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Oppiliappan List Archive: Message 00118 Apr 2004

 
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Dear friends,

As I sit tapping out this posting on my keyboard, a
line from a very famous Vedic passage echoes in my
ears. In the Vedic "prashna" or passage called
"chamakam" there is a "mantric" chant that speaks of
the many wondrous blessings of life  bestowed upon a
Vedic adherent. To the repeated chant of the Vedic
litany, "may cha cha may!" (meaning, "May I be
bestowed with (such and such) blessing..."), the
euphonious "chamakam" passage goes on to recount an
exhaustive list of several human blessings to aspire
for in life -- such as, for instance, well-being,
love, wealth, progeny, plentiful food, worship... so
on and so forth:

       "sham cha may, mayas-cha may
         priyam cha may 'nukAMascha may...
       ....
       deerghAyucha may na'mitram cha may..."

Now, towards the end of one "anuvAka" of the
"chamaka-prashnam" there is a curious phrase, so full
of significance, that describes one of the rarest
blessing of life --

       "na'mitram cha may..."

"na-mitram" in Sanskrit means "a state of being
friendless in this world"; "anamitram" is never being
in such a state.

One of the rarest of blessings a man can hope for is
never -- not for a single moment in life -- to be in a
state of "friendless-ness". Being friendless in this
world is the next worst thing to being orphaned. To be
orphaned in life is tragedy; to be friendless is a
curse. At every stage of one's life, says this Vedic
line, be it in childhood, youth or manhood, one must
always be blessed with the company of good and
abundant friends. 

At no time in life is the value of friends more
strongly felt than in two particular situations. One
is in sickness or old age. The other is when one is in
an alien land, far from home, and amongst utter
strangers. The need for human friends and warm
companionship in old age is indeed very acutely felt.
It is a terrible thing indeed -- far more terrible
than ill-health -- not to have enough friends in old
age. In the evening of our lives, when it seems as
though everyone is shunning our company, it is in the
evening of our lives more than ever that we need lots
of friends with whom to spend the rest of time left in
the world. Similarly, landing up on foreign soil
amidst alien people, and not knowing the native
language, customs or manners -- i.e. being
"friendless" or "namitram", or feeling lost in a
faraway land -- that can also be equally painful.  

One of the many reasons we are asked to chant the
famous passage of mantras from the Vedic "chamakam" is
to protect ourself against falling into a state or
situation of such abject "friendless-ness" in life. If
ever proof was needed of the compassion and solicitude
the Vedas have for human beings, it is truly in this
significant phrase -- "na'mitram cha may..."  

                  ***********

I regarded my first ever visit to the vast and great
land of America with a certain amount of nervousness
since I hardly had any true friends ("mitra:") there
to welcome me (although I must hasten to add here that
I have many close kin). But thanks to a very pleasant
experience that befell me by sheer chance, I did not,
after all, have to go friendless -- or, "namitram" --
in America. On the contrary, the real significance of
the Vedic phrase "na'mitram cha may..." came to be
driven home more starkly to me in America than at any
place else or anytime ever before. 
 
                  ************
                  
Every year numberless people go to India as excited
tourists. Many of them transform into humble pilgrims.

One may go visiting the great many historic temples of
India as a casual tourist but there should be no
surprise if it is as pilgrim that one returns. I have
seen this happen all too often -- the tourist who went
to enjoy himself at the hill-resort of Kodaikanal
returns instead as a pilgrim of the famous Madurai
Meenakshi-amman temple; the tourist who went with the
purpose of shopping for silk returns from Kanchipuram
talking  more about the great historical temples there
than about sarees or scarves; the tourist who went to
Calcutta to see the colonial splendour of the Victoria
Memorial there returns instead with accounts of a trip
to the Belur or Dakshineshwar... 

I went to America too with a tourist's expectation of
plain fun and curiosity. Certainly, I did enjoy the
grand sight of the New York skyline from the edge of
Ellis Island. I watched too with gaping admiration,
alongwith hundreds of tourists, the great Statue of
Liberty. Again, as I drove through the maze of streets
in Manhattan and past "Ground-Zero" -- the sad remains
of the Twin-Tower site of the "9/11" carnage --I too,
like any ordinary tourist, could not suppress a lump
in my throat...

But although America greeted me as a plain tourist --
one amongst statistical thousands who throng the
country from all parts of the globe every year -- it
was with a pilgrim's humble but overwhelming emotion
that I eventually returned from the tour. And the
reason was, quite simply, a temple... Yes, a temple,
again indeed, but a "temple" of entirely another sort.

