Many many years ago, so many that I no longer remember how many, I remember writing an essay for my school magazine. During a train journey, a thin little girl had sung while holding her infant brother in her arms. The coins that people threw into her tin bowl had held strange haunting music of their own. I must have seen beggars before, but this girl had felt real. Real enough that I had written about her. My teachers had…
my soldier, you are goneto paradise or beyond this universe’s realmi have no way of knowingthe aching winds bring news from farmy soldier, you are gone if there’s paradise on earth they saidit was there it was there it was therewho sent the minstrel of deathriding his bloodlust, detonating his carnagemy soldier, you are gone your child’s tears will soak through to her heartyour mother’s eyes will never know peaceyour father your son your country will weepyour instant will remain…
i’ve burnt with you slowly, sustainedly in scorches, in conflagration in flames i have burnt with you incinerating cremating my remains watching the ashes fly the embers spark and call on cataclysm to catch fire and burn again i have burnt with you been torrefied and returned to original dust indrani’s index …
Did you ever wonder, sometimes on a busy day Why a little longer, some moments would not stay? Catch those little bubbles, before they float away Catch those little moments, before time goes away Did you ignore dear ones, when they had something to say? Did you stop them in the middle, when they had a confession to make? Listen to their sweet words, before they vanish away Listen to what their heart says, else you may never hear…
i don’t think the “god’s own country” campaign had started when i first went to kerala. it was in the summer of ’89, my first trip to south india; first bangalore, then cochin. i had no idea what to expect, but a malayalee friend would always speak of the different green of his state. his voice would definitely reflect a funny kind of pride when he mentioned that. being from bengal, another “green” state, with poets and lyricists devoting many…
It has dawned on me that life passes by in seasons just like the TV shows I love to watch. It is not a big realization. Mythology and history have always emphasized phases of life and what to do in each one of them. My life’s seasons, so far, are not that drastic. Maybe an apt comparison is to Smallville – a number of seasons to allow Clark Kent to embrace his destiny as Superman, but more than a 100…
i don’t look at you any more for i think you’re the same every day yet you aren’t, are you the light falls differently the colours carouse at their own will there’s purple and pink some day some day it’s less orange sometimes more red than you are in the mood for there’s ochre, mocha, and blue and the shapes? what are they called wish i knew streaks and billows shimmery peaks and meadows lashes of a riotous unfettered…
Sometimes I wonder, how the future would be Sometimes I ponder on the lines of a fantasy With not just flying cars, but people flying around A visual spectacle, something like tomorrowland And then I begin to think, how will be the societies? Will there be peace around, or still the animosities? Will the borders be erased, will it be a free world? Or avenging continues for matters age old? Will there be equality among genders, classes and races? Will…
Last night, in a jumble of dreams, I danced… I was back in the newly built school auditorium. Now that I know more, I realise it wasn’t as magnificent as I thought it to be back then. No ornate columns, not even a carpet. Just a rectangular block of concrete, not even fully painted. With only a single raised platform. I remember, grand or not – didn’t matter to me then, it didn’t matter now. I remember leaning against an open…
i am grateful for the silence in the night as a i sleep there are no gunshots from near or far, intermittent, startling, i walk on the streets, the sky is blue above, a helicopter’s whir i feel no fear, no thought of chemical weapons, no not one, no none my child goes to school, sometimes i forget how not everyday is that the child soldier, the child kidnapped and raped, the child running down the street naked…