BIRTHDAY OF FIRE

Human beings shivering in rains, shrunk in cold, scorched in summer and eating food raw and unbaked was the picture till the advent of fire and light. Light ofcourse they had thru the sun in the sky, but it was not mostly light, the friend but often some phenomena from the above beyond one's purpose. Heat almost they had none except the sun's heat. What would they have thought of the sun as the source of light and heat? Did they have concepts of light and heat as seperate? Without fire in the life of mankind, would any form of civilisation have been possible? Cold and darkness seem such domiciled creatures now; but not so in the pre-fire ages of mankind. Food was raw, tools were rough, climate a dictator colluding with the wild- the picture is already bleak. There was only a spark in the brain pulling him thru all the untowardness in the surroundings--the spark of cognition, the spark of thinking, the spark of understanding.
Somehow fire came to man or man learnt to make fire. Many mythologies cherish some story or another about the fire's coming to mankind. The whole Rig Veda seems a mystical register of the biography of fire, the Agni. Prometheus brings fire from Heaven and incurs the wrath of Zeus.

Fire the external spark in the outside world enhanced the human life in innumerable ways. Civilisation and culture were but consequences; religion became a possibility;
story-telling was born, technology sharpened--man could taste what was freedom.
All because this ancient seer- agni, FIRE came to reside among men as the messenger between men and gods, as the bridge between the past and the future.
Some day should have been the birthday of this most important guest of mankind,
the strong friend, the sagacious guide and the sublime philosopher of physical
inspiration. Maybe Deepavali is one such day, the birthday of light, the birthday of
heat, the day of advent of the FIRE. Let us wish him a happy birthday !!

SRI KRISHNA

A stray arrow from the wilderness
To an illusive target
Of an untrodding foot
Could prove the finale
Of a narrative begun
Before the beginning of the sun
And moving on and on, way beyond
Even after the earth has come to an end
Bearing the holocaust on its honed tip
To the nested peace of the pained bliss;
Perhaps the arrow,
The self-same one
Rent by the hunter
Into the bird and bard of poesy
Bereavement cursed breaking the word
Into flesh of sounds
And breathing the meaning into the forest of the soul.

VENU IN THE ROLE OF ASVATTAAMAN

This is the picture of the actors in the sanskrit play 'Asvatthama' staged in Trichy way back during 1950s !! You can see my father, the indomitable VENU, in the role of Asvatthama--standing, Ist row, right extreme. The sacred thread is conspicuous. It has a bearing on the character-on-stage. My father used to say that he was able to bring full force into the acting by taking the proverbial oath of Asvatthama stretching the thread taut by the left hand while gesturing the oath by the right.(Asvatthama is the son of Drona, the brahmin teacher of military arts to Pandavas and Kauravas in the story of Mahabharatha. When Drona was becoming invincible in the war-field he was downed by a trickery of words. By the by, the great epic is available in English translations. In Tamil, the entire epic inclusive was brought out after 20 odd years of effort in 1930s and 1940s by the great M V Ramanujachariar swamy thru his Mahabharatham press in Kumbakonam. After 1955 it was long out of print for nearly 50 years. Luckily, now,it is being brought out in 9 tomes, already 4tomes are out, by one Venkataraman, my friend) You should have seen my father acting out various characters even while reading out. A genius and a genuine thespian was lost by Tamilnad unawares. 

Srirangam Mohanarangan 

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