I am glad that my old firend, Manpreet Badal, happens to be Washington while I am already here in connection with an issue I had left long unattended. I would ahve loved to go around the town with him , visiting some of the greatest monuments of "unageing intellect" that dot this unofficial world capital. I stepped out for a long early morning walk and some light solo-soccer as my hosts and the rest of the city slept away to glory. There is a smal open park close to where my hosts live, quiet, peaceful and shy. The mighty Potomac, which loves to roar its soveriegnty all day, all night is, for some unknown and strange reason, just whispering gentle prayers of epace as it glides almost embarrassed by its own might and magnitude and behaving at this hour like a most beautiful bride, happy in yet embarrassed by her own beauty. And its rubs its belly on the bosom of the riverbed , lost in ecstasy and eyes closed both in sheer bliss and in self conscious diffidence over its irresisitible charm in this mood. The sky above, a clear blue and unmoved and umoving ascetic yet looks benign as it watches from a height not measureable by human mind. I could never have believed Washington would have moments of such divine peace as it has this hour. Wordsworth tip-toed back into my mind after years of separation:
"Earth hath not anything to show more fair:
Dull would be he of soul who could pass by
Asight so touching in its majesty;
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering inthe smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock or hill;
Never saw I, never never felt a calm so deep!
The river glideth at its won sweet will:
Dear God ! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still."
A few hours from, this moment of sublime quiet and oenness with the universe would be lost yet again in the din of 'towns and cities'. A few hours away also lies the moment where th agenda of hatred would be sought to be camouflaged by 'concern for Punjab and the need for a new revolution' ( Read change of face of those in control of civil scretratiat.)
What an irony that just at that hour, when someone from Punjab, who spends hours coining slogans that would announce him as the new messiah of political revolution, would be balring away about the number of jeeps that line up the carvan of his political rival, I would be lost in an era
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)