Salty Homestead

Existence is like a whirlpool.
It spins with you, it jerks you,
finally swallowing you-
into a world, dreary and desolate.

My father and I,
used to discuss the dangers at sea,
and the whirpool took the cake.
It rips, tears and throws you away.

The ocean of life,
the waves of twilight, crash-
into nothingness, they go back,
to where they came from.

A vast horizon, spreading afar,
to lands unknown, unheard of.
Life is like the horizon,but different.
It ends, sometimes with long cogitation.

The ocean taught me, it nurtured me.
The blue shadows, the wild isles,
all with their lustful motions,
kept me,fed me and cradled me with passion.

Ah!first I was confused,
whether to listen to the crashing-
of the waves or to turn my back on them.
Would I have lost out?

Nights of unrest, o,nights of anguish,
fearing signs and reckonings,
I must listen, to the sweet murmuring,
and let my heart beat,in oneness and with love.

Shopping Kills

Shopping kills...
It tears you apart,
in greed, in want and in lust.
Ah! Why materialism?
Why not spartan and monk like ways?
Your eyes rove,
the exciting smells envelope your senses.
You succumb to want,
the lovely, luring labels catch your eye.
The lechering salesman blows open your mind-
and you with much useless pondering,
give in to his sweet, cunning beckoning.
The sense of control vanishes,
and yes!so does your money.
Consumerism just manhandles us,
it governs us and whats more,
we let it.
Escape is impossible-
it follows you where ever you go.
The sweetness of selecting a gift or,
giving with you heart, is long gone.
What remains is giving with restraint and hesitation.
Capitalism has done this to us,
so,a controlled market is utopian,
it sails in its own direction.
A melting cauldron-
of recession,pauperity and strife,
it continues to pound, to pound-
like a machine gun in Iraq,
pounding away to glory.

The Forbidden Fruit

How wrong are we?
We let them fall in pits,
all covered in filth.
They live,just to feed.

She wakes up everyday.
It is another day in hell,
collecting brown,black and white peices,
the fruit of our daily feed.

She scrapes and she shifts,
peice by peice, she puts-
into the basket,sometimes a tray.
A burden on her shoulders, it remains.

Do we rever her?
but no,we turn the other way.
Suffering in silence,she edges forward,
so her offspring may survive another day.

The law has no teeth.
Dry latrines exist-
eventhough forbidden.
It is left for her to clean.

'Pucca' latrines are made,
but who will clean the gutter?
its certainly not you or me,
but the gutty, fearless woman.

She carries hell on her shoulders,
the stink etches its way forward.
We stifle our breath, we turn our heads,
she fights ahead with her shovel and tray.

Books and 'I'

I was in Landmark yesterday, one of the most frequented book shops in Bangalore.I went with a bunch of friends and began to browse with no apparent intention in mind. I sailed through the entire literature section and I never fail to be mesmerized by the number of amazing books they have.It is true, they are quite on the pricey side but still, it is always a pleasure just to walk down those isles, to pick a random book out of a shelf and flick through it and sometimes just sit flat out on the floor and absorb your self in it. It is such a divine feeling. Ofcourse you do feel quite wretched sometimes when you see this one book you want that very minute but your wallet plays tricks on you. It suddenly appears to be quite empty.

Landmark is a place I hold a very sacred relationship with.I feel immense pleasure in just smelling that sweet aroma of freshly published books with awe-striking cover pages.It is as if you enter a different world as soon as you enter through the glass doors on the 1st floor of Forum. You are entirely at peace with yourself, that is the main reason I go there often. I am a great fan of reading and each day I browse through the different shelves,I find a new book, a new interesting book I could just spend hours walking through the different isles and listening to the very suitable music they play through the PA. It is a heavenly experience.

I am a person who never likes to borrow books from others.It is not for any other reason, except the fact that the feeling of owning a certain book does bring a great deal of pride and happiness. My friends sometimes ask me, "why do you buy books? You can just borrow them na". Sorry ,but I cannot get my self to do that ever.It is such a nice feeling, to pick a book from your own book shelf at home and start reading it with a bar of chocolate on the other hand. There are no words that can express the satisfaction I gain from doing so, especially on a rainy day.Ahh!Magical. The aeroplane is another place where I love to read, especially love stories.If I ever travel in the day time, I make sure to have a book with me. I love to just stare at the clouds and imagine the world out there, the world I'll never know. It is a lovely feeling.

Fiery Tales

Beauty and the Beast,
all shimmering in white.
The seven dwarfs settle in,
for a cold,wintry night.

Snow White,the prettiest,
Happy, the merriest.
The evil witch, tries and tries,
to do away with Happy and White.

Hansel and his sister Gretel,
show humanity what true love is,
Hansel's finger never grows fat,
the witch ends up fried,full of glistening fat.

