I am glad that one of my old friends and political colleague and former minister in Punjab Government, happens to be Washington while I am already here in connection with an issue I had left long unattended. I would ahve loved to go around the town with him , visiting some of the greatest monuments of "unageing intellect" that dot this unofficial world capital. I stepped out for a long early morning walk and some light solo-soccer as my hosts and the rest of the city slept away to glory. There is a small open park close to where my hosts live, quiet, peaceful and shy. The mighty Potomac, which loves to roar its sovereignty all day, all night is, for some unknown and strange reason, just whispering gentle prayers of peace as it glides almost embarrassed by its own might and magnitude and behaving at this hour like a most beautiful bride, happy in yet embarrassed by her own beauty. And its rubs its belly on the bosom of the riverbed , lost in ecstasy and eyes closed both in sheer bliss and in self conscious diffidence over its irresistible charm in this mood. The sky above, a clear blue and unmoved and unmoving ascetic yet looks benign as it watches from a height not measurable by human mind. I could never have believed Washington would have moments of such divine peace as it has this hour. Wordsworth tip-toed back into my mind after years of separation:

"Earth hath not anything to show more fair:
Dull would be he of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty;.....

Never saw I, never never felt a calm so deep!

The river glideth at its won sweet will:
Dear God ! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still."
A few hours from, this moment of sublime quiet and oneness with the universe would be lost yet again in the din of 'towns and cities'. A few hours away also lies the moment where th agenda of hatred would be sought to be camouflaged by 'concern for Punjab and the need for a new revolution' ( Read change of face of those in control of civil secretariat.)
What an irony that just at that hour, when a new messiah of political revolution , would be blaring away about the number of jeeps that line up the caravan of his political rival, I would be lost in an era over 14 billion years ago when this universe began in an inexplicable big bang and on how the phenomenon called life surfaced on a pretty ordinary planet lying in the suburbs of one of the many spiral arms of one of the most mundane galaxies among billions of galaxies, and how it progressed to a level where, forgetting  vast, immeasurable distances in time and space, the Kings of he planets, the humans, fritter away their energies on trying to rule over one or the other tiny fragments ( like Punjab or Korea or Iraq or Virginia etc) of this invisibly small among countless number of stars and  planets. While my friend will be surrounded by second or third rung self-pusher local political activists, I will be sitting somewhere, unobserved, among a different kind of cosmic galaxy that will comprise Stephan Hawkins, Einstein, Carl Sagan, Tacho Brahe, Kepler, Heisenberg, Niel Bohr, Capra -- among others.

And I will be taken to them by a person who can at any time decide to be  large and limitless and everlasting ike the universe.