I’m ready to translate the text you provide. However, I notice you’ve opened an HTML verse block but haven’t included any Bengali text yet.
Please paste the Bengali content you’d like me to translate, and I’ll render it as a literary English translation following the principles you’ve outlined — capturing the essence, voice, and emotional truth of the original work.
Thought: Eight Hundred Thirteen
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One. I first came to know of Toru Dutt while reading ‘Pushes Open the Door of Sleep,’ that extraordinary creation by Chinmoy Guha, a writer I hold dear. Among my recently acquired books is also ‘Toru Dutt: Collected Prose and Poetry,’ published by Oxford University Press. Among those we recognize as Great, there are two kinds of people: the intelligent and the gifted. One may perhaps become intelligent through effort, but effort alone cannot make one gifted. Toru Dutt was gifted—a genius. What she created in a mere twenty-one years of life is truly astonishing! I searched the internet and attempted to write something about Toru Dutt.
She holds the distinction of being the first Bengali to write a novel in French. She was the first Bengali woman writer to compose a novel in English titled ‘Bianca, or the Young Spanish Maiden.’ At just eighteen, she began translating various French poems, poetic critiques, essays, lectures and more into English. She translated many mythological characters from Sanskrit into English, among them ‘The Story of Savitri,’ ‘The Legend of Dhruva,’ ‘The Royal Sage,’ ‘Lakshman,’ and ‘Sita’—all remarkable achievements. Her creations touched the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Puranas in countless places. Her translated poems, original verses, novels, and letters are invaluable treasures of world literature, earning abundant praise from renowned English poet Sir Edmund William Gosse and various other scholars. Her novel written in French, ‘Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers,’ was translated into Bengali, with an introduction penned by the venerated author Premendra Mitra. ‘Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan’ is her collection of translations and adaptations from Sanskrit literature, which upon publication inaugurated a new era in the history of poetry written in English in India. Her collection of letters was published by Oxford University under the title ‘Life and Letters of Toru Dutt.’
The English translations of poems by nearly seventy to eighty French poets—of which she herself translated one hundred fifty-six, her elder sister Aru Dutt translated eight, and one poem of her own composition—a total of one hundred sixty-five poems compiled in ‘A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields,’ was published. The very next year, at merely twenty-one, this extraordinarily gifted yet tragically short-lived Bengali poet, Toru Dutt, succumbed to tuberculosis. It is worth noting that this book was the only one published during Toru Dutt’s lifetime. The most famous poem in the collection, ‘Our Casuarina Tree,’ is part of the English curriculum in Indian high schools. The poem is so renowned that it continues to be studied throughout the world. The poet, who died before her time, wrote this poem about the casuarina tree in some palatial residence of her Calcutta home, perhaps in Rambagan or Baghmari. She had gone to study at Cambridge University. Before that, she had spent considerable time in the city of Nice in France. How that casuarina tree from her home’s garden haunted her across the various cities and beaches of Europe, pursuing her—this is what Toru captured in her poem.
Her elder sister, Aru Dutt, too lived only twenty years. Aru and Toru together translated quite a number of French poems into English. Toru Dutt’s command of the French language influenced personalities like Jyotirindranath Tagore and Satyendranath Dutt. The names of Aru and Toru Dutt—these two Bengali daughters—were once pronounced in the same breath in English and French literature, much like the Brontë sisters, Charlotte and Emily, in English letters. Brevity of life and the ravages of time—these two forces played a principal role in consigning Aru Dutt’s literary works to oblivion. In fact, a large portion of her literary output or poetic creations has already been lost, or published under the name of her younger sister Toru Dutt, though in some cases it has been possible to later correct this error.
# The Plaster of Thought-Walls
Many critics hold that the poetry of Aru, who died before her time, is in many respects even more savory than that of her sister Toru. These two sisters had but one brother, Abjuden Dutta, who was himself short-lived, dying at merely fourteen years of age.
Toru’s mastery of French and English is, researchers tell us, nothing short of remarkable and almost unbelievable. If Michael Madhusudan Dutta was the pioneer among Bengalis in composing literature in foreign tongues, then among women stood Toru Dutta. What she accomplished in her brief life still fills researchers with wonder. Alongside Bengali, English, French, and Sanskrit, Toru Dutta knew German as well.
**Two.** There exist certain people who are at once supremely gifted and supremely arrogant. Most of us feel deeply uncomfortable around them. We cannot quite place them in our hearts, yet we cannot keep them from our eyes either. When the occasion arises to speak of them, we dignify the unearthing of their every fault as a “moral duty,” and yet we cannot help but witness their accomplishments, even as we do so surreptitiously. We are their haters, we are their followers; therefore we are their fans.
Arrogance becomes only those who can *carry* it. When the incompetent are arrogant, they look like goats; you will find countless such goats wandering the streets.
