A rather quiet but active babbler found foraging in small parties on ground as well as in foliages of bamboo thickets along humid valleys. No marks for guessing how it gets its name. As a rule it rarely ascends the trees and keeps to the undergrowth, in case it has ascended too high they drop like fallen leaf into the thicket if alarmed. Quite a common bird found in the forests of Western Ghats particularly Coorg and Wynad region. This specie also has a remarkable habit of making ‘cock nest’ that is used for roosting, no effort is made to conceal while the real nests are hidden undergrowth and is more tightly and neatly woven. Sri Aurobindo: a life divine
One day, and all the half dead is done,
One day, and all the unborn begun;
A little path and the great goal,
A touch that brings the divine whole.
Hill after hill was climbed and now,
Behold, the last tremendous brow
And the great rock that none has trod:
A step, and all is sky and God.
Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) was born in Calcutta to an upper class family, he did his higher studies in England, he cleared ICS but refused to join and immersed himself in understanding India and was drawn to freedom struggle. He was known
for his radical views, and for some time was one of the foremost leaders of the time. He was incarcerated for a year in Alipore Bomb case. His shift to spiritualism happened during this period, with British authorities still considering him a threat he shifted to French colony of Pondicherry. Here he developed his own vision for progress and human evolution. Central theme of Sri Aurobindo's vision is the evolution of human life into life divine "Man is a transitional being. He is not final. The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner spirit and the logic of nature's process." He wrote essays on Bhagvad Gita, Vedas, Upanishads, he also wrote the epic poem ‘Savithri’ apart from writings on issues of philosophy and so on. After his death in 1950 ‘The Mother’ (read about her in the main blog) carried his work forward by creating Auroville. The Blue Bird
I am the bird of God in His blue;
Divinely high and clear
I sing the notes of the sweet and the true
For the god’s and seraph’s ear.
I rise like a fire from the mortal’s earth
Into a griefless sky
And drop in the suffering soil of his birth
Fire-seeds of ecstasy.
My pinions soar beyond Time and Space
Into unfading Light;
I bring the bliss of the Eternal’s face
And the boon of the Spirit’s sight.
I measure the worlds with my ruby eyes;
I have perched on Wisdom’s tree
Thronged with the blossoms of Paradise
By the streams of Eternity.
Nothing is hid from my burning heart;
My mind is shoreless and still;
My song is rapture’s mystic art,
My flight immortal will.
The Cosmic Man
I look across the world and no horizon walls my gaze;
I see Tokyo and Paris and New York,
I see the bombs bursting on Barcelona and on Canton streets.
Man’s numberless misdeeds and small good deeds take place within my single self;
I am the beast he slays, the bird he feeds and saves;
The thoughts of unknown minds exalt me with their thrill;
I carry the sorrow of millions in my lonely breast.
These few lines-the original poem is quite long- from the poem The Dwarf Napoleon (Hitler. October 1939) is insightful as also brilliant in its characterisation. Keep in mind it was written in 1939 much before the full scale of Hitler’s atrocity came to light.
Far other this creature of nether clay,
Void of all grandeur, like a gnome at play,
Iron and mud his nature’s mingled stuff,
A little limited visionary brain
Cunning and skilful in its narrow vein,
A sentimental egoist poor and rough,
Whose heart was never sweet and fresh and young,
A headlong spirit driven by hopes and fears,
Intense neurotic with his shouts and tears,
Violent and cruel, devil, child and brute,
This screaming orator with his strident tongue,
This prophet of scanty fixed idea,
Plays now the leader of our human march;
....
In his high villa on the fatal hill
Alone he listens to that sovereign Voice,
Dictator of his action’s sudden choice,
The tiger leap of a demonic skill.
An energy his body cannot invest,-
Too small and human for that dreadful guest,
A tortured channel, not a happy vessel,-
Drives him to think and act and cry and wrestle.
Thus driven he must stride on conquering all,
Threatening and clamouring, brutal, invincible,
Until he meets upon his storm-swept road
A greater devil-or thunderstroke of God.
Journey’s end
The day ends lost in a stretch of even,
A long road trod-and the little farther.
Now the waste land, now the silence;
A blank dark wall, and behind it heaven.
In an essay The Future Poetry, Aurobindo writes about the significance that art and culture have for the spiritual evolution of mankind. He believed that a new, deep, and intuitive poetry could be a powerful aid to the change of consciousness and the life required to achieve the spiritual destiny of mankind.
