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| AHYMSIN Newsletter, Issue - June 2013 | |||||
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Barun Kumar Pal Concert and the Guruby Joanne Sullivan (Divya)Shri Barun Kumar Pal’s concert on Friday evening, March 1st, reminded me of my first meetings with Dr. Arya/Swami Veda. It called up a deep sense of how Swami Veda has touched my life. His physical frailty and the awareness of one day not seeing him made Barun Kumar Pal’s performance deeply personal for me. In my notes which you will see below, I can almost touch the joy and surprise of Mr. Pal’s meetings with his own guru as a young man in one particular song. It was like reading words on a page and I strongly identified with it. Lately I have been flooded with thoughts of my early years with Dr. Arya/Swami Veda and of his overflowing, endless love over the years. Like others who have spoken of this, I feared that in silence he would remove himself. But he has not. He is more present than ever. At the time of this concert, I did not know this, imagined that Swami Veda would just disappear into his cave. The cave is there. He has been carrying it with him and in us for many years. Though I do not always feel it, I believe that this is the truth and not poeticizing. Yet it is clear that I have so much to learn to grow deep in my communion with the Guru, who is not a physical form. It is all in my hands and I can do nothing at all about it. I believe that both are true, practice and in grace. It will not be through words. As Swami Veda said on 7th March, 2013, “only through Sadhana will you verify all that I am saying. Be ambitious.” Like many of us, I think, “can I go deep enough to find him? The guru, in any human form. Will I find him in my next life? Will I find him in this life?” This, more than the driving search for enlightenment has been the fire beneath me for many years, probably, like many of us, because of the love we have felt from and for our teacher. I cannot imagine attaining enlightenment but I can imagine perfection in love. I strive for love of my guru and for love without an object but I now understand that I do not know what it is. One has to live it every moment to become it and, like most of us, I am easily distracted with lesser concerns. What did Mr. Pal say with music that night? The first song was the favorite raga of Barun Kumar Pal’s guru, Pandit Ravi Shankar, the musical genius who died 11th December 2012. Mr. Pal said he had not played since the death of his guru but that he had decided that on this night he would resume playing in front of Swami Veda Bharati. It was indeed a very special event. He played the chitra-veena with tabla accompaniment. Mr. Pal invented his musical instrument, which is a cousin to the Hawaiian slide guitar. First, before playing, he explained some technicalities, that the first piece would begin with an omkara and an alap which served as an introduction and an unfolding of the mood, thus establishing the link between musicians and audience. “It would be a saturated point,” he explained, and then would hopefully go higher and higher.” It did. Here are some of my meanderings as I listened to the music. This is not a poem. It is what I felt through the grace that filled the music in me and probably in so many others in attendance that night. The first notes seemed to say “Guru! Guru! Guruji!” Walking through the smoke of dusk, great empty fields all around, looking toward a lush and distant wood. Sweet, so sweet, so sweet. It was a bittersweet interlude, and I felt like I was a stream running alongside the musician or that we were in the same stream for a moment as I remembered my own first realization that I had found my teacher--- a very young Pandit Usharbudh Arya, later to become Swami Veda Bharati. At one point in that first raga, there was one boldly repeating note like a water pot catching rain in the desert after 20 years with no rain. “Am I the opening, the hole in the sky that lets the rain out or am I the greedy-for-water empty water jug?” I asked myself. That one note repeated again and again. It seemed to say “This is the note! This is the note! This is the note!” and “I have found my guruji!” After the concert, I asked Barun Kumar Pal if this piece recounted his first meeting as a young man with his guru and then his time with him through the many years’ unfolding. Yes, he nodded, that gentle smile parting worlds. I mentioned to him that I thought that there was one place where there was a strikingly missed note. That missing note called out to the high heavens. Was that so? I asked. I was sure that I had heard it but then something in me needed to be sure. Again he nodded and smiled quietly. Here are some more thoughts I had as I listened. Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain down! The rain wants you to know him. A deluge. Could be a flood. Everyone is wet but no one knows rain, the face of rain yet. “Here I am! Here I am!” The rain said. But I was looking behind me, trying hard not to get wet. “Is this what it’s like for a Maitreya Buddha or a God who wants to light the way?!” I wondered. Everyone comes for a glimpse or a whisper but no one says “God, God, you have finally come. Take me up in your lap, Mother! Mother! Mother I never had.” The intentionally missed note plays louder than a thundering cloudburst that wipes out a mountain. Rising up, I accidentally hit the moon. She smiles. Then the sun comes out for another 500 years and at last glance Rain (Guru) said “I will wait. I will wait for you forever.” I remembered a meeting with Swami Rama when I first came to the Himalayan Institute in 1979. He was waiting at the door in his red robes when our car arrived late at night from Minnesota. He invited me to his room where two secretaries sat. He asked me why I had not told him I was getting married. I replied that I did not want to bother him, and I felt that if it was important he would know—and anyway, I thought that he had given up on me. He pounded the table so hard I thought it might break, shouting “I never give up on my students! Never!” More about the song, an allegory of Rain or Guru. I leapt up toward that last drop of rain and He smiled at me, Rain-inside-out. And there was nothing left but a horizon so night-black that it shimmered. Then I remembered last year’s Shivaratri, realizing that it was the last time I would hear Swami Veda call out the thousand names of Shiva. I tried and tried but could not talk about it. In India, some say that Shivaratri is the darkest night of the year and cold. Most years, it falls on the lunar calendar when is still winter. On Shivaratri, 2012, the sky lit up brighter than a thousand suns, it was that dark. Rain said, Guru said “You called and called and called and I came. Then you turned and walked away. My child, you walked away.” (constantly distracted) After the concert, when a few of us exchanged thoughts on the concert, Mr. Pal said that his guru’s last concert was in October, 2011 at the London Philharmonic. It was a full moon night and he usually composed a full moon song. At this, his last concert, he instead sang to his wife a full moon song by Rabindranath Tagore, “Sedin Dujone Dulechhinu.” Mr. Pal said that it was especially poignant and in retrospect, even more so because it was the last concert of the musical giant, his guru, Pandit Ravi Shankar. Soon after, he died. Yet his music, his spirit, and that of the many who loved him remains indelibly etched in the ether. [Note: an interview with Barun Kumar Pal about keeping alive the legacy of Ravi Shankar: http://ibnlive.in.com/news/pandit-ravi-shankars-students-will-keep-his-legacy-alive-pandit-barun-kumar-pal/310448-45-75.html; Ravi Shankar’s last concert, singing Rabindranath Tagore’s song “Sedin Dujone Dulechhinu” on the full moon, London Philharmonic, October, 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10-R8pu5Ycg; and “Sedin dujone dulechinu” with English translation, Bengali transliteration and a historical note: http://pages.intnet.mu/ghosh/poems/poems/sedinduj.htm ] Editor's Note:We invite you to visit Barun Kumar Pal's website: http://www.barunpalhansaveena.net/ and also to hear him play on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/user/barunkumarpal |
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