Hi and welcome to Dinitalks!
Although I’ve been wanting to write a blog forever, I decided I would not, and could not, go any longer without one on January 14, Makara Sankranti or Pongal, the day when the sun leaves the Tropic of Capricon and begins its northward journey to the Tropic of Cancer, promising sunshine and prosperity to those of us in the northern hemisphere. Well, light dawned on me that day too, and I’m going to make my first post in dedication to Makara, or the crocodile, a symbol of chaos.
Personally, I’m somehow preprogrammed to feel fear bordering on awe for the crocodile. To take a little autobiographical digression, my worst recurring nightmare, when I was little, was that I was a khaki-clad explorer in the Amazon jungles (I guesstimate the exact geographical location from memory now), taking a catamaran across a river when crocodiles silently swim towards me from all sides. At this point, I would wake up in cold sweat, shake the slumbering-and-snoring Ajja next to me and express how afraid I was to go back to sleep. My grandpa would tell me there was nothing to worry about, hold me close and drift back to sleep. I would still find it impossible to go back to sleep, not from a fear of my nightmare returning, but from being so close to the thunderous rapture of a snoring man.
The kirtimukha eating its own tail
Since the crocodile is my ancient fear, and he has shown his ugly, green head again reminding me to write a blog, I think it’s necessary to propitiate him first. This week, my encounter with Makara started with an article in The Hindu by Janaki Lenin, who went looking for makara in temple architecture, where arches are usually depicted as emerging from the mouth of the makara and ending with a snarling kirtimukha at the crest. The makara symbolises chaos, the trough or the lowest point, and the kirtimukha, the highest order, the face in all its glory. Lenin also narrates the story behind the kirtimukha, an ogre that popped out of Siva’s third eye when a foolish king tried to lay his hands on Parvati; the king begged for mercy, but it was too late. The ogre was born and he had a terrible hunger that had to be satiated, or the world would be in peril. The clever Siva thought of a solution: he made the ogre swallow himself, tail first. The ogre committed this act of self-cannibalism, and an impressed Siva granted him the title of kirtimukha in recognition of his act of self-sacrifice. The image is ubiquitous in temple architecture as a reminder that sacrifice wins over chaos.
The image of the kirtimukha, which is similar to the Greek figure of the Ouroboros, or the snake eating its own tail. The Indian counterpart would be the Ananta – the unending, the name of the snake that shelters Vishnu. And within that is contained the whole world, or the mandala.
Any act of creation follows a similar process. Ask John Milton, that great chronicler of creation. At first there is chaos, and then you cut, crop, shape to bring about order. The same with this blog. I start off with a bunch of jumbled ideas, but then once I write the first line, it begins making better sense, and more words come out. They shape themselves into sentences, paragraphs, long and short. It gains a shape, the words acquire a feel, the paragraphs a texture, and the piece a style; it all comes together. I want my blog to be a space where I create, to make sense of my thoughts and actions, organise my reactions, and when I finish writing, I want my mind at peace, in order and form.
With this symbology in mind, I want to start this new blog, within my snake-eat-snake world, and I will try to bring order within it. My objective is to be a kirtimukha, to produce order with the thoughts that eat me from within. And of course, like Milton said, “To write something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die.”
The snake eating its own tail signifies order, and all the world is contained inside it signifying the mandala
Dini in a bottle 