Pages

Showing posts with label vethaalam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vethaalam. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

my Vetaal

King Vikramaditya and the Vethaal


They say everyone has their own baggage that they carry around. Most of the time, like any baggage, it weighs you down, will even leave you paralyzed. Still, there must be some good kind of baggage too. There are some kinds that never gets lost, or that we can never totally get rid of. We may put it down for a while, but soon like long lost friends or unwanted guests show up at inopportune times. Or worse, like that wily devil or vampire or ghost, Vetaal/Bethal/Vethaalam of the Vikramaditya stories, climb onto our shoulders and refuse to let go. A dead weight that  manages to drag one down, fill us with dread and despair. A point comes when we just want to get rid of the burden. Out with the bad, and whatever outdated, or spoiled stuff is  in there, which may have been good once, for that time. The only way out then is to listen to that Bethal and answer its questions, which may or may not help me in the end.

Mine is a peculiar kind of baggage. Nothing special, but then I guess everyone's baggage must be special to them. When people talk of baggage, I always hear of doing the wrong things in the past, doing a lot of wrong things, having a racy youth, having lost a lot of valuable things, say, in the area of relationships. When I say "wrong" I do not mean to say that they were all wrong in the moral sense. They may have been or not, but I think that those become baggage when the individual looks back with regret and considers them to have been the wrong choice, the wrong path to take.

In any case,the peculiarity of  my baggage is that it is empty. My Vetaal is unreal. When I look into it, there is nothing in there! My past and present are ruled by inaction. No racy past - to sum it up. No  addictions to recover from, or to not recover from,  not even one shade of grey to feel guilty or proud of, or to cherish - - nothing that I can thrash around and about. Painfully shy, and  submitting to the Nazrani conditioning, rebelliously at times, I avoided all excitement. Except for the grand speeches and  funny gestures made within that safe circle of family and friends. I did manage to get that reputation of willfulness, stubbornness, and sheer muleheadedness from most of them, though. But many did not care about the extent to which I succumbed to tradition in the end. My perfectionism (quite personal) and that other personal code of honor-  of duty, responsibility and loyalty took care of that. So now this empty bag of mine weighs a ton. And it has been asking me these questions.

Did I make the wrong choices? Take the wrong path? Still no clear answer. But the answer that comes up right now is that maybe not. At those points in time, those were the only ones to take. Should I be happy about that? Not necessarily, and not necessarily should I be unhappy either. Things are as they are. Hope that Vetaal is satisfied, at least for now.