My dear Nikhila,
Thank you for the special warmth of your comments about my contributions to your celebrations, for that is what they are, not a funeral! As I said, I am delighted to have been invited to join all you in this venture. And no, darling, I did not mean the introduction, but the requiem article, but the principle is the same!
I enjoyed all of the others, and however different they were one from the other, they all had that one thing in common: a tremendous affection for Jalandhar.
I think it is Anu who has perhaps summed him up the best when she wrote:
Jalandhar was like a tide, he rose, came to the shore, drenched us all and then swept back...to where he came from... 😭 Jalandhar. To me, he is like a beloved child who commits unbelievable follies and is also unbelievably unlucky. I have spent a lot of time yelling at him silently: Stop, stop, stop! But he never listened, and when he had hurt himself mortally, I grieved that I could not pick him up and make him well again. That is a tragedy that cuts deep, and it will take me a while to talk myself into realising that he is but fiction.
I hated to watch him crippled and broken at the foot of that rock, and still hanging in there and pulling himself erect as best as he could. It hurt.
The worst was the sight of his face in that last moment of his corporeal existence, as he is looking at his mother and Vrinda in Mahadev.
It is the face of a lost and bewildered child, too unhappy to feel any resentment any more. A child so battered and torn, inside and outside, that he has no will and no energy left any more to fight against the tide of dharma and naitikta and shanti that is, willy nilly, engulfing him. No energy to question the logic and the coherence of what is being said to him in his dying moments by the father figure for whose caring and approval he craved.
No wonder, therefore, that the dying Jalandhar's face shows only tired incomprehension, tinged with bewilderment, as Mahadev's sonorous peroration washes over him, and at one point his eyelids droop visibly.
No wonder that in the end, he sees only the two persons who loved him for himself, simply, uncomplicatedly and unconditionally.
No wonder that in the very last instants of his corporeal existence, he cries out only for his mother.
I was glad when he leaned backwards and the flames engulfed him; he had returned to the element of which he was constituted at the beginning, Agni. And he was finally free of the misery of his human condition. I wanted my beloved child to be free of that at long last, and so I was glad today.
As for what Mahadev said to Jalandhar, well, God cannot be wrong, it is part of the job description. So naturally all the faults have to be Jalandhar's, since otherwise they would end up at Mahadev's door, and that cannot be permitted.
But I liked it that till the end, Jalandhar was true to his sense of self. He did not cringe and plead for mercy or understanding, and he did not call out to anyone except his mother. He went as he had lived, wrongheadedly but proudly, and his tears were only for the one person he missed besides his mother and Vrinda, his guru.
What I think about Shukracharya - and it is very negative - is not relevant here. But the fact is that Jalandhar was emotionally very dependent on his guru - remember that desperate pleading with Shukracharya in the mayalok, clinging to his hands and begging his pardon? So he needed to have his guru's final blessings before he departed forever.
The last two episodes of the track have been painful to get thru, and it will be a while before I can forget all that so many of them did/did not do (I will never forgive them), which contributed in no small measure to Jalandhar ending up at the bottom of that rock, gasping for breath as he summons up the last reserves of his energy to voice his grief and his sense of abandonment.
It was a relief when it ended at long last, and I was proud of him, for he was , as the poet put it, 'bloodied but unbowed'.
I wish he could have rejoined his mother and his beloved Vrinda where he had dreamt of going after his death, chandrama ke paar. As I wrote in my requiem, who knows? Maybe some part of him escaped Mahadev's third eye and made it there after all.
Bye for now, Nikhila. And congratulations again on this celebratory thread!!
Shyamala Aunty
{Quote} Nikki_SAS-holic
Aunty...FINALLY ur comment...this thread is NOW COMPLETE for me...🤗...
Thank u Aunty..i am at loss of words nw...donno wht else to say...Coming frm a person lik u means a lot to me n all other team mates..And plz dnt evn say ur intro wsnt upto the mark or something..All of us here UNANUMOUSLY agree tht none cud write Intro for him PERFECT lik u..And u DID GIVE us and ALSO Jalandhar a PERFECT INTRO for Jalandhar and as well as for this farewell thread...🤗🤗🤗
Aunty hw WONT i nt mention abt Utkarsh Sir n rest of DKDM team... MR cud excel as Jalandhar only because of those ppl...And thnx to Suchi who wrote perfect tribute to MR,Utkarsh Sir n DKDM team just lik i expected n wanted from her..