This world accepts arrogance only from the capable.
Cristiano Ronaldo wears torn jeans and they call it ‘style.’
I wear torn jeans and they call me ‘a pauper’s spawn’!
The very same t-shirt. On me, they say it costs at most a hundred taka; on Lionel Messi, they swear it costs no less than a thousand dollars.
You have to understand, why this kola-berry kola-berry kola-berry dey! If you cannot grasp it, then you must eat puffed rice doused in Sprite. No fuss, dear brother!!
**Three.** What is self-confidence?
It is when you are so masterful at something that speaking of it to others makes it sound like arrogance.
I once asked a friend, “What can’t you do in Microsoft Excel?” He replied, “I can only do the things that Excel cannot do. Excel’s limitations are my limitations.”
Consider—how superbly must one know a craft to speak of it thus! That is not arrogance; that is confidence. Whoever has not mastered a task so thoroughly that they become nearly unbeatable at it will never know the pleasure of thinking in such terms. For them, digesting another’s self-assurance is terribly difficult, so they mistake confidence for arrogance.
Arrogance is not the cause of ruin; rather, arrogance without merit is the cause of ruin.
Reflection: Eight Hundred Fourteen
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**One.** From the day we forget how to weep, from that day begins our eternal sorrow. Yes, there comes a time when, however much we wish to cry, we simply cannot. The tears pool and pool within, yet refuse to spill. What in this world weighs heavier than tears that have frozen in their ducts! What misfortune compares to the burden of carrying them!
When the beloved leaves us, when a cherished pet dies, even when a treasured photograph in its frame shatters—one day our eyes yield no tears. With age, the wellsprings of weeping run dry.
We who once wept bitterly when our favorite cup slipped from our hands and broke—that very self can no longer cry even when life’s grandest dreams shatter with a thud. A bird on broken wings cannot fly far.
# The Plaster of Thought-Walls
When we were small, we wept and wept until our chests flooded at the mere touch of a beloved toy. Yet when that cherished person—the very one whose hand we longed to hold—walked away into another’s grip before our eyes, we could not cry. We discover then a bitter truth: one’s own life can never dwell within another’s body.
This indifference of ours does not take long to set in. There are countless things that cease to move us. Intense feelings grow dull by degrees. Beliefs slip away one by one. Anger dies of its own accord.
In childhood we dream of growing up. Once grown, we waste away in regret at our inability to shrink back. Age teaches us that the inability to weep is itself a failure.
Life moves thus. We grow, and our eyes fill with an ocean that trembles ceaselessly—that deep current none can see. Our eyes burn, yet even scorched eyes cannot summon the rains of Shravan. Our days multiply, and with them, the days of our suffering.
Sometimes, after many nights, we suddenly burst through the silent darkness of midnight and sob without restraint. Why does this happen?
We ourselves cannot quite grasp the reason. Who abandoned us, what shattered within, where in our chest has everything turned to ash… though we think and think, we find no answers. Yet we can surmise, we can feel: the person within us is dying a little each day. For that dying friend—who is ourselves—there rises a great tenderness. This pity for oneself is pure, unstudied, utterly private.
Perhaps it is for this most faithful companion that we suddenly, tearing through the night’s silence and seemingly without cause, cry out in anguish. If we can weep, the chest grows light. One who cannot even weep at his own death—such a being, however much a man, is nothing but a cold stone weighing down the earth.
Many of those we take for human are in truth merely stones that walk and breathe.
—
**Two.** As far as I know, among all the Vedic translations available in Bengali, those by Debendranath Tagore, Rameshchandra Dutt, Satyabrata Samashrami, Sri Aurobindo, Durgadas Lahiri, and Swami Jagadiswarananda are the finest. It is unfortunate that these translations are not easily obtainable. Yet good things must always be sought out with effort.
A complete translation of the Vedas into Bengali has not yet been made; only portions and certain samhitas have been rendered. Recently, with assistance from the Government of West Bengal, the Ramakrishna Mission has undertaken this monumental labor. They are working to publish the complete Vedas in sixty volumes. I believe some forty-four parts have already been released. (There may be error in this figure; should there be, I would be grateful for correction.)
Today, my personal library’s philosophy section has received several new additions. I was told they would bring me all the published parts of the Vedas that I have yet to obtain.
Let me offer you some guidance on book-buying. From my experience, there are several organizations whose publications on philosophy of religion (not devotional practice or aesthetic spirituality) can be purchased with eyes closed:
The Pondicherry Ashram of the sage Sri Aurobindo
Udbodhan Office and Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture
Gita Press, Gorakhpur
Motilal Banarsidass Publishing House
I shall close with a verse from the Shukla Yajurveda: *Yad bhadram tanna asuv*—Let that which is auspicious come unto us.
