{"id":1313,"date":"2020-06-02T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-02T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stagingserver3.com\/Maharaj\/i-look-back-neither-in-pain-or-despair-babus-soliloquy-from-heaven\/"},"modified":"2020-06-02T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-06-02T00:00:00","slug":"i-look-back-neither-in-pain-or-despair-babus-soliloquy-from-heaven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stagingserver3.com\/Maharaj\/i-look-back-neither-in-pain-or-despair-babus-soliloquy-from-heaven\/","title":{"rendered":"I Look Back Neither in Pain or Despair – Babu\u2019s Soliloquy from Heaven"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/strong>I have been in the pastures of heaven now for about five weeks:
\nQuiet and unhurried, swimming in a painless existence,
\nEveryday is grand, every event here is magical,
\nLife lifts in blissful ecstasy, serenading the colossal majesty of the cosmos.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Every since I arrived here I have had no time to think on my earlier existence,
\nBut now I am slowly drifting in that direction:
\nI see a lot of affectation and wishful thinking by people on earth,
\nLot of foolish customs and rituals, foolish hopes.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Good people struggle for existence while bad people have it made so easy,
\nRelationships are often sweet lies, selfishness often holds the sway,
\nLove is often a wrong word used by people when they should have been saying my- interest,
\nModern lifestyles have reduced life to mere self-interest and physical enjoyment.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I do not recall the scooter-truck accident,
\nThat shattered my life beyond any repair,
\nI have stitched a timeline out of others\u2019 recalls,
\nA futile effort to give semblance of order in my tragedy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When life\u2019s center-of-gravity shatters any efforts to fix it is a waste,
\nOne must accept one\u2019s defeat and live for small kicks,
\nHave you seen flowers blossoming after a storm blows them off,
\nTo accept life without a personal reward is the greatest sacrifice one can make.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For forty-seven years I labored to exist,
\nWithout a job, wife, or children,
\nThere was no ambition for which I would have willingly bled,
\nThere was no dream for which I would have broken my right arm.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I was on a road without a destination,
\nTravelling without a purpose or reward,
\nLife was a garment stitched in days,
\nWeeks rolled into months; months melted in years.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My relatives treated me with tenderness, love, and friendship,
\nThey would never ask me if I was bored, lonely, or depressed,
\nTheir pleasant inquiries were keenly edited,
\nTo make a false impression that I was having a great life.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I had nowhere to go but forward,
\nPast was my death-knell, future did not exist,
\nPresent was my life,
\nI was a prisoner within its walls.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

While parents were alive there was someone to ask me,
\nWhether I had eaten anything, whether I was tired,
\nThere was someone to give a loving look,
\nA warm voice saying goodbye or welcome.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

With their exit I lost the greatest human touch in my life,
\nAfter that my life was a long stretch of vast loneliness,
\nBut I did not fold or bend,
\nKept my life on the fast-track.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I went to several libraries every day to catch up the news,
\nEat at Mac three times,
\nRetired home by 9, slept by 11,
\nLooking to another day.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Many years passed thus,
\nAnd started showing a mark,
\nI began losing interest in the libraries,
\nI thought I must work.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I sent several hundred applications but none was acknowledged,
\nI started becoming depressed,
\nWhat to do, where to go,
\nEnd seemed to raise its head.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

As my curtain started to draw down
\nI reflected on my life,
\nHow I spent forty-seven years in
\nSilent struggle, unshed tears, permanently jailed in loneliness.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

People pitied my existence
\nBut never speaking a word about it to me,
\nI pulled my own iron curtain,
\nNever telling them my true feelings.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At times I wondered why I was being punished so severely,
\nAs I had committed no sin in my life,
\nBut then the thought came that it may have been from the past life,
\nI was sentenced to life imprisonment without a judge or jury.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Coming here I feel I could not have done better on earth,
\nAll I had was a strong will to live,
\nI did not believe in chest-thumping,
\nLife has only one purpose: stand up and walk ahead.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The big drama about human life is that people believe
\nThere is a moral code attached to it,
\nIt is a dream flying by the wind of chance,
\nIt is thrilling as long as it is in the air.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I did my prison-time on earth as best I could,
\nI shed as few tears as I could,
\nI complained about my pain as little as I could,
\nDo not make me a hero, I was only doing my duty.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Suffern, New York, September 11, 2019
\nwww.kaulscorner.com<\/a>
\nmaharaj.kaul@yahoo.com<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0I have been in the pastures of heaven now for about five weeks: Quiet and unhurried, swimming in a painless existence, Everyday is grand, every event here is magical, Life…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1313","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-poems"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingserver3.com\/Maharaj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingserver3.com\/Maharaj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingserver3.com\/Maharaj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingserver3.com\/Maharaj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingserver3.com\/Maharaj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stagingserver3.com\/Maharaj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1313\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingserver3.com\/Maharaj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingserver3.com\/Maharaj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingserver3.com\/Maharaj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}