Yet another new year
Is back with the old baggage
Of fears and cautions
Prejudices and bigotry
Lurking shadows of
Diseases and death
They tell us
To hang on
To seek hope in
Science and prayers
Look for silver linings
And healings
Lost love
And musings
While prejudice kills peace,
And pride our compassion
While hate spreads
Like wildfire
Our comforts get
Traded and sold
While we lose our voice
And rights
Like Jesus
Or phoenix
Maybe they will rise
Just like balloons
Filled with their breath
Those little street urchins
They bear testimony of
Our collective failures,
Our naked emperors
Maybe their balloons display
Everyone’s lost smiles!!
#2022
GenZ Rebellion
My handheld device
Shows me a glimpse
Glimpse of a rebellion
By GenZ and Gen Alphas
Our youngsters are on edge
They are tired of hope
Hope for a better tomorrow
Of which there are no signs
They know
Action speaks louder than
All the words and rhetoric
To ensure a better future
The best way is to show up!!
With climate dystopia
Temperatures rising
And Wars raging
There is indeed no hope in sight!!
Youths are doing
What youths do the best
They are rebelling
Asking for a systemic change
They are dreamers
Left with only nightmares
They are out on streets
To reclaim their dreams
Dreams of a better future
A better safe tomorrow
Afterall it is their future
Being gambled away
By senile politicians and greedy oligarchs
Young protestors are seeking
Accountability –
Who is responsible?
Who plundered it all?
Why isn’t education a priority ?
While defense budget is?
What are you defending?
If not the lives of youngsters?
Sending them to war fronts
For wars of not their making
Leaving them stranded in life
With AI enabled devices
(Which too predict only dystopia)
The pretense is over
They know no one cares
No one thinks of them
Their safety, their education
And their future
With a miniscule education budget
And crumbling infrastructures
And no teachers
They are learning faster on streets
The lessons of life and history
They need no textbooks or classrooms
To understand misplaced priorities
Are we at the tipping point?
That rare historic epoch?
Revolution isn’t being televised
It is being livestreamed
Every regressive action
Is on record and on camera
Heartless political machinery
Turning cities into militarised zones
Waging war against its own youth
Such a deplorable shame!!
While the rebellion is spreading
Like a wildfire
All world leaders have turned
Blind, deaf and mute
Hoping perhaps for the rebellion
To lose its momentum
Such a lapse of judgement
No one learns from history
(Hence the history repeats)
Time and again
Our children teach us
Courage and empathy
While we build a pretty facade of a home
And a farce of a life for them!
Photo courtesy: creative commons wikipedia
Hope in the Light
Doomsayers and doomscrollers
Find it impossible to be hopeful
Quite rightly so
Everything that could go wrong
Has indeed gone wrong
And what seems to be right
Seems to be doomed too
It is like being buried
Under the debris of
One’s own making
Being trapped in that
Dark claustrophobic space
With no possibility
Of hope Or light
The only way out is to move
To move towards any
Glimmer of light
Or glimmer of hope
Only in such pitch darkness
Can one meet faint light
Which arrives from nowhere
Almost like a hallucination
Reflecting that elusive hope
Rekindling the dying spirits
Nothing is lost
Till everything is lost
We make it through
Through that dark space
Where we learn hopelessness
Hope always stays hidden within
That hopelessness
Stubborn hope does thrive
All that it needs is a faint light
That glimmer of light
In the kind eyes
Or from a bird’s flight
Or from that distant far away star
Whose light makes it
After a journey of millions of years
Traveling light years
It meets us right in the eye
Making us aware
The dark space isn’t dark
It is made of millions
Millions of stars and kind hearts
Great Floods
Great floods have occurred in the past
No one talks of who triggered it
But we know right from Noah
Who were the saviours
Gods can’t seem to do much
In the drowning world
Where drowned ones
Wait for that one physical and real
Hand to manifest
The hand of the saviours
To pull them out of the debris
To live to tell the tale
Some say it felt like
A great wall of water and sludge
Came towards them
Scenes of apocalypse unfolded
Is the world coming to
An end?
We know there are
Profiteers getting richer
By burning the planet
But ice is ice is ice
With a fixed melting point
A completely non-negotiable one
We have watched for a decade or more
Bargains over 1 degrees or two
But idiots never understood
Glaciers will melt
No gods can save us
From nature’s fury
We transcended the boundaries
Taking earth for granted
Like we take our women too
But everything has a breaking point
Yet we refuse to learn
As long as the poor
Or rich tourists die
Does really matter anymore?
Nor do lives on a narrow strip
Which is getting narrower
Nor do high altitude folks
Who are the first victims
And first responders too
Who is to be held accountable?