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**Three.** There are generally three kinds of grief that touch us:
The grief of one for whose sorrow we bear responsibility
The grief of one whose sorrow resonates with our own
The grief of one who is dear to us
In all other cases, we merely perform the show of sorrow.
# The Plaster of Thought-Walls
Most people are rather annoyed or secretly pleased by another’s sorrow. Sorrow is a costly thing—best not to squander it about.
There exist certain brutally cruel people of the extreme sort, whom even this first kind of sorrow cannot touch. For such people, nothing is more foolish than to remain grieved. Your sorrow only grants them victory.
Four. To live, when life brings whatever circumstance it must, the better course is to simply accept it. In this lies peace and comfort, readily found. If acceptance proves impossible, then one must attempt to escape that circumstance. Otherwise, if one can master the art of embracing the present moment and using it to its fullest advantage, much benefit accrues. That moment you cannot accept in mind or heart may never return to life again. Perhaps every moment ahead will be worse than the present one. Who knows! Let us remember: death is a perfectly ordinary event. If death comes before the next moment arrives, we shall have to die bearing the failure of not having peacefully accepted this present one. Banishing thoughts of death from the mind does not banish death from life.
Let us live for today, not for tomorrow. Who can say what tomorrow will be, or whether it will come at all? Many things seem different when viewed from a distance. In thought and conjecture, many difficult things appear easy. Can we truly know in advance what the actual state of things will be? We make the difficult seem simple and the simple seem difficult; as a result, both slip through our fingers.
Consider: at this very moment, countless people now alive will depart this world before tomorrow arrives. This moment, that moment, the next—thousands upon thousands are dying, will die. Any one of us could be among them. People compose a probable list of death and leave themselves out of it. How strange! In that ledger of endless time, who knows when we might be entered? From the moment you began reading these words until now, somewhere, someone has left us behind. The list of the living is terribly fleeting. We do not know when our summons will suddenly arrive. Certainty that tomorrow morning will surely come—that is not life, that is dream. Death is far more powerful than dream.
We waste today dreaming of tomorrow. We turn today’s joy to dust in dreams of the day after. Who could even guess how suddenly life becomes mere ashes and dust? To pay the debt of birth, we must be reborn in every moment. To push the moment toward death is to live having divorced ourselves from the joy of birth. In this way, present happiness is lost to future dreams.
Do we suffer more at the time of death, or during life? No one can answer this with certainty. If the first is true, what sense in keeping ourselves in suffering while alive? If the second is true, what sense in multiplying that suffering by our own hand? In penetrating this mystery of life, the meaning of truly living is this: celebrate each moment, laugh, play, sing, dance through life. When you make a moment beautiful, life becomes beautiful. It may be that the meaning of our entire existence lies in this very moment.
So if tomorrow’s dawn will never come again to this life, what meaning do these countless, countless dewdrops of anticipation carry—those we hoard to anoint our eyes in that impossible morning?
Why not open both eyes wide today and truly see how that flower blooms, how the black mark on the pet cat’s forehead stirs such tenderness, what it feels like to walk barefoot on grass with arms spread wide toward the sky! Ah, how many people yearn to live but lack the means! And we—we have the means to live, yet we won’t even let the desire touch our hearts! Where is the sense in this? What greater wealth exists than good health! We possess such boundless good fortune and still manage to squander it, meanwhile we keep thinking, thinking endlessly: not here, somewhere else; not now, some other moment!
Each moment death rushes past just beside our ear, and we don’t feel a thing. Before we can even sense it, fulfilling all the obligations of living becomes a kind of victory. Time rolls on and death’s dense breath grows denser still around our necks. In anyone’s life, nothing more than this ever arrives or ever will.
Thought: Eight Hundred Fifteen
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One. This country has no shortage of busybodies. They don’t even have a cloth wrapped around their own loins, yet they’ll come teach you how to fasten a trouser belt!
Two. We are becoming quite grown-up these days.
Even when someone looks straight into our eyes and tells a perfect lie, we understand it all yet nod along and laugh with a knowing smile, saying yes yes, you are quite right!
Growing up means learning to grant others the freedom to lie. It may be that a lie means nothing to us, and we forgive it.
The man who has been cheating us day after day—we don’t even let him know that we have long since seen through his deception. Without any protest, we could tell him: no no, you are incapable of cheating anyone! Such a thing could never happen!
We are growing terribly old! To those whose life holds no real achievement or gain except in deceiving us, we have learned how to hand them victory.
Though the man no longer loves, we have learned to answer his “I love you!” with “I love you too!” without our voice trembling once!
Because we are growing up, we have come to know: when someone no longer loves, there is no point in spending more words about love with them.
We are growing ever older, and losing ourselves within ourselves.
We have learned to act. Life is not grand enough to be spent in endless turmoil. We now know how to hide ourselves. To show everyone who I am is merely to add suffering to life. We understand this very well now.
