This is true knowledge, to seek the Self as the true end of wisdom always. To seek anything else is ignorance.
Bhagavad Gita
Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
Aristotle
Whoever knows himself knows God.
Prophet Muhammad
If you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty and you are poverty.
Saint Thomas
Thou sleep’st: awake and see thyself.
William Shakespeare
©DEV VIRAHSAWMY AND ICJM
When I was a little boy on the dusty road of Goodlands
I was told I was a ‘Telgu’.
My ‘Telgu’ father fathered a child with a ‘non-Telgu’ girl
Before marrying my mother
A ‘Telgu’ girl from Quartier Militaire
Where she had learnt Tifrer’s and others’ Creole songs
Which she sang to me:
• Pa bate li misie,
• Ler mo ti kontan twa Lilinn,
• Kari lalo milatres,
• Roule mon’pti Sir Zil,
• Nwar, nwar, nwar do mama,
• Charli – O, aret bwar diven banann …
My ‘non-Telgu’ friends who spoke Creole and Bhojpuri
Loved to tease me.
For them ‘tel’ was ‘oil’ and ‘gu’ was ‘shit’
And so I was – what was I? –
Oily shit or shitty oil?
A Telgu child who listened to Creole songs
Sung by a Telgu mother
And Creole stories
Told by a Telgu granduncle (Tata);
Whose dream was peopled by the cunning hare
And the wise tortoise
And fuelled by the tricks of Tizan
That was the Telgu I thought I was.
Later I was told I was not Telgu
But Telegu from Andhra Pradesh.
Much later my identity sketched by others
Took a new shape:
I am Telugu from Telangana!
Yet I still feel like the little boy
On the dusty road of Goodlands
Who listened to Creole songs
Sung by a Telgu mother
And Creole stories
Told by a Telgu Tata.
On the road to Damascus and Emaus
I make music with my friends
For those I love.
Ek hi raasta!