For uncountable deaths
We will bear witness
Make films, poetry, stories too
We have all documentation tools
To document the horror
Soon we will walk around
With oxygen masks
As cities turn unliveable
While mountains prone to GLOFs
You escape the noise
To seek peace in higher altitude
Only to get buried under a glacier deluge
No one knows where you disappeared
Lucky ones say Shiva or Jesus or Prophet
Or any god of their calling saved them
No one asks why gods are so selective?
They never punish the perpetrators
They go after the poorest of poor
Trapped in bare minimum cycles of survival
On a larger scale we are in an era
Which might get defined in retrospect
An era hooked to screens
Watching their own collapse
And mountains turning into rivers
Minute by minute
Waiting for saviours
To manifest to save them
From themselves
As we sink into the deluge and debris
Of our own making
When will we learn to act?
Isn’t it too late already?
Betrayals
Time betrays
People betray
Family betrays
Life betrays
You betray yourself too
The true story
Isn’t the words said
The true story
Is never what is seen
It lies in what stays
Unsaid and unnoticed
And in life unlived!!
What betrays silence
Is the word
& what betrays the words
Is the silence
Between said and unsaid
There is a pause
A void so dense
Yet so empty
Bereft of trust and emotions
Post Rain Night Walk
After long last
The rains have come home
Sound of rains
Like music to the ears
The city roads and trees look happy
Finally a complete wash
And a chance to come clean
Washing away all the dust and grime
The cars roofs and leaves
Glistening with water droplets
Finally clouds kept their promise
They brought down water drops
To trap light and refract away
To create sparkling dots
Mini stars on the ground
Amidst all the darkness
Love in the Era of Dating Apps
I wonder how does love fare
In the era of dating apps
Earlier love came gate crashing into our lives
Annoyingly when we least expected it
It sat as an unwanted guest
Messing up all the time lines
It waited patiently for its turn
To unleash it’s charm
And make its way into our lives
I wonder how love copes now
In the era of dating and speed dating
Has it become impatient?
Does it move along with our swipes
Swipe right you may find it
Swipe left you may lose it or vice versa
With Apps and profiles
As the ultimate gate keepers
How will it ever get to gate-crash?
Is love at first sight even a possibility?
There are always damn screen and filters
And best edited profile pictures
And then when you personally meet
With ample room for expectations
And disdain
Does love leave the table politely?
Earlier love would linger on
And maybe even stalk
And now it ghosts
Earlier there were no promises or forever
But yet love would haunt for life
I no longer know how it works
When we lay all our cards on the table
Hoping for a fair game
But then it turns out
There are no rules of the game
Love remains a situationship
Waiting for an upgrade
It is always a clean slate
No misgivings, no messiness
Light as a butterfly
Love flutters in and out of life
No surprises anymore
No confessions either
Love in the age of AI and Apps
Has turned out to be a smart love
With racing heartbeats in rings and watches
No broken hearts, no unrequited love
Nor platonic or overtly lustful
Love itself has become a need
A box to be ticked
The more you chase it, the more it eludes
That hope – the next swipe might
Bring it to your table right?
Keep at it!!!
Knowing love, it will still turn up
To upset all your plans
Staring right at you
Sweeping you in a twister storm
And then dumping you
Totally broken but warm
It will teach you to smile and sob
Only love can teach love
It is a shape shifting algorithm
Making an absolute fool of
Even the wisest one!!
Let’s Talk About The Weather
So finally here we are
Talking about the weather
The most safe topic
Not so long ago
But Alas! No longer is
Who would have imagined this day?
We are not just being
Robbed of a decent weather
But also a safe small conversation
Which now ends up in a rant
Look at the sheer number of folks
Ranting about the European heat wave?
Finally they are getting back at the whites
For not having acs which they never needed
It is equally fun to watch
Europeans learning the ‘DIY’ ways to cool off
Turning the fan away might be just the trick We Indians or rest of the world never learnt
Or putting aluminium foils on the windows
Or using other ways of coping and cooling
Or simply sprinkling water on strangers
Weather is certainly getting
Stranger and stranger
Blowing hot and cold
Bringing rains and droughts
Most of us are ending up
Under the weather
Once upon a time a lovely talking point
Now it’s best avoided
We just cope…we cut trees
We just cope
We buy more cars
We just cope
We wage wars
We just cope
We want all our luxuries
Yet we struggle to cope
We end up on a dream
Summer holidays
Only to find destinations getting hotter
Most tourist spots closed
Our list turns listless
Tired, we feel lucky to find a place
Under the shade
A stranger finally looks at you
And asks how’s the weather?
You paid for this remember?
For that hottest spot
Under the very super hot weather!!
