What's on your mind?

It has been a long time since I last wrote and this happened despite my resolution (not a new year one but generally) of being more regular. Anyway, that is what always tends to happen if you really set your mind to something contrary. Come to think of it, that can not be right especially if you think about what Basu, a budding hypnotist has to say. Basu is a classmate from BHU and a good friend who I recently met at the wedding of Ankur, another classmate and good friend from BHU (and also my room mate for the only year at BHU when we had to share rooms).

Now, this wedding was in a place called Chatarpur, which inspite of what people may think, is not in Delhi (that is Chatarpur hills, by the way), but in Madhya Pradesh. The place is a district, a decent town by any standards and yet surprisingly does not even have a railway station. This is explained by the fact that the town apparently does not fall in the middle of any major route, somewhat like a dead end maybe. Anyway, I am digressing. Coming back to the point, a trip to Chatarpur in the middle of the week (the wedding was on Thursday) seemed entirely unlikely till Basu and Animesh (yeah, I know you have guessed it already...another classmate and good friend from BHU) started making plans to go there.

Go there we did, but Animesh could not make it and it fell to Basu and me to enliven the proceedings at Ankur's baraat, which was running the risk of being a non-starter but for his brother and the two of us, of course. We danced the night away and warmed the cockles of our hearts enough by feasting on some good food and good faces. Having done that, it was time to go to Khajuraho the next day to give more definition to the Madhya Pradesh trip, unique and unlikely to be repeated soon that it was.

Khajuraho was exciting (not just erotic, read again) and not only because the ruins were the way they were but more because standing in the midst of it all, you could not help imagining yourself in the era bygone when the same area that seemed deserted except for the typical tourists, was the center of civilization as people knew it. The temples, their roofs, entry pathways and the entire aura of the place simply transported you in the middle of all the action, the priests chanting mantras, the flower sellers offering you flowers to devote at Gods' feet, the artisans presenting their craft at the temples' steps...it was all so fantastic.

Khajuraho done, we moved on to Delhi where Basu was hospitality personified as I stayed with him for a couple of days and we sat around discussing stuff, watching movies, and generally having a good time. It was in the middle of this good time that we decided to take on an earlier discussion that we had somewhere in Madhya Pradesh on the efficacy of hypnotism as a form of therapy. Having tried a trained hypnotherapist and discovered that she was busy and not aavailable before I left Delhi, Basu decided to take matters in his hand.

It was, he said and I tend to agree, the suggestability of ideas that hypnotism is all about. An idea, once implanted in the subconscious tends to bring the person around to accepting the idea in its entirety. So, coming back to what I started with, if you really set your mind to something (especially the subconscious part of your mind), there is no way that will not happen. So a situation where what happens is contrary to what you have thought will happen, there is something really screwed up about you and your mind :-)

By the way, the experiment of hypnotism that Basu did with me was pretty successful.