there's hope in you

You are at the bottom of the charts
In most exams that the world sets for you,
Infant mortality, education, and what not.
You run like the rusted wheels
Of an ancient locomotive, pushing yourself through
The mired mazes of stench,
Civilisations heaped, haphazard,
On the edge of your track.
On your roads, you carry bullock carts,
Alongside Silver Phantom cars,
And never once cringe
At the disparity of it all.

And yet, despite it all,
There’s a charm about you,
In your vivid colours,
The heady aromas that fill your homes,
Your castles, kings, queens and silks,
The torrid showers of your monsoons,
Your raging rivers,
The burst of colours in your forests and fields,
In your poetry and art
In the multitude of your tongues.
In the way you walk to the brink, and back,
With a resilience that’s hard to define

It’s easy to fall in love with you, India,
Despite all the delusions that may surround you.

what would you do, Kafka?

Bare the soul.
Put it on display.
Have them come,
Parade, look, observe, critique,
Smile and leave.
And then, we mourn.
Weep as commerce whores purity,
Watch. Mute.
As every thought is bought
And sold.
Bought and sold.
Until nothing remains
Save
The eagerness of who
The biggest bidder will be.

Kafka, what would you say,
If you were alive today?



knowing you will be published is great at first. euphoric. and then there are questions...

of heirs and heirlooms

It’s a different home he comes to
Every night.
Sometimes it’s his father,
In a drunken stupor,
The money from his meagre earnings
Lying empty in a bottle.
At others, it’s his mother,
On the matted charpoy,
With her clandestine lover
From the street beyond,
Her day’s earnings, spent
On cheap perfume and
Jasmine flowers.

But it’s always the same,
In one way.
He comes back to an empty home.
Empty at the coffers,
Devoid of love,
And on many days, empty of food.

And he, the forgotten heir to
Broken heirlooms
Picks up the fragments,
Discards them
And moves on.

He survives.
Gives himself away,
Little by little,
Month after month,
To anonymous recipients,
Empty wombs
That yearn for heirs.
And in them, he sees
Belonging.


A few days ago, I was told that many poor students who want to escape their poverty and abysmal conditions sell their eggs and sperms every month. we talk of a glorious future but cannot nourish our present.

Falling in love at 2

It’s two in the morning
There’s just me and there’s you.
Nothing between us,
Even noise has taken a vow
Of silence,
Even if for just a while.

It is the time when
There’s just us
And little else for company
When the world seems so faraway
And dreams so near
And so impossibly true.

Before i place a book mark on those dreams,
And my stark white pages
Turn into pixelated emotions,
Before words surrender to noise once more,
Allow me to revel in you,
Solitude, my friend.




love 2am in the morning. my favourite time to work. sometimes it's so silent, one can hear the earth whisper.

monoliths 2

What ran through your mind, ye anonymous sculptor,
When you chiselled poetry from stone?
When you breathed life into the eyes,
And the lust for life into the myriad nubile forms?
Did you dream before you built them,
Or did they come to you as you carved?
Did you look back to admire your work,
Or were you too bruised to think of it at all?
What were you like and where was your family
Whilst you worked through night and day?
Why didn’t you leave a little of your history behind,
For us to peer into,
Like you did those of your king?

You didn’t think of course,
that when you were done,
Dead and gone,
You would still remain immortal
Despite your anonymity.


it's hard not to be inspired after seeing the work of the anonymous at Mahabalipuram

monoliths

There they stand,the stone carvings,
Monoliths.
Moved by elephantine visions,
And chiselled by bare hands,
And a tool or two,
To etch the glory of a king and his gods.

The bare hands must have won a woman
In turn,
Possibly even a bag of gold,
A house and enough patronage
To fill coffers of the next few generations.

And the elephants -
The elephants may have got
Their sugar cane
And hay.
They would have been egged on
Until they forgot their own histories.
Until every memory of that legacy
lay etched in their own skin.