A Closure
I am not sure
What is A Closure?
Which everyone looks for?
Is it a signalling to end a phase of life?
Does life have such demarcations?
Before and after phases
Before school, after school,
Before marriage, after divorce?
After birth and before death
That’s the lifetime we get
We keep dividing into moments
Phases of growing up, coming of age
Falling in and out of love
Getting married, becoming a parent
Then the lonesome empty-nester
We keep drawing lines
Or adding chapters to our lives
While erasing the past which keeps
Receding faster, Doppler shifting away
Memories fade but hurt remains
We can’t get over traumas
Yet we call it PTSD
From the moment of birth to death
It’s just a few odd years
When we scale it
To the age of the Earth or the universe
We can’t even predict
Where the grim reaper awaits us
When we will close our eyes
The curtains will fall
And the drama will end
The drama of our life
That will be the true closure
Two dates in the bracket
Will define our lifetime
And of course
The perspectives of people
Who loved to love us
And who loved to hate us
While we were caught up
In their ideas of love and hate
The drama was never ours
We were mere characters in
Lives and dramas of others
Time does strange funny things
Somewhere in the future
One might get resurrected
In some random conversations
In another drama of not our making
A dead bright leaf also gets
A chance at immortality
When someone clicks a photo
Or paints it or turns it ornamental
In the Camus Universe
Existence has no purpose or meaning
And here we are purposefully
Decimenting and reducing each other
To almost nothing
Or whatever suits us
Then we seek a closure
Closure from hurt
Only to begin again
Another drama
Hoping for forevers
Which doesn’t exist
Soon I will be gone
And so will you be
We will be either villains or heroes
In shape, perspectives and
Narrative shifting world
How about seeking a fresh start
Maybe begin again
So where were we?
Yes…A closure…
Climate Chaos
Some blame it on nature
The sun’s activity cycles
Some blame it on human activities
Unprecedented cutting of trees
And encroachment of lakes and forests
So I guess Earth is playing it fair
It blows too hot, dry or humid
And just when humans start complaining
It blows hailstorms, cyclones and rains
With water water everywhere
And nowhere for it to go!!
My house help lamented the other day
That I was spending a lot on house plants
She hinted jokingly that money could help poor
Ah!! The fallacy of existence
I could only smile back and say
They were my buddies who gave me free oxygen and beautiful flowers for free
We take the oxygen we breathe much for granted
Just like the clean water we drink
And the gravity and the magnetic field
And also the sun and the moon
And of course our sole planet earth
While we spend billions to find exoplanets
With a hint of the existence of life
Perhaps, we deserve this wrath of nature
To reset our perspectives and context
Nothing is unlimited and forever
And everything follows
The law of reciprocity
Hate begets hate and Love begets love
Eye for an eye has blinded the humanity
Yet we refuse to learn
We make it all about profits and money
Climate chaos will be good for climate insurance
Rich will get richer and poor will become poorer
Except for the few who will be paraded as hope
The model examples of rags to riches tale
The dream after all needs to be sold
To keep nightmare going!!!
Going Solo
It didn’t take long
To go solo
Be it movies
Or restaurants
Or museums
Or a bookstore
Or treks
I don’t even remember
When it began
Perhaps during my college
My long solo commute?
Every daily commuter
Is always alone
Though almost crushed
In a crowded train or bus
There is a constant
Inner talk with self
About a thing
Or millions of things
Or just an empty mind
Too fatigued to think
You don’t need people
When you grow up
So rugged
And then of course
There are betrayals
Of trust and time
Then there was beautiful phase
When my newborn boy
Became my extension
I was never alone
I was his constant
For that tiny life
I had brought forth
Into this chaotic world
I was never alone
Kids never let you be
Unless you play along
So often it would
Be the library or bookstore visits
Where I would sit solo
In line of sight of my boy
Far far away in the kids section
I don’t remember
Who exactly was I
Training to be alone ?
After the boy grew up
And flew off far far away
I made up my mind
To be the solitary reaper
Of my abandoned pursuits
I unearthed my buried self
In place of a girl in 20’s
Out came a woman in her 50’s
More calmer, confident and wiser
Much slower too
How I wish I could reach out
To that girl and tell her to go solo
The world abandons you anyways
Women are supposed to play
A second fiddle in everything
Wish I could spare her from
All the traumas and dilemmas
And of course all the tears
My dark circles are rightfully earned
But here I am in my 50’s
Carrying that abandoned
Spirit of my 20’s
I know it feels absurd
To those who never tried
(Or didn’t have to)
To stand up for oneself
And live for a while
Remember?
We have abandoned our earth too
Who moves solo in the dark space
And then there is the final solo act
When we depart solo!!