No one loses us anymore. We ourselves are the ones who lose ourselves!
For all that we do not need, all that we do not love, all that causes us no harm—our time to think about these three things grows steadily less. This is what happens as we grow up.
Living ourselves and letting others live—beyond this, we no longer have time to conjure any other meaning of dharma in our minds. What feeds and clothes and keeps us alive without harming another—that is dharma. Anything beyond this, whatever it may be, worrying about it is called “boundless leisure.” We see it very clearly: no one has given us the duty to save others from hell or perdition. To think about the consequences of another’s deeds that neither touch nor will touch me—that is idleness. The days of idleness are not the same as the days of growing up.
Three.
# The Plaster of Thought-Walls
Rabindranath Tagore himself placed his trust in a particular translation of the Mahabharata—one that demands our deepest reflection.
Mahamahopadhyay Haridās Siddhāntavāgīsh took up the task of translating, annotating, and expounding the Mahabharata into Bengali at thirty-five years of age. Working entirely alone, he completed this monumental undertaking thirty years later—159 volumes in all, with the original verses intact, under the title *Mahābhāratam*. The world’s history offers few parallels to such single-minded dedication. That learned translation became Tagore’s constant companion, as was only fitting.
I had acquired this edition, published by Vishwavani in forty-three volumes, many years ago. I felt moved to share it with you.
Let me add this while I’m at it: the most esteemed English translation of the Mahabharata is K.M. Ganguli’s *The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa*, published in eighteen volumes.
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**Four.** Before inviting someone to a meal, learn what they enjoy eating. What appeals to your palate may hold no charm for theirs. For one prone to allergies, a simple lentil and potato curry proves far more nourishing than an elaborate seven-course prawn preparation. Lack this small measure of sense, and your money, time, and effort dissolve into mere waste. As a bonus, you earn a reputation as a thoughtless and foolish person.
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**Five.** Speaking with people teaches you extraordinary things about yourself—things you never knew. For instance, one day you suddenly discover you regularly take Pethidine. And after pushing that injection into your body, the marketplace overflows with delicious rumors about what you do thereafter—rumors you had never heard before.
You gained knowledge. Your learning expanded. Then you return home, stand naked before the mirror, and inspect your entire body carefully for any hole or mark where you pushed that injection. Finding none, you seek out those very people from whom you first learned you were a Pethidine user. Upon seeing you, they band together and beat you soundly, for it is everyone’s sacred duty to bring a lying, drug-addicted wretch back to righteous living. Under the blows, you are forced to cry out: Yes, brothers, I take Pethidine. I swear before you all—I shall never touch it again.
Your correction fills their faces with triumph. You, who never smoked a single cigarette in your life, now stand revealed before the world as someone addicted to heroin, Pethidine, and sundry other narcotics. The truth has crystallized: you are a drug user.
Keep your eyes and ears open, and you discover the most astonishing, the most bizarre facts about yourself. Others believe and spread such strange tales about us that learning of them, we would stare wide-eyed in wonder, thinking: *Brother, why do you believe such things? Is someone paying you to spread these lies?*
—
**Five.** I recently purchased several books and felt inclined to share their images with you.
From *Sahih al-Bukhari* through *Tafsir al-Tabari*, *Tafsir al-Qurtubi*, and *Tafsir Ibn Kathir*—distilled into *The Noble Quran*, published in nine volumes—this work stands among the world’s most revered commentaries. Approved by Madinah Islamic University and distributed free by the Saudi government each year to pilgrims performing the Hajj, it bears mention that the King Fahad Complex for the Printing of the Holy Quran produces ten million copies of *The Noble Quran* annually. This tafsir appears among the books in the photographs.
It has been long since I shared with you the joy of acquiring books.
# The Plaster of Thought-Walls: Reflection 816
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**One.** From 3-6-12 to 3-6-21. Nine years have passed. The tenth year begins. Yes, exactly nine years ago on this very day I joined the service. That day marked the beginning of my journey from nobody to somebody.
Notice how auspicious the joining date is for the 30th batch?
I’ve curtailed my book-buying compared to before, yet still manage to acquire around sixty to seventy books each month on average. I know only two or three tricks to keep myself content, and one of them is this habit of buying books. I buy and store them away; I hardly ever read them. My library holds roughly seven thousand books, and new ones accumulate every single day—though precious little settles in my mind, truth be told. Still, I buy books to chip away at the remorse bit by bit. The sorrow of not being able to buy a book I long for equals the weight of several hundred deaths!
To celebrate this day, I gifted myself a few books—philosophy books. Buying them brought me great peace. I usually don’t share photographs of books in my collection; somehow it feels embarrassing. But today I felt like sharing.
