Pujit Aggarwal

All animals are creatures of desire; appetites would be more appropriate. They crave food when hungry, water when thirsty, safety when exposed to danger or harm. They become touch-friendly and cuddlesome when cultivated with love and care. Dogs, cats, and some birds are amenable to domesticity. Human beings are different because they have appetites and cravings which exceed physiological needs and involve body, mind, spirit and above all emotions that mutate into ambition, aspiration, obsession, even mania. Ideology, faith, manifesto, doctrines, even dogma, are ostensibly stable but volatile forms of dormant desire. Given a slight spark of provocation, they flare up into a bonfire of aggression or defence to overcome the threat. Paradoxically, this brand of consumption is equally self-consuming. On the whole, sins are impulses or acts of negativity and evil which every religion, morality, and culture deprecates with varying degrees of emphasis because they are harmful both to the sinne...

  I was about to select the title Life Lessons but, on an impulse, I omitted the modifier and settled for the simple one word which is so comprehensive it subsumes not only the nanosecond but eternity also. Life lessons, for lack of an equally imprecise variant, are dispensed at reduced rates in the media and the market. It was Luiza's quiddity not to adhere to a preconceived syllabus. Her syllabus was you---the individual before her---regardless of age or antecedents. Her approach to the topic under discussion was interdisciplinary, anecdotal and wherever possible, empirical. She would show you the difference between a stalk and a stem, between a petal and a sepal, on location. The in-house garden became an extension of the class. Once, while I was quizzing her about the brittle dynamics of a go-getting personality, she recited from memory a sonnet of Shakespeare. On first hearing I found the sonnet rather opaque. She recited it again at a slow pace inflecting the key words in...