Mind and Miscomprehension

A Bipolar Nightingale

A beautiful girl walks into a psychiatrist’s office, not with a report or diagnosis, but with light in her eyes. Her presence rearranges the air — even the nurse feels it. “Sometimes she brings gloom too,” the nurse adds quietly.

There is a song on one pole, the hearts lift, the desolation on the other, an unending fall.

She is Bipolar

Sacred in all her Avatars

Psychiatrist mulls where to settle her. Should she be guided towards a bit of depression or an uplifted mood? For the former, there were mood depressants, mood stabilisers, and strange membrane stabilisers.

Then, on the other hand, there was methedrine, amphetamine, caffeine and nicotine. She was too young to have alcohol so that opium could be a substitute.

Where on that delicate number line should she be nudged? Should it be to zero? Less than that? Or should it be her expansive own self?

Here, the holy stumbles between the pole ends, a featureless number line. Infinity is not only at the ends, but also between each point.

A poverty-stricken Brahmin, and a  Brahmani, both a bag of sticks and bones, so poor that they pantomime devotion so convincingly that even Indra laughs. Gave an apple of immortality to the unfortunate couple for more of that.

After much grief over greed, mistrust, and jealousy, they reach a silent truce. They decide to give it to the King as a return gift.

The King, in his luxury, was sick of life. He looked at the apple and saw what it was for him: a continuation of that luxurious life. Yet, he yearned now for simpler things of his childhood. He gifted the apple to the queen, whom he still loved. The queen, thinking that the King was too old for her, gifted the apple to the young General. The General knew he lived an ephemeral life of fighting. He understood the likelihood of untimely death and even accepted it. He bestowed the apple on a favourite prostitute. The prostitute knew her life was meaningless. She decided to give the apple of immortality to the King. She secretly admired him as a much-abused but godlike king. 

The King, in a flash, discerns the story and realises affection does not belong anywhere; it sits like a butterfly. Only to sit elsewhere. It is not related to love or an obligation; it simply is. It is an urge that needs to be spent.

He decides to eat the apple and leaves his Kingdom to the Brahmin, so destitute.

A king becomes an itinerant immortal, wandering through generations as a broken syllable. 🍎He lives among Charvakas and sees how they logically reinterpret the Vedas. 

He realised that the language in an artefact, a philological figure with false robes, looting false admiration, was for the world, which could go with simpler things like transient affections, fleeting loves, happiness, and sense, where language is in this. Language is in hard-bound books; sacred could not be confined in them, merely symbolised, that the very stuff of existence is not to be found in symbols and hard-bound books of grammar.

In the Beginning Was the Mispronunciation: A Myth of Language, Saints, and Sacred Error. I write this knowing I will mispronounce the sacred. I will slur saints, spell Artaud without enough despair, mistake a Bhakta for a beggar. And that is the only honest way to begin.

Artoud had a streak; he wrote using his shit, while the wise digambars danced naked under the sun and the stars, oblivious, what were they doing?

Answering an urge.

Of understanding incomprehensible

Some invoked the snake of Kundalini.

So, language is probably a broken attempt to utter the unpronounceable.

Yet it is so wondrous and divine a sense in itself.

The Broken linguists

🕉️ Of Saints, Skeptics, and Broken Meters

When God Was Mispronounced on Purpose

People sang to the divine in cracked syllables. This was before psychiatry tried to define irregular moods. It was also before philology dressed language in robes and footnotes. They danced into God with stained feet. They wept outside temples they were not allowed to enter.

They were Bhaktas — and they inverted everything.

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🧵 Lalleshwari: The Naked Weaver of Kashmir

She undressed, not for spectacle, but for clarity. Her body, unadorned, was the scroll of wisdom.

Lalla, born in 14th-century Kashmir, walked away from the roles of wife and daughter-in-law, and instead walked into fire. She sang vakhs — short verses that defied both metric form and social code.

“Shiva pervades all that is — What shall I worship, and whom?”

Lalla’s madness was sacred. Her solitude divine. She would have been medicated today. Kashmir remembers her instead as the voice of the mountain mist.

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🎙️ Kabir: The Weaver Who Mocked Both Sides

Kabir stitched cloth and shattered dogma. He said Ram with mischief, not reverence. He mocked both temple bells and mosque calls.

“Beads in hand, lips utter Ram, But the heart wanders in greed — What use is chanting, O fool, When your mind is not clean?”

He sang in doha form, but with rawness that bled.

Today, he’d be labelled disruptive. But saints still quote him in courtrooms of despair.

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🪶 Ravidas: The Untouchable Who Sang the City of God

Ravidas lived with leather and love. He cleaned hides. He didn’t hide.

He imagined a city: Begumpura — sorrowless, caste-free, unbound by ritual.

“There, no one rules another. There, all walk equally.”

A world with no Brahmin, no outcaste. Just light, and shoes well made.

His religion was craft. His verse — blistered truth.

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💃 Andal: The Girl Who Married God

Andal, a child poet of Tamil Nadu, didn’t seek God. She demanded Him.

She wore garlands meant for Vishnu — and said, “If you don’t want a girl who dreams, don’t appear in her dreams.”

“I want Him, the One with eyes like black lotuses. I want Him, or I will burn.”

She wrote the Tiruppavai — thirty verses of longing, fevered and fragrant. People called it obsession. Her village built her temples.

Andal broke caste, gender, protocol — and became a goddess.

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🥁 Tukaram: The Drummer of Despair

Tukaram threw the Vedas into the river. “Let them sink,” he said, “if they don’t teach how to cry.”

A farmer-poet from Maharashtra, he sang in abhangs — songs with no end, just aching loops of devotion.

“Why did You make me, O God, if not to break me again and again?”

His songs came from drought and debt, not discourse. He wept publicly. Villagers sang with him.

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👑 Meera: The Queen Who Danced in Defiance

Meera Bai left her palace and her husband for a flute-player who never wrote back.

She sang to Krishna with the madness of abandoned love.

“I have found the only cure for this pain: to keep singing Your name.”

They said she was possessed. She said she was drunk — on God.

She walked barefoot into temples that barred women. She was beaten, shunned, almost poisoned.

But she kept dancing. And now, little girls sing her verses in courtyards at dusk.

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🔥 The Charvakas: The Heretics of Sense

And then — before all this devotion — there were the Charvakas. India’s atheists. India’s sacred skeptics.

They rejected gods, rituals, and priests. They worshipped sensation.

“There is no heaven, no rebirth, Only this: the taste of mango on your tongue, the scent of a lover’s neck, the ache of hunger.”

They died unsung. But their whisper lingers — in every heretic poem and every doctor’s sigh.

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⚖️ Inversion as Revelation

These saints and skeptics didn’t just break rules. They inverted cosmologies:

• Andal married God, not man.
• Kabir turned scorn into scripture.
• Lalla spoke truth naked, in snow.
• Meera sang madness into sanctity.
• Ravidas built a city with words.
• Tukaram made God cry back.
• Charvakas said: if you want truth, chew it.

None of them passed theology’s test. But all of them passed through fire and came out burning.

• The Problem of Language
• Came Out Burning
• Love with Bipolar: Glimpse and the Eclipse
• Dalwinder’s Well-Meaning Dilemma and the Impossibility of Language
• To the Girl Who Swims Through Time