Learning by Doing

I was introduced into the world of blogging by Rama a long time friend from my schooldays. I set up my blog on what I consider to be the anarcho-environmentalism of the Bhil adivasis at the beginning of this month and then forgot about it as I was busy with other work. Later Bhupinder who is an accomplished blogger chanced upon my blog by doing a search for my name on blogger. This he did because he became interested in me after beginning to read my book on the struggles of the Bhils of which he had been informed by Rama. His first comment was that the name of my blog was too big and unseemly and that I should change it. So I began wracking my brain to think of a new name. And I came up with Anarkali! Anar for the anarchism part and kali which means flower bud in Hindi for the environmentalism part. Anar in Hindi can also mean the fruit pomegranate which is said to be a rare panacea for all ills that is much in demand from sick people as in the Hindi idiom - "Ek anar sou bimar - One pomegranate being sought by a hundred ill people"! Thus this name gives the promise of cleansing this world of the many diseases of modern development. Similarly kali can also imply a budding environmentalist movement. Finally according to a legend that is considered to be apocryphal by historians Anarkali was the lover of Prince Salim who was later to become the Mughal emperor Jehangir. She was a dancer of lowly birth and so Emperor Akbar did not approve of this romance of his son and ordered Anarkali to be bricked in alive into a wall and death in Lahore in Pakistan. There is in fact a tomb there where the sarcophagus bears a beautiful persian couplet -
Ta qayamat shukr goyam kard gar khwish ra
Ah! gar man baz beenam rui yar khwish ra
(Ah ! could I behold the face of my beloved once more;
I would give thanks unto my God Unto the day of resurrection).
But there is also another version of the story that says that Anarkali managed to escape. I would like to latch on to this second version because allegorically it then means that anarcho-environmentalists can succeed in bringing about the escape of humankind from the grip of the self-destructive love of modern development that it is enamoured of at the moment! So in every sense of the word Anarkali is the most appropriate name for this blog. Thanks Bhupinder for helping me to bring about this creative transformation of the name of my blog.