Tapasya

I suppose, penance is the nearest word in English for Tapasya.

The earliest encounter I remember to have had with this word is when my elders, my grandmother, mother, aunts etc referred to my ‘waiting’ patiently and intensely. I was watching them ‘brew’ some unusual item in the kitchen at our ancestral home (not just a house, then) at our village. It was my grandmother's humble way of passing on the baton to the next generation, when she instructed the daughters/ daughters-in-law to revive some ancient recipe which requires elaborate preparation. I could see why these items did not happen in our routine week-ends even in our city dwellings. As soon as I could sense that they are up to something wonderful, unique, unusual, out-of-ordinary-routine, I was all attention, and even failed to notice that my usual mischief prone schedules faded out. I mustered all efforts to be exceptionally obedient, lest I would be asked to keep myself at a safe distance, while I had decided to be at the hub of the activity, not ready to miss anything. My attempts to ask and find out what it is all about, usually gets warded off in a summary manner, since they themselves needed all their focusing.

During all this, all that they know is that I was around there, unusually silent, and carefully non-interfering. They just feel my harmless presence. This docile effort is amply rewarded, when they offer the first sample-taste of the finished product. This is where they also mention that “he has been doing tapas for this all the while”. I knew this much, that it was some sort of a compliment to me, and not the usual dose of admonishments. Yet, I could not grasp as to what I did to merit that dubious word ‘tapas’. All I did was to focus completely on what was going on. I was so absorbed that I even forgot that I was hungry, and the usual mid-day meal time was crossed over, the women folk too failed to notice it, due to the absence of my reminder that ‘I am hungry’.

A couple of decades later, I had a glimpse of it on celluloid, when I saw movies like “Zanjeer” & “Kala pathar” etc, where the hero retained that grim look all the time, to remind the audience that he carried that main purpose of his life all through, irrespective of the situation outside. Many years later, in a spiritual session, I was told that an intense participation could help reducing the time element in reaching the goals. Such practices required years of ‘doing’ regularly to reach a particular notch level. The word itself, means ‘heat’ (Taap, tapah) at its root. So the process of heating it up was the time consuming element. Heating up to such a point, where the shaping takes place instantly, as with molten metals. Slow heating takes time, we know. Becoming very intense about something would itself hasten the heating process tremendously, is what we learnt. An example we can see is the record-shattering-performances by sportspersons at the Olympics. It is here that individual’s own performance matters a lot, in contrast to other fields like academics, businesses, etc where outstanding achievements do happen but the nature of intensity is entirely different.

How to get at this kind of intense-ness is not of much interest to a casual reader, I agree, and therefore suffice it to say that once it is mastered, enough to be able to invoke it at will, not only spiritual growth, but handling of material aspects of routine life becomes almost effortless.

Psn (27th February, 2010)