The Calf Path

Dear Om,
Thank you for the invitation to visit ‘Navadarsanam’. The visit in fact is long over due. I shall be bringing another friend too (Our I I T batch Nehru Hall!).
That is an interesting theme you have chosen for discussion on this anniversary- “ The Road Not Taken”-“Off the Beaten Track?”. That helped to reminisce my good old days when I was doing a short combined Defence course at Hyderabad; long time back when an officer (Squadron Leader) from Sri Lanka had passed on to me a piece of cyclostyled (not Xeroxed as is now) paper to keep me awake in the class (the contents seem to say pretty much the same thing!!!) which I still preserve as a memento. I never bothered to find its source though. Although he was a Buddhist (died in a crash I understand) I gave him a copy of “The Holy Gita” by Swami Chinmayananda in return. I don’t know what he did with it. Any way here is what his piece of paper said:

V V R
20th Jan 2005

The Calf Path
One day through the primeval wood, a calf walked home as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew, a crooked trail as all calves do.
Since then three hundred years have fled, and I infer the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail, and thereby hangs my moral tale.

The trail was taken up the next day, by a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bell-wether sheep, pursued the trail o’er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him, too, as good bell-wethers always do.
And from that day, o’er hill and glade, through those old woods a path was made.
And many men wound in and out, and dodged and turned and bent about,
And uttered words of righteous wrath, because ‘twas such a crooked path;
But still they followed—do not laugh—the first migrations of that calf.

And through this winding wood-way stalked, because he wobbled when he walked.
This forest path became a lane, that bent and turned and turned again;
This crooked lane became a road, where many a poor horse with his load,
Toiled on beneath the burning sun, and traveled some three miles in one.

And thus a century and a half, they trod the footsteps of that calf.
The years passed on in swiftness fleet, the road became a village street;
And this, before men were aware, a city’s crowded thoroughfare.
And soon the central street was this, of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half, trod in the footsteps of that calf.

Each day a hundred thousand men follow this zig zag calf again
And o’er his crooked journey went the traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led, by one calf near three centuries dead.
They followed still his crooked way, and lost one hundred years a day;
For thus such reverence is lent, to a well established precedent.

A moral lesson this might teach, were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind, along the calf path of the mind,
And work away from sun to sun, to do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track, and in and out, and forth and back,
And still their devious course pursue, to keep the path that others do.

They keep the path a sacred groove, along which all their lives they move;
But how the old wood –Gods** laugh, who first saw the primeval calf.
Ah, many old things this tale might teach—but I am not ordained to preach.

&&&&&&&&&&&&


** Vanadevatas