Poets

A poem is a cover up

It conceals more than what it reveals

What is significant in a life truly lived is the thing that poetry can only pretend to represent.

Poems are an easy way out of the smoulderings of the soul

Never trust a poet.

Poets are brave and very stupidly so

They calculate aesthetic merits and leave harshness of life unfettered.

Right There

Right there in front of my eyes does the light of my world keeps evolving into shades that I have always been left to register. I have found it tough to open up. As I hold on, shades vanish and hues devolve so as to match changed backgrounds. Honestly, on occasions I have felt abandoned and left to wonder if living in the world is akin to fighting a battle where one never belongs to an army or to a group where everybody else is ready to lay their lives for the slightest of cause that is dear to you. The army however, as it turns out, is always there for the opponent to support and the team, ever willing to ditch you on its promises. It is unacceptable to my humble spirit that a universe that promised sustenance to my existence could choose to be this partisan against my stakes. What is beautiful however in this injustice is the fact that unruliness does exhibit a pattern. I am not the only one. Millions others before me have and after me shall have to brazen it out, though not as successfully or terribly as I have. Things around me – squalid objects, toothless images and mobile technologies speak of a desire that makes them succeed in acquiring indispensability. I refuse to lend a ear and to learn. That’s what I have come out to be. I am no different!

How Does It Matter?

As beings lacerated in thought, throwing up our judgments of the world at it, we can’t help seeming pitifully ridiculous. Our predecessors were content with a handful of what we have in gazillions. Intellectual achievements today are too many to be even bothered about. A Socrates grins in eternal sleep at the contagion he unleashed. It bites into the discontented soul and induces ugly utterances-the hyperbole as we shamelessly tag it today for matters of favour and convenience. I waste my acumen being ecumenical in ideas and belief. To my mind, life isn’t one truly lived if it does not aspire for the universe in its undecipherable oneness. To surrender to its easily graspable diversity is plain mediocrity. And that is to be merely very kind of me. Loathsome putrefaction of integral analysis may be checked for the universe to be regained. Quite a bit of it has been silently slipping away while we relax relieved of the burdensome reason that philosopher smiles about!

Ecstasy

Was looking for a suitable word to title this post. A word that could rightly vouch for the state of my mind at the moment. It had to denote some intense energy and playfulness. It had to exude a groovy rhythm and had to be a bit raunchy. Many surfaced as contenders: bliss (sounded too pure and spiritual), delirium (was more like some psycho stuff) and delectation (was just too a happy happy one). Ecstasy won the race as it balanced the pros and cons of its own multi-meaningness the best.

3:00 p.m. left my room in a hurry to catch the metro train till the railway station where I had to see a friend.

3:20 reached the station, met my friend and decided to take a bus for the return journey for which I had to walk a little distance towards the Red Fort.

I am walking now. People rushing around for so many things. Sellers with their cigarette beedi stalls on the footpath make me meander my way through. From somewhere in the horizon, a thick cloud of dust appears and fills my heart with hope and joy in the sweltering heat.

On the way, a policeman chasing a pickpocket. He runs in full force and his massive belly jiggles. The thief, a thin man dressed in black, running for his life. Cross the street. Two young men on the footpath. They sit with a stove and are frying mini samosas. Another man urinates standing not so far away. Bus 26 comes and I get in. Take the last seat. It does not have a glass pane. Someone fought with it may be. The broad open view of all that happens outside thrills me. The hot gush of air strikes at my curls and I close my eyes now and then to prevent the dust from ruthlessly hitting the retina. Men and women busy walking. Some are just resting here and there on the dusty sidewalks. My eyes meet some of theirs. Some relishing cucumbers and smoking. Inside the bus, the conductor looks at a child and smiles. A fellow passenger playing songs on his cellphone player. I take out my cell too and randomly click all that is coming my way. I touch my hair, my fingers comb their way through. Smile to myself all the way. The city appears so much my very own. Like a fiefdom. I share this sense of ownership with the ones who are traveling with me in the buses, rickshaws or the BMWs and the Mercs. See the woman’s saree fluttering in the wind. She clings to the man who is driving her scooter.

It is a Sunday and the roads are not so packed. Paced out traffic. The bus driver plays a catchy song and I sing along loudly. I have found songs playing in running vehicles to be extra musical. An elderly woman looks at me and I stop singing. Leave the seat, walk till the front gate of the bus like a drunken man. Ask the driver to let me alight  at the next stop. He smiles back. Even when he knows its name, he asks “Khyber Pass”?? I utter an emphatic ‘yesss’. Tightly holding the hand rails, I hum again and swerve to the movements of the bus. He pumps up the volume. The tune touches my soul.

My stop is here. I say a loud thank you to the bus driver and get down almost dancing to the tune in my head.

Love was not in the air. Something else was.

Dear Delhi, I am sorry. Next month, I will complete some 12 years of my life with you. And yet it has only been some 12 times that I have felt about you this way. I want to love you and own you as my very own.

Do me a small favor. Please make sure this high tide never slips off my head.

Exuberance of the physique…wow! the way I swerved on the sidewalk and the dancing steps that guided my head!

Yay!

A Pretentious Post

I so wished to pontificate and be viewed by the ecclesiastical authority as the indomitable challenge. One that could not be conveniently bogged down. The iconoclast has always been a quick success. Standing on a parallel pulpit, he is someone who has had an easy audience. While placating the enraged religious sensibilities, the heathen in him makes him appear as the hero of the age. The profane Crucifixion widen his halo and each time that he utters an idea, his worship spreads far and wide.

It isn’t God that the true believers of my age adore and shower faith on. They do so to his semblance whose necks they wreathe each time they enter the temples, mosques and the synagogues. Tethered to that finite universe of futility, the semblance keeps perambulating in a wilderness where believing in all that is available to the senses is the rigid norm.

What does then false religion mean in any given age? The false religion of all ages is true religion itself. Hence the attack on a living faith or the historiography of another that vanished long ago should be careful enough. What is being attacked or documented isn’t a system but a belief that preexisted and will always precede these attempts. This belief is one that is continuing. It makes us believe in either believing or not believing. One can analyse a faith only to be aware of all that lies beneath one’s own being. Writing this, I am vindicated of my faith in the right to believe that belief is nothing except a very important decision we take each passing moment of our lives. Believe in believing -you are pious in the eyes of the believer. Refuse to believe- you are a star!

Can then one dream of being a star and adorn the skies? I say yes..always. The example of the pontificating iconoclasts in there before us. Pulpits wait. They should not be left waiting for long!