The Hippie's words of Wisdom

I once met a firang on the brigade road in bangalore. This one was different, or was he a normal firang,Well I let you decide. He was wearing a saffron dhoti, rose coloured cotton shirt,shaven head with a mullet and a bright read vaishnavite "namam" on his forehead. He was carrying a cloth bag with some books in it. He caught me unawares and tried to start a conversation with me. I could immediately gather that he was trying to raise money by selling those philisophy books in his bag.I would, In his opinion he was trying to propagate the ISKCON philosophy.

The conversation was slowly getting into a debate mode, we me being very defensive. I had already made up my mind that I am not going to buy anything from him but didnt want to lose an argument either. He asked me about my goals in life and I rolled out things that werent much different from the list you see in my earlier post. He said " you are chasing wrong things in life, all things material, all things that are ethereal". I countered "You are a loser who doesnt even aspire to achieve". He said "I had all these and more in life when I was in US and I left all these after I realized how shallow materialistic life is" and went on to say "Consider this, you are chasing your goals, nice cars, fancy houses and riches, do you thin you will achieve them, or even if you did would you stop wanting more? You are like a person chasing his own shadows. You will never be able to catch your shadow. You turnback and run towards the sun, and the shadows will chase you".


I went silent, I just made an excuse and got away from there. Considering that this was about 10 years ago, I have grown to realise how difficult it is to chase the sun. We all chase our shadows, just because it makes us feel happy, gives us a sense of importance. In reality it is a substitute for the lack of courage to turn back and face the sun.