You are invited to the gracious and well-appointed house of a lady whom you had met a few times previously. Your eyes begin to rove and take in the details spread out in the rooms; paintings, sketches, photographs on the walls; details of the furniture; dolls, sculptural pieces, pottery deployed on the side tables; coffee table books on art, gardening, cities. There is no thought or reflection on what this household at this place of earth means, and is connected to the larger world, at times of perceiving. Those thoughts would come later. For now you are just enjoying the air as you carry out the task of observing.

As you sit and interrogate the host on the significance of the various objects-de-art, talk somehow veers to the recent bombings in London, and the air is immediately strained by the weight of suffering as well as is colored with ashes of anger. The question comes up as to why young men who grew up in a 憀iberal?democracy would want to bomb the very place they grew up in, killing many others and themselves in the process.

Since you can抰 resist giving out your crude opinions, when it always is simply wiser to keep those pronouncements to yourself, and perhaps just say a silent prayer of peace such as that of St. Francis, you begin by saying how it might be that the unsolved racial issues within British society might have contributed to driven those young men to perverse and cruel religious ideologies.

You would have, at this point, added a thought or two on the utility, perhaps, in thinking of how such perversions could have come about, and even found so much appeal in a society, which makes large claims on the kind of life it potentially offers to its young people that they should have not, ideally, turned into killers. At this point another invitee, let抯 call him Mr. X, who also happens to be from the Indian subcontinent, interjects to state flatly that all of this had nothing much to do with race or social problems in the British society, and that all fault lies with the religion, i.e., Islam, and its adherents alone.

From his tone you can gather that he had very well made up his mind about this religion, and had, perhaps, even etched out his point vis-?vis Islam in mental stone, along the lines of Mien Kamf and Judaism. Again here it was simply wiser to be silent, because who knows, maybe his diagnosis is right, maybe he has given larger amount of critical thought that you have to these issues, maybe the fault lies in a religion and one sixth of the world population who profess to follow it, either because of the happenstance of birth or out of their own choosing?

Yet you have to speak, again without much opportunity to reflect, because intuitively you perceive, not only because of the friendships and acquaintances with people who are Muslims, but also personally, that living religions are never monolithic, and that faith within a community shows as much variation as there are variations and deviations of feeling, perception and wonder among human beings. And thus it is highly reductive to pin the cause of a serious problem to as big an organism as a whole religion.

However since elegance in debate or discussion is something you are yet to master, you fumble your way through your thickets of thoughts. You also point out to the history of race riots in Britain as your supporting claim. To refute this Mr. X, diabolically, brings up those other communities who perhaps were similarly discriminated against, such as Indians (by this I think he means those Indians who are Hindus like himself) and Chinese, who didn抰 take to bombing as way of readdress. (Here you hear echoes of railroad barons of late 19th century America, who used one immigrant group against others, for example Irish vs. Chinese to skirt problems of extremely dangerous working conditions ?workplace safety laws are of quite recent origin after men have become, perhaps, less disposable - and corresponding compensation) Hence the problem is not, as I have been too simplistically trying to claim, social conditions leading to radicalization of young men by perverse ideologies (which by the way was one of the main findings/conclusions of a report submitted by the British home minister to the British Parliament a few months before the bombings) but that of a religion.

While you are wondering if subtlety of thought is a vice and not a virtue as you feel it is, and try to gather your flustered breath, the discussion, which had caused the temperature of the room to rise by a few degrees, is broken off, and talk turns to other less contentious issues. However this would not be for long because talk somehow comes back to the problem of Islam as a fine dinner ends and dessert is served. But more of that should wait for a later missive.

It is sometime in the night. And I am shuffling through discs, a quick succession of sounds; first a haunting chant like composition for violin called Tabula Rasa by Arvo Pärt, a Estonian composer, then over to Frank Sinatra and his smoky love songs, and finally because of resignation or laziness, Faiz’s ghazals in Abida’s voice. Some how no music seems to be right tonight. I lie on my back and watch thoughts swim up and down my spine like goldfish. Ideas for poems, images from a country that can’t be redeemed or retrieved, lists of words that are beautiful and intimate, then common objects and Neruda’s odes to them: knife, spoon, lemon, salt, wine.

Then it occurs to me that I should write an ode to Messengers. I think of what I will say of that pixel-ed panel though which one receives everything – laughter, sound, feeling, facts, information, opinions, questions, concern - warped in text, in grammars of language. However this is just a description of what happens, a tip of the iceberg. What lies behind, inside, and hidden, how does one get to that? How does one unearth that?

Perhaps one can’t. One is tied. Fingers, tendrils, roots of words only span a minute distance of what lies between two ideas, two kinds of consciousness. I should know this better than most, having lost – yes, even though as Elizabeth Bishop maintains losing as an art is not hard to master, and neither does it end in disaster – friends of many years, friends I knew as flesh and blood, as raucous laughter, as tears, as embraces, behind those fogs of words, which reduce voices to mere echoes. And finally even the echoes stop. It too hard, too painful perhaps, to carry on talking, gossiping in such disembodied fashion.

And then separate realities always are waiting once the power, the grove of cyberia, is switched off, with each one’s reality just slipping into the neighborhood of fable, in the comprehension of the other. Sympathy, in any case, is a meager diet, especially when one is looking from the other for an intuitive and deep understanding of the cards that life is dealing to him on the poker table. An understanding that can only come if one can show and act on love one profess to have for the other. Love, a complex many headed beast no doubt, but which is surely not identical to the English word 'love', contaminated by its traces.

Yet, how strong is the human impulse to communicate, to broadcast news of the self to the world, to elicit perfect understanding, to pull a blanket of talk over the hours, to forget the gaps that start just where the skin ends! Thus cursed or blessed, one has to keep navigating between the self and the other, the exterior and the interior, keep piloting the tugboat of life between the gulfs of words, of worlds.

After watching an excellent documentary entitled Rivers and Tides on Andy Goldsworthy 'artistic work' with nature that reflects and draws the participant's attention to nature, my well hidden obsession with revealed patterns made by various kinds of detritus in streams, in ossifying tree roots, in the remanents of tree trunks shaped liked the open pages of a book, the head of a bird or a fish, in pebbles that seem to echo the count of time in the way they refelect certain numerals etc somehow begins to make more sense, even if like Goldsworthy I too can't articulate very well what are the aesthetics behind them all.

If you are an artist or want to be one, this is a movie worth watching. You may start paying attention to all stuff concealed in those overlooked margins soon after!