**Two.** If you speak ill of someone in their absence, and they later come to know of it and suffer for it, the Creator will remove or diminish some other suffering they were destined to bear. In response to the wrong you committed against them, the Lord will forgive them some of their own wrongs. Why would He do this? Because the new suffering they incurred was not rightfully theirs. Thus, by removing or lessening their deserved suffering, justice and balance are restored. But since removing or reducing their appointed suffering might itself constitute an injustice to another, the Creator will then inscribe that suffering or punishment in your ledger of destiny—for you alone bear responsibility for all of this.
When you speak ill of someone or attempt to harm them, you yourself will face suffering or punishment. This is the judgment of nature itself. No matter how hard you try, you cannot escape that consequence. Even if you escape punishment, your child or a beloved will suffer the punishment undeservedly before your very eyes. The person you speak ill of or attempt to harm—the Creator will forgive them some of their sins while increasing yours. You will certainly face punishment for those added sins before death itself. Now the choice is yours.
**Three.** The person you can embrace and weep against without any hesitation—that person is truly the closest to you.
The person into whose eyes you can look and pour forth, without stammering, all the turbulence churning in your chest—that is the person you trust most profoundly.
# The Plaster of Thought-Walls
You will notice sometimes: a mountain of immense pain accumulates within the chest, yet not a single tear falls from the eyes. The interior churns, writhes, but across the entire face settles a silence ancient as centuries.
Why does this happen? Because search as we might, we cannot find a trustworthy chest to weep upon, nor a pair of eyes simple and open enough in which to bare the soul.
For lack of such a person, we wander the days accumulating great stones of suffering in our breast without complaint. These stones pile upon stones until they form a mountain. I can be seen—and yet the mountain inside me, far taller than myself, cannot. Because it remains unseen, we cannot truly discern, among the living figures walking before our eyes, who is dead and who is alive.
Hoarded words and hardened pain should never be kept locked within. The more tightly we compress these two things, the more terrible the anguish that grows inside. If we can lighten ourselves even by quarreling with someone, then we ought to do it. Yes, we need one person in this life—someone upon whom we can shed all our anger and sorrow. If you have such a beloved with whom you cannot bring yourself to quarrel freely, from the depths of your heart, then I would say: perhaps something is wrong with you. That person does not truly love you.
Life demands a chest—one we can flood with tears whenever we wish. Life demands a pair of eyes into which we can look and speak everything, emptying ourselves of burden. Someone with whom there is no need for pretense, before whom we can unfold ourselves as we are, without hesitation—that is what we call beloved. All others are merely necessary or unnecessary.
Sometimes we ourselves cannot quite discern who truly stands close to us, which chest is the one we trust absolutely. Then we feel terribly helpless and forsaken. The person who has everything, yet no one whose breast they can cling to and weep into without end, has nothing at all. That person is the poorest soul on earth.
If ever you discover that you have found someone in whose arms you can collapse and cry without restraint, then know this: you have found the most essential person in your life. From that day forward, there is someone in your life whom you can trust, someone whose shoulder bears your life’s weight, leaving you weightless as a feather. Never—never under any circumstance—let that person go. Whether friend, lover, mother, father, brother, sister—keep them near. For this, you must compromise with anything that requires it.
If keeping yourself well means inhabiting a relationship undefined, unnamed—so be it. Health matters more than recognition. What those who cannot care for you say, what they call you—none of it matters.
The most precious treasure in all the world is your own well-being. You may love someone who cannot or will not care for you—love them, yes—but do not decide to spend your entire life with them. To be with someone who keeps you well is sweeter than to be with someone merely loved.
—
**Four.**
“Brother, did you keep a dog?”
“No, brother. I did not.”
Once a dog kept me. Now it keeps someone else.
“What’s all this talk, Dhuor Mia?”
“Speaking plain truth, brother! In this world, some people keep dogs, and some people are kept by dogs. It’s all destiny!”
Thought: Number Eight-Seventeen
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One. Among the sorrows of this world that we are compelled to swallow in silence, one stands apart: watching your mother and father grow old before your very eyes.
The strong hands that taught us to navigate this world—gradually, in time, those same hands grow soft right before us.
The arm we would rest our head upon and fall asleep—one day we watch its skin crease and shrivel.
The person who taught us to stand upright as a child—one day we see that very person begin to stoop.
To my eyes, one of the world’s harshest sights is watching your parents grow old and ill before you.
The older we grow, the more our parents age. And one day, at some unexpected hour, we discover: the two superheroes who made us heroes are slowly, inexorably moving toward their great departure.
We understand these fragmented truths, yet somehow we cannot accept them.
We can easily resign ourselves to a thousand deaths, to unbearable agony, but—
Let the world crack and shatter, let everything crumble, let planets and stars and the entire cosmos turn upside down, and still—the thought that our parents will leave us, that even a fraction of death’s torment will touch their bodies, this thought simply never enters our minds. We cannot bear it. We will not. Not in any way! Not ever!