There are 106 great temples in India designated in the
Tamil language as "divya-dEsam-s", or "divine
provinces". Thousands of worshippers flock every year
to these beautiful places. In America, across the
length and breadth of the land, there are similar such
wonderful "temples" -- probably 106 or even more of
them -- which, in my opinion, deserve no less to be
duly designated and revered as "divya-dEsam-s". These
"temples" are "temples of learning". I mean the great
many Universities of America -- such as Yale, Harvard,
Stanford, MIT and a host of others -- all the great
universities that collectively have made America the
world's wonderland of higher education. Young and
brilliant minds from the farthest corners of Asia,
India, Europe, Latin America and Africa -- so many
students every year flock to these "divya-dEsam-s" of
advanced learning in so many fields and disciplines...
It would make anyone wonder why? I was no exception.

If there be but one compelling reason for touring
India and should that be in being able to visit a
"divya-dEsam" temple, then by the same token, I would
have no hesitation in saying, a tour of the USA is
well worth it for the sake of a few hours spent inside
any of the country's great many eminent universities.
The American university as a place of lofty learning
and knowledge is as sacred a patch of soil upon earth
as any holy "divya-dEsam" I have been blessed to
visit. 

America, I realized, is really more sacred
"gnyAna-bhoomi" or "vidyA-bhoomi" than mere
"bhOga-bhUmi". 
   
                  *************

On a clear and fine day in spring, March 20th '04 --
my first day in America -- I set out from New Jersey
on a long 4-hour route on my first ever pilgrimage to
an American "divya-dEsam" ... which in this case was
the University of Connecticut or "U-Conn" as many
young American students, I later discovered, call it
with the same sort of fondness a SriVaishnavan like
me, say, would refer to the "divya-dEsam" of Tirupati,
back home in India, as "malai" or SriRangam as
"kOvil".

The route took me past the arterially busy George
Washington Bridge, a big, bustling and nodal gateway
through which an unending stream of gnarled, and often
snarling, automobile traffic gushes in and out of the
states of New Jersey and neighbouring Connecticut. As
my car swung into the fast-lane along the long,
winding and snow-swept 'Interstate', I became aware
I'd entered, for the first time ever in my life, into
a whole new fabled world -- the world of the great
American highways... a vast, labyrinthian but
efficient network of roadways criss-crossing miles and
miles over a giant of a continent. 

My companion and chaperone on the trip to the American
"divya-dEsam" was my good Muslim friend, Syed Nawaz
Ahmed. Nawaz and I had been classmates in school 30
and more years ago in Chennai, India. We had not met
-- nor had we corresponded with each other -- since
1972 when we both left high school to each follow our
separate ways in life. It was by sheer accident -- one
of those miraculous happenstances one often hears
occurs these days on the world-wide Internet circuit
-- it was pure happenstance that Nawaz and I came into
contact again in late 2003 --- after almost three
decades! 

Nawaz had migrated to the USA in the early '80s where
in New York he had set up his own limousine-car
service company. He and his family had thrived, he
told me, and he was now presiding over a prosperous
business with many important clients including (he
told me in hushed tones) "top-ranking officers of the
FBI"! 

Afer 30 long years, to meet up again with a dear old
school friend in far off America was a rare and moving
moment of revival indeed in life... It was a blessing
of Vedic character too, for, the "chamaka-prashna"
line of "na'mitram cha may..!", for quite some strange
reason, began to ring ceaselessly in my ears... It did
not stop until long after I'd wound up my first tour
of America and set sail home...

                    **********

More miracles of friendship were to follow! 

Motoring down an American interstate into Connecticut
with my old friend, Nawaz, I found myself eagerly
looking forward to meeting with -- miracle of
miracles! -- yet another old school-mate of ours
residing now in the "divya-dEsam" of "U-conn". It was
at the invitation of this other friend, in fact, that
we, both Nawaz and I, were headed that way. We were
journeying to a grand class re-union in America -- 3
friends from Chennai who hadn't met in more than 30
years! 

His name -- Narasimhan Srinivasan... He and I, I
instantly recalled, had been the only two
SriVaishnavite boys in the whole of that class of '72
way back in the Catholic Missionary school we'd
studied together... "Hans" (as Narasim(han) was being
called by everybody in America) was now (tenured)
Associate Professor of Marketing at "UConn". How he
had changed indeed! His lectures and published papers,
Nawaz later told me, were now legend in academic
circles. He had attained some kind of near
'campus-guru' status amongst his students. But by God,
Nawaz said to me, though transformed in America into
"Hans", Narasimhan remained still the same old fellow
we'd known in our school days... a jolly good friend,
a true "mitra:"...
                
               *************   

As I now look back upon the moment of my re-union with
two good friends whom I'd all but forgotten for 30
years --  but brought together again by sheer, blessed
accident, in far-off America, on the sacred grounds of
a great American temple of learning, a "divya-dEsam"
of sorts -- what can I say about such a moment except
that it seemed somehow God pre-ordained.

As Nawaz drove me through America past the cities of
Hartford and Yale and into the snow-swept county of
Glastonbury, heading towards "U-Conn", the familiar
chant of the "chamakam" kept ringing silently in my
ears --

           "na'mitram cha may...."

             (to be continued)

Regards,

dAsan,
Sudarshan         





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