SOMETIMES WE GET BIG THINGS IN SMALL PACKETS...CHECK IT OUT...

It was yesterday when I was all set to write my new post and I received a call from my friend to book a table for four as they were all set to come to the nearest hotel from my hostel. And I gave up writing the post at that time. Truly speaking I did not like at that particular point of time when I had to give up my writing not for my friend but for a person whom I had never met. Anyways, I came to my hostel and booked a table. I waited for fifteen to twenty minutes and before I develop a feeling that it would have been better if I had stayed for a bit longer, a bike arrived followed by Scorpio. One by one they came towards me and they get settled. A person approached me and said, “Hi, I am Atul.” To which I politely replied, “Yes, I heard about you a lot from my friends. Hello, I am Dipan.” (Note: I am deliberately not mentioning the names of my friends. Sorry for that.)
I said those things just to be humble and to show that my friends keep talking about him. Truly speaking I heard his name just two days before. But one thing is sure that when I heard his name I thought that I had heard or read his name somewhere. But there are lots of people having the same name. I gave the very thought at that time. From yesterday’s talk I recollected that he the same Atul whose exhibition of paintings is here in Vallabh Vidyanagar, Gujarat, India. And a usual image of a painter immediately approached my mind, which was broken when he said about his paintings on Shabari. Yes sir and madam, the same Shabari we have seen in our all time great epic Ramayana. He said that he got inspiration of painting Shabari after watching three paintings of her at Delhi in 1988. (Let me tell you that in 1988, I was just four years old.) He said that we have seen Shabari in her old age only, when Rama meets her but no one knows about her youth and her life there as a tribal woman. (When he was describing the youth of Shabari, I was having the picture of the heroin of Avataar – Tribal woman at Pendora. I thought the she must be looking like her.) To the surprise of everyone he also said that there isn’t any character of Shabari in Valmiki’s Ramayana. And in his paintings of Shabari, he has depicted her life in tribe before leaving that world. As he said, Shabari left her home because she saw a lot of flesh and blood of animals and birds at the time of her marriage, she left her home denying to leave in that cruel world. I am excited to see all those paintings which describe the Shabari, we have never met or even imagined. Shabari to us was always a very old lady having cough and walking with the help of a wooden stick. Yes, it is true. You even will see the same doing by a ten years old girl playing Shabari in competition.
The thing is, we can never believe what we have not seen. That is the human mindset. My Papa always tell us if a person of present era have capacity to do some unbelievable things like banding down iron by just looking at it, then a person in ancient can easily do so many miracles which we cannot even think. The same thing is applicable here. We, the society, have accepted Shabari as an old lady waiting for Rama, but what about the Shabari’s own life. I meet you today, but it doesn’t mean that you were not having your life before meeting me. Or I was not having life before meeting you. You will tell me in pure Hindi, “ARE YAAR AAM KHAO NA, GUTALI O SE KYA LENA HAI?” Am I right? But my answer is – I am not interested in as the above saying suggests, but I wanna say that every individual has his/her/its own value and stand. There is always a lot more than we can perceive as it happened with me yesterday only. I thought Atul might one of the very good friends of my friend and a painter. But Atul is not simply Atul. He is Atul Dodiya, one of the finest painters of India, whose name can easily be spoken with legendary M. F. Hussain. He is one of those few well acclaimed painters outside the country. And I was really obliged when I came to know that I had a cup of tea when he was having his dinner at my hostel. Thank you friends for forcing me to come over there to meet him. Thanx Atul.