Category: time

A Poem a Day

It is a good way of beginning

The ‘Cruelest Month’ of the year

A poem a day!

How else would one survive?

The daily calamities, killings

And mournings

The sense of worse times ahead

For Entropy always wins

The beautiful flower of yesterday

Is wilted, fallen and forgotten

Just realised I did see the Halley’s Comet

And then came the afterthought

I won’t ever be seeing it again!

It will come irrespective of everything

As sun beckons it every 75 years

Plants thrive on sunlight

Maybe they bloom flowers

For the Sun!!

A return gift maybe

For all the free glorious light

Plants know gratitude

While we seem to thrive

On regret, hate and revenge!

#GloPoWriMo

Poetry Ai’nt Luxury

If poetry were a luxury

Afforded by only few

The world wouldn’t have known

Realities of poverty, hunger and war

That lament of loss and grief

Poetry ain’t luxury

Thankfully

A little girl hiding in an attic

With just a paper and pen

Multitudes of thoughts and emotions

Finds an alternative realm

Realm of words and emotions

Those damn slaves, those blues singers

Poetry freed them from slavery

Songs and poetry of protests

Gave language, words and idioms

To the oppression and violence they endured

Poetry gave the moon and stars 

Silver linings another meaning

Metaphors for hopes, love and loss

There wouldn’t be lullabys

There won’t be haikus

Long and short

Lyrical and free verse

Had poetry been a luxury

It belongs to those who own it

A craft they are willing to hone it

It says much even in its pauses

Brevity is its expanse

Poetry is a friend

Who walks along

Encouraging one to face life

It is like those fallen and trampled flowers

A true evidence of life lived and unlived.

Joan of Arc

Though there is ample evidence

That we were the harvesters, gatherers

While men went hunting and gaming

Maybe we were cave artists too

Though there is an ample evidence

That we did the ground calculations

For ambitious space missions

Carried out fatal experiments

To figure out x rays, radioactivity and

Even the DNA structure

Though there is evidence

That most anonymous writers

Too were women

They were also those wives, sisters, sister in laws and whores

Which gave the world stupendous art

Yet women have been historically ignored

Cast aside, taken for granted

Treated as a doormat 

While men ran their victory laps

As they stood on the podium 

The tray bearers were the women too

There is ample overpowering evidence

That we birthed the entire humanity

Every evil soul who masquerades as saviour

Started life in a mother’s womb

The very female sex whom he ended up

Exploiting, killing and silencing

How did we end up here?

Are we truly the weaker kind?

Or just too kind? Or too conditioned?

Passing on the intergenerational trauma

And patriarchy in equal measures

No wonder we end up being hated a lot

For trading freedom for freedom

That’s the only real deal for us

Be unfree, free, unfree, free

To be or not to be

We truly can’t distinguish between choices

There isn’t any escape route

From this foul role-play

We regale it in and we ace it too!!

After all we just have to call it day

And decide not to give birth

And watch homes and government scramble

With incentives and perks

We can pull off a demographic shift

Yet these imbecile fools

Disrespect and disrobe us

Rape and kill as per their will

There seems to be no end in sight

We are still in the recognition stage

Recognising the inequality

Still debating that patriarchy 

Is the ultimate design

No wonder Joan of Arc

Was called a witch and burnt at stake

Only to be venerated later

As a patron saint and saviour

This game is too old

Can we move to the next level?

We refuse to be recognised in retrospect

We dare you to practice equality

Take those baby steps

Remember we women are good at it

To teach those baby steps

Watch you falter

Give us a chance to make you

A better human or maybe at least a human!!

Photo courtesy: My son, Anuran. This was clicked at Orleans where Joan of Arc led the war to save France.

Unheard Screams

She was out on the streets

Screaming about horrors

That went on inside a mansion

No one believed her

Women are always

Hysteric they thought

Before her there was another

A super model

Who tried to tell the truth

She was packed off

To the psychiatric ward

A filmmaker tried too

He died before

The world saw his edited film

Which felt like his perverse imagination

All this while

For decades men and women

Of power and influence

Kept mum even when they knew

They all partied, built a horrific reality

That the world thought was

Just a perverse imagination

They maimed, harmed and killed

In the name of fun and longevity

It took a whole generation

Of abused and trafficked kids to grow up

To call it all out, fight endless legal battles

Die mysteriously in the process

To bring it all to the light

With all evidence for everyone to see

Yet the world is numb

The perverse spy network

That controlled the world

Still thrives in money and power

Telling people to move on

Screaming only stocks and race

Money and influence matters

A handful few perverts

Reminding us that torture chambers

Continue to exist, cruelty never dies

In war between good and evil

Evil always has the ugliest loud laugh

While goodness stands shackled

Maimed, trafficked and brutally abused

No one believes the goodness anymore

What good does it serve to be good?

