- Sep 28, 2022
My FB reel is full of cats. Fascinating individuals these are. Their eyes very clearly see something that we don't and they clearly know much more than we do. If only they were bipeds they would have conquered the world by now. As much as their acrobatics amaze me, their ability to not get hurt time and again despite their crazy adventures doesn't, because I have read about the proverbial nine lives they possess. It's not without reason that Minerva McGonagall turned into a cat at will, I feel. It probably gave the ancient spunky woman additional years to live.
And to think of nine lives during the nine days of Navratri is probably a divine signal. (What is not nowadays?) It was just before this festival two decades ago that a Marathi newspaper decided to give itself a new life - not a ninth one, but just a second. It captured the imagination of all the women in Mumbai by asking them to dress in the same colour and send in their group photographs so the paper could publish them. The news spread like wildfire and the whites and oranges and blues and reds took over streets and railway platforms and offices day after day, painting Mumbai in uniform colours. The newspaper got a new life and the custom thrives even today. And like the newspaper, it has got a new life!
The colours now signify frequencies and energies and qualities that govern the feminine and have taken on a completely new avatar that grows in a gargantuan fashion year after year. What was never a part of religion or tradition is now probably the biggest part of the festival.
There used to be a temple, I had read in the same newspaper many years ago. Like every other temple this one had the daily evening aarti but it also had a very peculiar custom. Every evening just before the aarti they caught a cat (some poor stray cat) and tied it to a pillar and released it thereafter. The Aarti simply wouldn't happen until a cat was tied up. No one knew why till one bearded, ancient and wise man recounted the story of the temple's resident feline of yore that would scratch its back against the legs of the aarti singing devotees causing nuisance, prompting the custom of tying it up before the aarti started. The cat had since passed on, possibly after living its nine lives, but had given life to a cat-tying custom that would never die.
Thoughts have a peculiar way of jumping from one topic to another, one place to another and from one era to another. Unless they are stopped with a steely resolve they continue taking on new lives, just like the FB reel that continues showing new cat videos no matter how many I see and admire. Dumbledore famously used the pensieve for this very purpose - 'One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one's mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one's leisure.' In the unfortunate absence of a pensieve in my life, there's no other way to siphon the excessive thoughts than putting them in words so that the mind can focus on more important topics like - what colour to wear tomorrow!