Two. When your words don’t suit me, I don’t grow angry or laugh. Instead, I usually begin to think about what you’ve said, about your position. Even when I hear something that runs entirely counter to my understanding and experience, rather than protest, I sit quietly and think: what exactly are you trying to say? How much truth lies in what you’re saying? I am no longer your patron, to hang you for the “crime” of speaking unpalatable truths!
In me there works a kind of fear of ignorance, or a hunger to transcend it, which urges me to learn from you and from others about any matter. I desire, with genuine respect, to understand your thinking—even if it walks a path opposite to mine. And it’s not as though this causes me no pain. But however much it hurts, I prefer to think about and understand opposing views, so that I may reconcile and come to terms with myself and my own work. If you criticize something I’ve done—if you judge my work without anger or bias, with truth and understanding—then I will bow my head and accept even your harshest rebuke.
But if I see that someone is not attacking my work, but rather fussing over my person; if they’re trying to spread lies about me that have no truth in them; if they’re arriving at false conclusions about me based on what others have told them or mere conjecture—then I feel a fierce mockery and anger arise within me. You may form assumptions about me, but I hold far deeper knowledge of myself. My understanding of myself is truer than your speculation about me.
# The Plaster of Thought-Walls
Unpleasant truths I can bear, but unpleasant lies—I have neither the time nor the patience for them. And even if I did possess such time, I would not gift it to someone who is utterly unnecessary to my life. I have seen it countless times: those who thrust their unsolicited advice and counsel upon others are mostly here to inflate themselves while diminishing me. Anyone who makes me feel small has no place in the architecture of my life.
Yes, I do tolerate unpleasant lies—I must, in silence—when my boss tells them about me, or when someone I genuinely need speaks them. Bearing a boss’s falsehoods and venom is simply part of the employment. Consider this: I have not smoked a single cigarette in my entire life, yet if my boss or someone vital to my interests were to secretly judge me a drug addict and silently declare their victory, I would have no protest to lodge. A fool’s happiness lives in their own mind—why provoke the fool? The capable win through truth; the incapable win through lies.
I am always prepared to receive honest criticism of my work, for it benefits me above all—I can improve myself. But I truly have neither the patience nor the time to absorb your anger, jealousy, or venom directed at me or my professional, personal, familial, or any other circumstance. I am not so weak as to let the tyranny of some stranger’s false account hold dominion over my mind. Besides, only the incompetent mistake criticism for condemnation. Accept the company of incompetent people, and soon you find yourself standing in their place.
Three. Often people fail despite tremendous effort, while others succeed with scarcely a try. The question is fundamentally about failure and success, not about striving or idleness. Once success reveals itself, even the effortless past is forgiven and praised, yet nobody speaks of a failed person’s perseverance until the very end!
Four. Happiness and love—these two matters are profoundly, utterly relative.
One man draws strange comfort from cigarette after cigarette, while another cannot bear even the smoke of the same thing.
The thief whom society sees as a criminal, a character of absolute depravity, is to someone else the person of their heart, to another a father worthy of divine reverence, a son, a brother.
The man who endures scolding and mistreatment every single day—that very same person is someone else’s reason to shed secret tears each night.
Every human being’s emotions and feelings are of a different kind. Each sentiment and its expression belong to a separate house in the realm of relativity.
The person you love with everything you possess may not love you at all, but may give themselves entirely to someone else. You cannot fathom why your love counts for nothing to them. To watch pure love rendered worthless and still accept it in silence is not easy. Here is the strangest part: the person you love with all your heart loves someone else entirely. So your beloved is also sitting in that same waiting room of uncertainty as you are, caught in an endless vigil. This is a tangled, confused, unresolved mystery in this world.
And yet people love. And yet, spitting upon all the world’s logic, people still search for happiness and insist on living.
In the arithmetic of gain and loss, caught between the millstones of happiness and sorrow, an entire life is ground away—and we scarcely notice when it is gone.
At some final twilight hour of life, we suddenly discover…alas, I have gained nothing in this life!
Yet again, at some dusk or beneath a moon breaking through clouds, we grasp it clearly…that joy and sorrow in this life are nothing but a bewildering riddle assembled from rows upon rows of zeroes.
Thought: Eight Hundred Eighteen
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One. Even when people reach the end of life without finding love, they still do not wish to witness or experience the giving and receiving of love. If one seeks to know why they do not wish it, one must look back at those days they have spent in the mere absence of love. He who has not received love cannot bear another’s love being offered to him.
Rather than dwell on whether this matter of love is for a lifetime or merely a moment, I wonder if we truly know anything about the permanence of a whole lifetime at all. What meaning is there in spending even a moment on what only eternity knows? The greater one’s reluctance to accept, the more one must prepare oneself to feel a certain groundless sorrow and regret in the living of life.