And yaay...am SOO HAPPY to knw u loved tht title song of this topic and ALSO THE SONG of this thread - Baadshah...isnt he INDEED a BAADSHAAH for all of us here?😉😉😉...
And Aunty...a dull phase hv come to all of us POST Jalandhar in DKDM...But hope Utkarsh Sir n team give us a YET ANOTHER EXCITING track post ramayan..So tht if not here,atleast in fb page of Utkarsh,v all can start a NEW BEGINNING..😃😃..
Nywz keep in touch Aunty...n thnx soo much for evrything n good wishes..luv u...🤗
My dear Nikhila,
As you know by now, I am rarely at a loss for words, but now, after going through this thread of yours, which is growing and growing and growing, like Hanuman's tail, even I seem to have run out of them!
It is truly a labour of love, your page 1, and it shows. I was most impressed by all the sections in that substantive and very substantial page, but the songs were perhaps the best!👏👏👏'
You truly deserve several rounds of applause for this tremendous and very successful effort to say Kabhi alvida na kehna to Jalandhar. As Utkarsh would say, I am sure that in some dimension, perhaps chandrama ke paar, Jalandhar would be sitting, with his beloved mother and Vrinda, reading all this and smiling.
Plus I was very pleased by the special tributes paid to the DKDM team, not just to the stars of the show, Mohit Raina and Utkarsh Naithani, but to the others as well, whose role in making this show what it has become deserves both recognition and a lot of praise. Which you have given them, with warmth and grace.
I am amazed, not just by the amount of energy, enthusiasm, care and commitment you and your collaborators have brought to this exercise - I would not have known where to start, and it was all I could manage to reserve this spot for myself! - but also by the sheer range and the cheerful bounce and go of the very large number of contributions you have managed to collect. The end product is a very rich compendium of tributes to Jalandhar.
Amidst such a flood of emotion, so unstintingly expressed, my own modest write up, dear Nikhila, seems pale and anaemic! But never mind, I was very pleased to have been able to do it for you. And I loved all the others, so colourful, so individualistic, and so uninhibited. My congratulations to all those whose pieces are featured in that section. You were all in top form!👏👏
And the same to those who did the earlier parts about the various aspects of Jalandhar's persona and his relationships. You brought a delightful and cheeky irreverence to your descriptions that had me in stitches!😉
However, I did not quite agree with some of the assessments given there, especially about Mahadev's final pravachan to Jalandhar. I have not done any posting on this or any other topic here in the IF after May 24, but I have written about this aspect, and about each DKDM episode over this period, beginning from May 21, on Utkarsh Naithani's FB page.
Those who are on this thread can, if they are interested, see these pieces there, and in particular, the one about the final dialogue between the dying Jalandhar and Mahadev. It is dated June 5, as I wrote it very early that morning, and it has the title : Mahadev and Jalandhar: A Contrary View. Some of you might find it of interest, as also the follow up discussion on that thread.
I should also like to take this opportunity to say au revoir to the very many young friends that I have made in this forum over the last month, It seems like a long, long time ago, but my first comment here was only on May 2, and my first stand alone post was only on May 3. I had been watching DKDM for 7 months by then, but I had never felt any urge to comment about any aspect of it, though I liked it a lot even then.
It was the character of Jalandhar who brought me here to this forum. And now that the Greek tragedy of his life has ended, and what lie ahead are the Raavan and Ramayana tracks, I will once again find myself with nothing that I would want to comment on. So, as it was for Jalandhar, the time has come for me to say, not adieu, a final goodbye, but au revoir.
I send you all my warmest good wishes for your comradeship, so evident in these pages, to stay intact and to flourish. Have a lot of fun, my young friends, and take care. God bless.
Shyamala Aunty
Edited by sashashyam - 12 years ago
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