The Wild Flowers

I often travel between Mumbai and Pune by train. These journeys are especially exciting during the monsoons. As the train winds its way through the hilly terrain, the valley starts appearing like a fruit basket with the lush green canopy for velvet stuffed with white fluffy clouds for cotton buds! By the end of monsoon scores of tiny star like wild flowers abound the slopes. They sway to every gush of breeze that ruffles them every now and then like some street smart romeo to which the flowers seem to giggle like adolescent girls - as if they were enjoying the pranks it played! I wonder whats the purpose of their lives ? For whom or for what do these tiny flowers live a life that is momentary? Had my train never wound its way through this path would they have never bloomed? So is it the purpose of these flowers to bloom for a poet or painter or an author or a photographer? I guess not. Infact, its the other way round that everyone who passed that way and witnessed the natures extravaganza should count himself fortunate for even if the train had never passed that way the wild flowers would have bloomed the same way, displaying the same vibrant colours and sprinkling the same mesmerizing fragrances. And it would be us who would miss out on this natural extravaganza!

Artists are like those wild flowers and creative talents like the vibrant colours and fragrances of those flowers. As a flower seldom holds back its colours and odours neither should an artist hold back his creativity nor should his creative exploits be subject to the size of the audiences for he is a mere custodian of the beautiful things that are designed by God for the mortal world!!

                                                                - Bhushan Sarmalkar (JAI)