The girl I was enchanted by in the bookshop yesterday evening, when I wished to speak with her—even after she made it clear with her eyes that consent was there, that two people could sit facing each other for some time and drink two cups of coffee together—still we could not sit and converse openly. We have learned to search for sin in the steam of coffee, instead of warmth.
We understand “bond” to mean the bonds of an entire life. Yet we have never truly grasped what an entire lifetime even means. When we felt sorrow because we did not meet the demand of a single moment, was that moment outside of life itself? In the end, this question remains.
We prefer to think that we do not belong to each other! Since we do not, then how do we sit facing one another like this? What two people in this world have ever truly belonged to each other, and who knew it before it happened, or understood it even after? We have no wish to examine such things, only because of some scattered wrong voices. A person never truly becomes another’s; a person fundamentally remains only oneself until death.
Though friendship may lay claim to some love, love in this world makes no claim upon friendship. And nobody troubles themselves, nor truly understands, that in spreading the warmth of one’s heart there may dwell only a pure intention or a simple pull. In a society of the ignorant and the foolish, to speak of understanding is itself a great difficulty. Before such a conversation can even begin, proclamations of silencing arrive with haste.
Where there exists this strange belief that to be in a loving relationship with someone, one must remain in physical proximity or always at their side—in such a place, no conversation born of mutual trust and affection, whether brief or long, can ever come to be!
Why must love necessarily exist in conversation? Why must we push away a conversation that arises from pure liking alone? We do not truly seek answers to such questions. Because we do not seek them, under the name of bond we gain only a chain, not a person. Our dwelling and understanding are with the chain, not with the human being. Our inherited legacy consists only of the tradition and habit of wearing chains, the indulgence and ease of remaining blind. Not merely to wear them, but to place them upon others; not merely to remain, but to make remain!
One can spend some time with someone one finds appealing or has just taken a liking to, without expecting anything in return. This is the truth of a person.
# The Plaster of Thought-Walls
One can certainly spend a little time with someone one likes, or has just taken a liking to—on the condition that this affection endures for a lifetime. This is what we call the truth of society.
Whether one can speak a little with someone one likes, or has just taken a liking to, is a matter we each think about in our own ways—or perhaps we think nothing about it at all. Yet what will happen shall happen regardless, and the joy or sorrow of that happening is determined very little by the present moment and context. This is what we call the truth of life.
If someone searching for reasons why they were drawn to another finds sin there, then who could be a greater sinner than they? Sinners are forever hunting for more sin. Sinners see sin most clearly through their eyes.
If the condition for spending a life with another is that affection flow in only one direction, then that condition is neither love nor loyalty. It is merely a social contract—one that cares nothing for the truth of a person’s heart or life. And because it cares nothing, it breaks easily.
The collision of three truths—the personal, the social, and the vital—becomes inevitable at a certain point. That point is called *survival*. And this very point is called the truth of the moment. The harder it is for someone to bear and accept the truth of the moment, the more complex the meaning of life becomes for them.
We search for sin only in the body, yet all sin—its dwelling, its settlement, its flourishing—takes root in the mind alone.
**Two.** Solitude is of two kinds:
The solitude of not finding the person one desired,
The solitude of finding that very person, yet remaining alone.
The second is far more anguishing.
Truth be told, solitude cannot be measured by whether one has found another or not. Those who think that if they could only find a certain person, no more sorrow would exist in this life—I say to them: two people are never the same after finding each other as they were before.
People transform when they are found.
**Three.** There are a few pieces I have written that I myself do not have the courage to read. One of them is “On the Death and Rebirth of the Poet.” Tonight at 9 PM, I will upload a recitation of this poem in Manisha Maitra’s production. I will post it on my YouTube channel, my Facebook page, and will certainly share it in my profile and groups as well.
I have written this poem precisely about how the faces and roles of those around us change when we fall into trouble.
I carry intense emotion bound up with this poem. Everything that has happened in the poet’s life in these lines has happened word-for-word in my own. When you read this poem, the understanding you form about people is fundamentally what they are. You feel it in your bones when you fall into trouble. In that hour, you will not find anyone truly trustworthy by your side; worse still, those who stood beside you wearing the mask of friendship will show you a completely different face.
Almost everyone participates in the festival of cruelty, or watches in silence and savors it. The hunger to watch others trampled and tormented unites mankind. Having seen that face of humanity with such clarity, the praise or blame of people hardly touches me. I have understood: we are mostly preoccupied with people who are entirely unnecessary.
I have provided the link to the poem in the first comment, for interested readers.