What kind of a rot is this? 

Where screams of vulnerable

Women and children

Often go unheard

While men continue to flaunt

Their naked positions and power

Through utter cruel perversity

Shame on this selective

Deaf, dumb and blind world

Was it all like this forever?

Was free world, an illusion

That was sold to us?

Just like puppets we dance

While the screams go unheard

We scroll past all the horrors

To pause at delicate flowers

Or wellness reels

How many steps did you walk today?

Stars burn out too

Sun and stars may seem like

Permanent fixtures of our lives

Moving across the sky

The sun and other billions of them

They are literally a ball of fire

Constantly fusing atoms together

Depleting their reserves slowly

And very brightly

They are going to die too

Each one of them

Die and evolve into something else

Depending on how big or small they are

White dwarf, black dwarf, neutron stars

Or maybe a black hole

Just like every other being

The stars burn out too

And fade into oblivion

Their life timescales are too large

For us to witness

Like ours is for creatures who

Live for only for a bit

Nothing is permanent

Nor stars, nor universe nor we

Yet we keep seeking forevers

Knowing very well that

The cosmic dance can end  any moment

Knowing that everyone will move on

Memories linger but that too

For a while, only a little while

In the grand scale of the universe

Sky, horizons, time, colours

Eternities and forevers are illusions

Stars burn out too…so do we…

Difficult Days

These are difficult days

When reality occults the dreams

It is bizarre isn’t it?

Reality that we try to figure out

Or try to make sense of ?

Is this also imagined ?

Then what is real?

What I think is real real?

The time that ticks away?

Or the dream that fades over time?

Is time too imagined?

Just like dreams ?

Sun does rise for real

But again it’s a play

Play of light, atmosphere

We see it before it even 

Peeps over the horizon 

While setting sun lingers elsewhere

It rises for us in full glory

It illuminates the tiniest dust particles

While darkness engulfs elsewhere

With no power to light their lives

Powerless have to make through

Another cold imprisoned night

Maybe darkness is a blessing

That hides the cruelty, rubble

That amputated humanity

Missing its phantom spine

Where do we go from here? 

Dreams are the only ransom

We can pay

To continue existing

Dreams of freedom

And that hopeless hope

Stars twinkling away far off

They are the witnesses

Of how our sun was born

And our Earth came into being

How dinosaurs roared and vanished

Maybe if we can fine tune

From somewhere

Maybe it is still visible

How it all began

The eternal cycle of

creation and destruction

It is such a pity

We want to behold pleasure

Which comes at the cost of pain!

We want to behold AI

Which comes at the I

These are difficult days…

Far too Long…

It takes far too long

To figure out the right from wrong

It takes far too much

To comprehend how much is too much

It takes a lifetime

To figure out life is about time

Sometimes it’s far too late

To let go what is already lost

It takes too long to figure out

There isn’t any blue print

And there isn’t much to figure out

By the time we find the puzzle pieces

It is too late

The puzzle actually is being undone

And not all pieces fit in

It takes forever

To know that silence is eloquent

Conveys more than words

It takes too many wars to know

To know what actually is at stake

And wars go on far too long

And love?

We can barely hold it for long

It slips through fingers like sand

The moment you define it

It becomes a possession

A caged bird

Which rarely returns when set free

It goes away far too far and

Far too long…

Sometimes It Is Too Late…

A petit pink fresh flower

Fell on the roadside

Just detached from the mother tree

I thought of picking it up

On my way back

As I walked ahead

A big SUV passed me by

At the end of the lane

As I turned

I saw it backing

Into its marked zone

To park perhaps

To my utter dismay

The wheels went over

That petit pink flower lay crushed

Beneath the mother tree

Sometimes it is just too late

To  behold, cherish and save

Beauty is often fragile and transient

Always ending up crushed

Under the ruthless

Wheels of the civilization

Sometimes it is too late

Most times it is too late!!

Tiger Tiger

http://madkatphotoessays.com/2025/11/08/tiger-tiger/

Excerpt:

“Humans who have built roads

Into their territories

Are now the new colonisers

How much ever we study history

Dissect colonisation

We continue to colonise nature

To plunder it all

Leaving no space to other species

While the capital city

Chokes on high AQI

We try fancy stuff

Like seeding the clouds

We want even clouds

To be performative

Even when all our acts

Grand spectacular failure

We refuse to learn simple truth

We just need to save 

The planet and nature 

For it to save us!!”

Image courtesy: Arvind Karthik