Two Minute Tales

Short tales of a reflective mind - striking visuals, memorable lines, general refections and life hacks.

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You need not fear God. You are God.

- Reza Aslan, A Human History of Religion

"We are Homo Religiosus, not in our desire for creeds or institutions, nor in our commitments to specific gods and theologies, but in our existential striving toward transcendence: toward that which lies beyond the manifest world."

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"What we call 'religious morality' played no role in the spiritual lives of primitive peoples. Belief in a 'divine lawgiver' who determines good and bad behaviour is barely five thousand years old; belief in a heavenly reward for such behaviour is even newer"

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"In transforming the gods of heaven into humans, we will transform humans into the gods of the earth"

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"To conceive of the gods in human form, to claim that we share the same physical and psychic qualities as the gods themselves, is to view humanity as somehow distinct from the rest of the natural world. For the first time in our evolution we began to imagine ourselves not as a part of the universe, but as its center. Gone is the animistic worldview that had bound us in soul and spirit to the natural world. And if we're no longer bound in essence to the animals and the earth, then why not exploit them?"

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"It is astonishing that in the hundreds of thousands of years in which humanity's religious impulse has expressed itself through belief in the soul, the worship of ancestors, the creation of spirits, the formation of gods and pantheons, the construction of temples and shrines, and the establishment of myths and rituals, what we today recognize as monotheism - that is, belief in a sole, singular God - has existed for barely three thousand of those years."

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"What is God? That question has been at the center of the human quest to make sense of the divine from the very beginning. Is God the animating force that connects all living beings, as our prehistoric ancestors seemed to believe? Or nature deified, as the early Mesopotamians thought? Or an abstract force that permeates the universe, teh way some Greek philosophers described it? Or a personalized deity who looks and acts just like a human being? Or is God literally a human being?

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"He who knows his soul knows his Lord" -- Ibn al-Arabi

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The world will always be poetry waiting to be written

No matter how much ink is spilt

the lines will never be complete

The poet writes for her own assurance

her tiny spark in the flames of the universe

The sparks keep flying about

The flame always lit

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In The Mood For Love (2000), Hong Kong

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“He’d thought that it had happened long before with Isabel, but it hadn’t. Not until now.

She had existed and now she did not. Not at all, as if not ever. And people hurried around, as if this outrageous fact could be overcome by making sensible arrangements. He, too, obeyed the customs, signing where he was told to sign, arranging - as they said - for the remains.

What an excellent word - “remains”. Lie something left to dry out in sooty layers in a cupboard.

And before long he found himself outside, pretending that he had as ordinary and good reason as anybody else to put one foot ahead of the other.

What he carried with him, all he carried with him, was a lack, something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever.”

- Alice Munro, Leaving Maverley (Dear Life)

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Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1970); UK, France 

Short: It is funny how the most political sketch of Baldwin got created by the most sincere effort to depoliticise him. Baldwin at his most fiery self. 

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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), USA

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“Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth”

-Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“On the margin. Peasants: only they are not really peasants, because they have no land, or what land they have does not feed them. And citizens: only they are not citizens, because they do not belong to a guild or a corporation; they are the little people, prey of anyone.”

“...I shall soon enter this broad desert, perfectly level and boundless, where the truly pious heart succumbs in bliss. I shall sink into the divine shadow, in a dumb silence and an ineffable union, and in this sinking all equality and inequality shall be lost, and in that abyss my spirit will lose itself, and will not know the equal or the unequal, or anything else: and all the differences will be forgotten. I shall be in the simple foundation, in the silent desert where diversity is never seen, in the privacy where no-one finds himself in the proper place. I shall fall into the silent and uninhabited divinity where there is no work and no image.”

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“You die at heart from a withdrawal of love” 

- Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea

“ Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.”

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“There is nothing to learn by looking at the galactic desert outside, turn the spectroscope inward, to where He has set his bow in the clouds within as a sign of the covenant between Him and the earth. Break the Galilean lenses - the Florentine was wrong, he tempted men with finite calculus. The confessor and the inquisitor were right, for the earth is not round but an experience of the fallible human mind.” 

- O.V. Vijayan, The Legends of Khasak

“The Diving Fowl (Chukkru) sat there and contemplated the plunge. Deep down lay the water, luminous in the dark, like a diviner’s crystal... He dived into the well, and deeper, into the well within the well. The water was like many crystal doors and silken curtains. Chukkru made his way past crystal and silk, and moved towards the mystery that lured him all his life. As Chukkru journeyed on, the last of the crystal doors behind him.” 

“Abida looked at the dragonfly, into its eyes of thousand crystals. The eyes shone dully with the chronicles of the dead. If dragonflies were memories of the dead, as they believed in Khasak, whose then was this memory? Perhaps it was her mother’s pining images of sin and regret and drowning...In the enchantment of the grove she became a dragonfly; whose memory was she? Perhaps a memory of her own sorrows of another birth.”

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Namukku Parkkan Munthiri Thoppukal (1986), India - Malayalam

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Kul Gov Garem (2018), Kashmir

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Asukh (1999), India - Bengali

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Ram ke naam (1992), India - Hindi

Pujari Laldas, deeply impactful!  

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Mughal-E-Azam (1960), India

--> शहंशाह की इन बेहिसाब बख्शीशों के बदले में... --> ये कनीज़... --> जलालुद्दीन मोहम्मद अकबर को अपना खून माफ़ करती है |    

--> तुम्हारी दुनिया से जा रहे है... --> उठो हमारा सलाम ले लो |  

--> अनारकली जब तक ये दुनिया कायम रहेगी... --> तुम लफ्ज़-ए-मोहब्बत  की आबरू बनकर ज़िंदा रहोगी |         

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Mughal-E-Azam (1960), India - Urdu

--> किसी के इश्क़ में दुनिया लुटाकर हम भी देखेंगे |

---> जो ज़बान उनके सामने मोहब्बत का इकरार तक ना कर सकी... वो इंकार कैसे करेगी ?

--> जब प्यार किया तो डरना क्या ?

--> ज़ख़्मो से भरा है किसी मजबूर का सीना...  --> तूफ़ान के आसार है, दुश्वार है जीना| 

--> प्यार की आंधी रुक ना सकेगी नफ़रत की दीवारों से... --> इश्क़ बगावत कर बैठे तो दुनिया का रुख मोड़ दे |

--> कनीज़ की मजबूरी को आरज़ू ना समझिये ज़िल्ले-ए-इलाही |

--> कनीज़ तो कब की मर चुकी | 

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Ernest et Célestine (2012), France 

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Toyland (2007); Germany