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**Thought: Eight Hundred Nineteen**
**……………………………………………**
One. The very man who laughs and rolls about giggling in the company of friends, that spirited soul—perhaps when he steps into his home and turns off the light, he presses his face into the pillow and weeps in shuddering sobs.
The very man who says, “Come on, friend!
# The Plaster of Thought-Walls
What good is all this thinking! Eat, drink, make merry—the world is vast and wide! Life won’t come twice!’ So speaks the man who consoles others with such platitudes, yet perhaps every night he swallows an anti-depressant tablet and surrenders to sleep.
The man whose face beams with perpetual good cheer—looking at him, I find myself wistful, thinking, ‘Oh, if only I could be happy like him!’—that very merrymaker perhaps cannot sleep a single night without strong sedatives.
We see in a person only what they choose to show us.
Beyond that, there exists within each soul an entirely different, vast world—one whose existence we never truly comprehend, perhaps never can. Only that person themselves knows what they actually are. The rest of us merely guess.
The man who speaks in coarse, vulgar, unspeakable language—that foul-mouthed creature perhaps walks the same route home every day and gives a packet of biscuits to the street’s limping, helpless dog.
The man we hastily brand with labels of cruelty, harshness, and callousness—that wretched fellow perhaps treads so carefully around an ant that his foot never crushes its body.
The man I have never once seen tenderly caressing his own child—that indifferent soul perhaps weeps with a shattered heart, howling with grief, when the neighborhood’s dog dies.
Every person carries some admirable quality we never discover. Within each human dwells a deity. A person is one thing outwardly, quite another within. Humans are fundamentally creatures of mixed nature.
No person is ever entirely bad, nor entirely good.
There exist in this world many people who are like coconuts—a hard shell without, but soft, flowing water within.
Humans have a love of hiding themselves away; sometimes they are simply forced to.
What a person yearns for is this: that others understand them not by their words, but by their deeds; that someone will break through that hard outer casing and discover the tender human inside.
Yet in the end, every person remains undiscovered. This is why we consider the smiling person happy. And yet—most of the world’s smiles are cunningly employed as the most perfect of masks!
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**Two.** I believe children should grow according to their own nature. We should not interfere in anything they do. So when I stand on my apartment’s balcony and watch children joyfully jumping on parked cars, flinging mud onto them as they please, I say nothing to them. To me, one child’s happiness is worth far more than a thousand expensive automobiles. Besides, that car isn’t even mine—and neither are the children!
**Three.** There is no greater punishment than spending time with a stingy person!
Oh God! All those who have abandoned me—may you make their bones as tight-fisted as their hearts!
**Four.** A fool is a fool precisely because he has never felt shame at being one.
A fool always desires another fool with a kind heart, someone who will coddle him endlessly; like me, for instance.
**Five.** When hair turns gray, it becomes white. Looking at those white hairs, our spirits may indeed sink—and rightly so. We may even find ourselves unable to accept this graying with any peace of mind. But what does it matter? The hair has turned gray; in the end, this is simply the truth, is it not? Believe it or not, when your mood darkens, your gray hair does not suddenly return to its former color.
Yet yes—to lighten our spirits, we can dye that white hair.
With dye, grey hair becomes black, reddish, brown, or whatever color we fancy. Our hearts might leap with delight at the sight, yet greying hair remains grey—it will never turn young again. Our heads will still be crowned with grey hair, only now it is grey hair dyed black, reddish, or brown. Even if someone takes offense, hair greying does not stop. The angry man’s hair greys, the calm man’s hair greys too. Perhaps to avoid trouble, everyone stands before the angry man with dyed grey hair and declares it young, merely to keep the peace! Very well then—but it is not only the angry who receive this “special honor.” The fool receives it too!
Black-dyed grey hair and naturally black hair are not the same thing. Accept it or not, the truth remains true.
Six. We kick the cow that gives us milk. The cow that gives no milk—she does not get kicked by us.
This is our national tradition.
Yet the cow goes on giving milk, for she can scarcely do anything else. This is not her magnanimity; it is her nature. Yes, this is why she is called a cow. And she remains a cow her whole life long.
Seven. To expect safety from a lion’s roar in a pasture is also foolishness. Cows cannot fire guns, true enough, but the cowherd can!
Eight. When clearing weeds, one may accidentally cut down a good plant or two. Yet it is still better to clear away the weeds.
I believe no uncle is better than a blind uncle. But if there is the matter of receiving something from that blind uncle, then it is another story. We understand well enough—if a cow gives milk, we may kick her even so; she can bear it.
You strike someone without reason, and they say to you, “My treasure, my precious soul! Who has forbidden you to strike? Come, beloved, come to my breast!” … How does such a thought enter your head? Everyone has the freedom to speak their mind, but no one has the freedom to be rude or to vex another. In this world, rudeness is excused nowhere.
Whoever vexes you deserves a kick, if you are bound to him by no ties of obligation.