Sleeping beauty sleeps all night,
her finger stinging,her heart heavy.
The charming prince, plants a kiss,
Beauty is awakened with nothing amiss.

The little mermaid,the poor old maid,
her legs crossed with finesse,
twiddling her toes with every soft Caresse,
She loves her little missus with every soft cry.

Cinderella, with a huge umbrella,
warding off the evil,wicked witch.
Her glass slipper, compared to Tumbelina,
the fairy god mother waving her wand-erina.

A few ponderings on liberty.

I have been wondering for a long time, what liberty actually means to me. Is it just purely freedom or is there a broader connotation attached to it? Liberty, is a term we keep hearing in the lines of politics, war and so many other societal institutions. I am an individual living in the 21st century and although great men in the past have hailed liberty with such glee and enthusiasm, I see absolutely no liberty in our society. Liberty never exists.It cannot exist in a society like ours, full of apartheid, cultural stereotypes and of course a fickle minded bourgeoisie.The proletariat never experiences true liberty, though it is promised to them by their masters. If we go back in time and sneak a glance at the French revolution, the feudal system existed. Landlords exploited the serfs, labour wise and otherwise. The aristocracy lived a good life with plenty of meat and wine. They had hunting parties,and Marie Antoinette ate cake instead of bread, or is it the other way around?.

The feudal system was said to be abolished, but was it ever completely abolished?. The proletariat or the working class still suffer in silence. Let us be realistic and consider one of the worlds most populated and large countries, India.The manual scavengers, are a fine example of how the proletariat is exploited by the bourgeoisie. The employment of manual scavengers and the building of dry latrines [ prohibition] act was passed in 1995. This is a law with no teeth, just like Annie Zaidi says in her Frontline article, "India's Shame". It is dehumanizing, degrading,abhorrent, but it still does exist. It is a reality. People still pick our "shit" with their bare hands or sometimes if lucky a piece of plastic and carry it on their heads. Aren't these people also human beings. The bourgeoisie engage in numerous rhetorical thinking processes, thinking about how to uplift these poverty stricken people, how to liberate them, but what they do not realize, or maybe they do realize is that they are the same people who make these people, people just like us clean their latrines and handle their excreta to be more precise. Governments hotly deny the existence of manual scavengers in their states but, the reality is that they still do exist.This is just the case of manual scavenging. Is this what we call liberty?Is this what we call fraternity?.

Liberty is such an Utopian concept, at least in my point of view.It just merely exists to pacify the oppressed, to give them false hope, to discourage them from uprising against the centre. Religions promise liberty in the form of Nirvana, or the journey to heaven. Karl Marx once said that religion is merely the sigh of the oppressed and the heart of the oppressor [ hope I am not wrong]. Religion soothes the oppressed, suppressed and the depressed. It provides an outlet for the person to relieve himself, if temporarily of the suffering and the pain. Now, the question is,does liberty ever exist? It exists in great or little minds, but will it ever suffice for the individual to keep thinking about it, to engage in rhetoric about it and to make promises that he or she cannot keep. This is something we should think about. The rich get richer and the poor become poorer. This is how the world works. There is no escape from it, because of the apathy and the indifference that is omnipresent in society. Apathy has become a deity, it is to be worshipped.It begins in college offices and ends up in high ranking government posts. The police, the village panchayat, practitioners of medicine, principals of schools, everyone, they practice one thing in common and that is, even though it is quite pathetic to mention, ' apathy'.So now we come back to the original question, is liberty present in our lives?. Think...Think...Think... I have already found my answer.
Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, Justice... these are just words found in the dictionary. If you ask a sexual minority or any proletariat for that matter, you will see whether these words actually mean anything or not. Wars are fought, people die unnecessarily. So where is the liberty, the justice, the equality?

The Intellectual and the Bull

Defiance, scathing intellect and wit,
fighting for a land with a twig.
Blowing, harrumphing, seething wild,
lies a snorting bull with lips bared wide.

An intellect is like the bull.
He succumbs to worldly pleasures-
money and instant fame,
turning, twisting and snorting with glee.

The "brain drain" ended up-
being brain dead.
The intellect strived,
to come back with rhetoric and gray flesh.

A white beard, a wrinkled face.
The intellect tries to sustain,
public policy, philosophy and theory,
will he vanish in a whirl of misery?

You never know , my friend.
The intelligentsia might abstain,
but the intellect will compensate,
with dogma, critique and pomposity.

A curmudgeon , a wet blanket,
always striving for supremacy.
The intellect exists, with narratives,
he adds weight to his brain with relatives.

You, in an inebriated state,
would you ever know-
the raison d^ etre
whether it is to represent?

Bracing and heartfelt he lies.
Asserting his identity.
The bull snorts,
but the intellect nods, with audacity.