This article is dedicated to all those gardeners whose handiwork is the campus of IIMB.
A poet who thrives on ethereal ideas is the ideal person or maybe the only person who appreciates the beauty and purpose of a flower. Wordsworth in his ‘Daffodils’ captures this resemblance between flowers and ideas by equating flowers with pensive mood and solitariness.
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
....
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Lord Vishnu has a lotus in his lower right hand. The lotus would look like it is in its period of anthesis when it is fully open and functional. The lotus here stands for the ultimate function of an idea – liberation. It is the liberation from this perennial problem of being human. The lotus symbolizes spiritual awakening, the anthesis of our mind from a long dormant period of ignorance.
Some flowers require vernalization before actually flowering. This prolonged period of ‘chill hours’ is essential for them to gain strength to break the dormancy and leap into flowering. These chill hours are the human lives that we cycle through and the experiences that we gain are the actual process of vernalization towards ultimate awakening. Maybe we humans are those flowers which could not gain the strength to wake up without this toil.
A plant without flowers which are its essential organs of reproduction may cease to exist. Nature has created so many kinds of flowers, so many vectors of pollination, so many varieties of pollinators to ensure that the fertilization could go on as long as possible and as constantly as possible. The way nature handles this problem of fertilization seems to be very complex. When I take a casual walk around the IIMB campus nature shows the tip of the iceberg of this problem definition by the visual treat of the enormous varieties of flowers around. God should be an extremely talented gardener!
What flower is to reproduction, an idea is to innovation. Why should a tree create a flower? To reproduce. Why should an organization focus on generating and creating ideas? To innovate. Is there any other way an organization could survive?
N.
The photo in this article was taken by Ranga, my brother, during the tulip festival at Mount Vernon.
References:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Wandered_Lonely_as_a_Cloud
