha asked me to sing some Hindustani classical Ragas so that he could pick the one that would suit the mood of the poem. A Raga is used to set up a specific melodic framework for a song. I started with his favorite Yaman, then moved to Bhairavi and then to Bhairav. The moment he heard the deep and majestic notes of Bhairav, he said, “This is the one! Now, can you try and set the tune using Bhairav? Let’s go one para at a time.” I started humming the notes of the raga and the tune started forming in my head almost immediately. As I sang the lines trying to sync them with the tune in my head, the song started taking shape quickly. Then I got the idea of composing the last part of the song in a fast-paced traditional kirtan style and Guha agreed to lend his voice to it! I was elated! With constant encouragement from Guha, finally the song got done! The cherry on top is the pranam mantra Guha wrote (he penned it in five mins right then) with which the song ends. My job done, we handed over the reins to our friend Venky, who is a tabla maestro, a singer and a professional music composer par excellence. Venky abandoned all his projects, worked day and night on this one and created a beautiful piece.

Translation of UG Krishnamurti Laho Pranam by me

O man of my soul! O fiery man! O Nirgun!
Let the offering of your smokeless, transparent fire,
Burn to the root centuries of solidified oppression that deformed and incapacitated the mind,
Let that fire light a lamp in the core, let its luminance spread beyond the horizon,
Let the seekers of emancipation know this in their depths of being,
As I know the source of my own core movement.

Jivatman, Paramatman are mere words – no need for them;
Your pristine life is a rain-drenched ray of sun.

Your boundless, focussed, piercing gaze burns the core conditioning,
Spontaneously springs the timeless expression of life at the center of existence.

The depth of the soul trembles at your admonition,
The untainted, sacred space that thoughts, idea and hope have never seen,
Sprouts in a flash and flowers into the incomparable creation of life supreme!


Translation of Pranam Mantra

O Gopal Krishnamurti, my dearest friend
The destroyer of sorrow who gives birth to the eternal fount of wisdom
You are as dear to me as my life!

You have perfect knowledge of how to destroy yourself, but you know nothing about what is good for you. You know much more than what you need and it is creating havoc in your body. Just the way too much food makes you sick, too much information can make you sick too. Your thoughts lose their natural rhythm and mess your head up!

Guha

Entry on 9th March 2019:

The more I ponder about him, the more I am amazed. Being with him is very easy and difficult at the same time. He is strict with people who are very close to him. With others he is the nicest possible. He does not tolerate distractions. Observing him made me realise how masterfully he treads the fine line between control and concern for well-being. He never dominates yet makes it clear what he will not tolerate. He is not shy to show the door to anyone who does not like his ways. He declares with a grin, “My way or the highway!” 

The closer I came to him, the better I realised how stringent the conditions are to be with him. He says, “One needs to have tremendous focus to continuously be with me. It is not easy.” But not once did I find him bossy. Whatever he asks to be done is never for himself. All he wants for himself is some hot water, some cloves, coffee and a little something to eat. It is such a relief to stay with him. No tantrums, no push and pull, no demands, not a single false step ever. There is such purity in everything he does, even when he is angry. 

The usual behaviour that we are conditioned to expect from an individual when we refer to the term “love” are absent in him. There is no display or demand, just pure response based on the other’s need. If one is able to filter out the conditioned responses, then being with him is pure joy. He never fails to point out how to recognise and discard the conditioned responses. It depends on how serious one is. He says, “I can’t create the hunger in you.” 

***

Entry on 13th March 2019:

He once told me, “I can’t ask people to fall in love with me!” My jaw dropped when I heard him say this. Falling in love with him is all that is necessary, as I found out in my case. But it is a rare event – truly falling in love without wanting anything from him. No practice, no meditation, no studies can do what his presence does. He is the panacea for all my woes. He destroyed my sorrows and arrested my mental movements and centered my focus on him. He says he does nothing but how else can I describe this? Because I too did nothing.

What a friend! He wants nothing yet gives all. His ever bubbling joy spills onto people around him. Yet when he is grim, the air seems heavy and it is hard to even breathe. The very next moment his sun comes out without a trace of the storm that just passed! When he rages like a volcano, the heat is unbearable. Again, he is the cool balm on my festering wound. He is mindless as Nature, yet can apply his mind to most complex matters of living. He is the only one free amongst us all.

***
Entry on 14th March 2019:

After I saw how Guha functions, I realised that there is no such thing as spirituality. There is just day-to-day living. The struggles, the discoveries, the conflicts – are the only reality. There is nothing other than or separate from this. Every “ism”, every philosophy, every scripture is an outcome of this struggle to live and to understand life. The unchanging and eternal God is an invention of the human mind to find a solution or to escape from the stranglehold of misery. Spirituality is a fancy concoction that is impotent. As a kid I looked to spirituality to find respite from my inner conflicts. I struggled and struggled. I seriously tried meditation and japa but nothing helped. Now I know that none of these practices can address the core problem. Nothing can bring relief because we do not want to look at what we are, instead we are busy painting a grandiose picture of what we want to be – enlightened, all-knowing, one with everything, ever blissful and what not! I shudder to think that the entire foundation of spirituality is based on such half-baked and abstract ideations which over the centuries have successfully fooled us into believing that we can do something to attain a blissful and thoughtless state. Why can’t a sane and intelligent human being figure for himself or herself that it is the tortured mind that projects a state of eternal bliss, that it is the oppressed sense of self that paints a picture of emancipation?

What a waste of vital energy, what a neurosis! But is there any other way of discovering the futility of these things? I don’t know!

***

Your relationship with money tells me everything about you! It is a deep social conditioning.

Guha