So, what do these flags signify to a generation for whom the musical and aesthetic value overpowers and somewhat overlaps its intrinsic or acquired spiritual and religious value?
During my travels in North India and Nepal, my sub-conscious, with the conscious overwhelmed by the unpredictability, vibrancy and unexpected encounters of the places and the people I came across, assigned a meaning, albeit very personal, to this mantra, stripped of its pre-assigned religious meaning. A 33-day long stay in Nepal further strengthened my perception and understanding of “Om Mani Padme Hum”. The mere syllables inscribed on flags were now, to me, modes of memorial association with faces, smiles, greetings, conversations, glances, long walks, and more.
Gorkha
“OM”
I hear the clanking of utensils in the adjacent makeshift kitchen of a house in the village of Nomjung in Gorkha. The sun has just set, but its crimson embers, while bidding adieu to the velvet blue of the advancing night, inspires reflection; a reflection that is not forced, but flows through the veins of scattered thoughts, and settles, like an anchored boat on a still lake. In a moment of thoughtless stillness, when your body feels like smoke, and when the mountains, the leafless trees, the sky, the smoke from the houses, and everything in sight blurs out and hits you in the middle of the chest, forcing a forlorn tear, a vagrant smile, when you have given your being in to submission, you will have experienced “Om”.
Kathmandu
“Ma Ni”
My 6th day in Kathmandu. Standing on the rooftop of an out-of-the-place 4-storey apartment in the middle of the city with a cup of cold lemon tea waiting on the parapet. I stopped midway through a sentence as my gaze turned to the sun stealing light from the valley as it shyly hides in between unnamed, snow-capped peaks as if guilty of a crime. My gaze was disturbed by the one standing opposite to me with a dying smoke in his hand. For an instance, when the mist hovered heavy over the city, the buildings resembling legos, the mountains a sight from an animated movie, I forgot how I had met him and ended up here on this terrace. Did I meet him today? Was he a friend? Nothing surfaced on my memory bed.
Only that we had talked about peace sitting on the corner bench of a Nepali soldier’s old summer house in the heart of the city. I remembered the squirrel on the adjacent tree which had caught our attention. Maybe I even remembered him from another distant, sunny December afternoon, sitting like silence on a bench, disturbed by words.
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