A PALACE TALE

A PALACE TALE

A person built a palace at night with its hundreds of rooms filled with the choicest of edibles, entertainment and other objects of desire. He then quietly slipped away keeping the palace gates wide open. As daylight dawned, pedestrians started streaming in and became mad with delight at the delicacies on display and for free consumption as much as possible. As the crowd swelled, the available material of pleasure seemed inadequate for so many. Competition set in and fights started. This led to the formation of rival groups vying for supremacy and group-fights began. Meanwhile, some clever few began wondering as to who had built the palace and had kept all the tools of joy there open to all. They began searching for the palace-maker everywhere in the palace but could not find him. Then the most intelligent among them had an idea. He thought that may be the palace-maker had left the palace and had gone outside. So, he ventured forth from the palace leaving its pleasures and pains behind to seek the palace-maker out. There was a huge park just beyond the palace with lushgreen grass. There he saw an old, shrivelled man sitting on a bench smoking a bidi (cheap small version of a cigarette). He enquired of the stranger as to his query but met with an ambiguous answer. Upon further probing he became convinced that that man was the owner of the palace who had many more such palaces in many places for everyone. As his vision cleared, he was filled with a surpassing peace and bliss which he felt he had received owing to his association with that withered old man. He now felt the urge to communicate his knowledge and blissful experience with the inmates of the palace. So, the intelligent seeker left the park and went inside the palace to tell the inmates what he had learnt and how he now felt. But few listened to him. Most kept on at their greedy grabbing and intermittent fighting oblivious of the news that had freshly come from outside. 

Such is our world and such our predicament. We are caught within the palace of this world and will not budge from it. Who cares for what lies beyond the walls of the palace cast in concrete and to seek the lush greenery of eternal youth and freedom, to forsake the puerile pleasures of the mind and the body and seek the bliss beyond, that of the Reality behind the phenomenal drama that is fraught with the dual syndrome of pleasure and pain and perpetual conflict and chaos? Who cares after all? 🕉

Written by Sugata Bose