Staying relevant
In irrelevant times
Is the challenge
Engage
Or disengage?
Stay attached?
Or be detached?
When Time sweeps
You away from the frame
Should one linger
On the fringes?
Where does one go?
Is there a Rumi’s field?
The even playing field?
Where they play it fair
No time to call a foul
A foul
No ground rules
It’s a game
Where no one wins
But all try to
Reinvent
Shifting positions
Moving goal-posts
To stay relevant
In these irrelevant times…
With her chin-up
And chips down
With spring in her feet
She trots on the globe
Our blue dot
But she is not alone
There are billions of us
Totally lost
In the humongous mess
Of hundreds of imagined worlds
And faiths
And the great sense of propriety
All trying to be right
By proving others wrong
Kudos to us for
Throwing out the baby
– our sustenance
Along with the bath water
All self similar beings
Trying so hard
To advance their race
By killing each other
The sheer madness
We still love to imagine
And believe
It’s the sun that sets
Or rises for us
Instead of –
– that’s it’s we go
Around an axis
Downside up
And upside down
Along the elliptical
Planet doesn’t care
Whether it’s dinosaurs
Or only us
Neither does the Universe
Feeling all self-important
With bloated
or deflated egos
With the chin up
Or chips down
We continue to seek
our significance
In the grand cosmic
Insignificance
But does it have all to be
So dangerously silly?
by pitting imagined worlds
Imagined selves
And imagined gods
Against each other
And against Nature!
She tells
People ignore
Ah, the ‘Drama’
He confesses
People dismiss
Oh, the ‘Dark Side’
Ah, patriarchy
the dark drama!!
#metoo #patriarchy
They both argued
About glory
Red being red
Flaunted being important
Underlined with Red
Called Blue
The scatter brain
Blue being blue
Mellow in being
Simply said
I make most of my
Wavelength
And let small particles
Scatter me to the Oblivion
Thus played out
The most spectacular sunset
Blue sky smeared
with Vermillion red
Sun smiled as it set
Ah! the usual fight
Forgetting they
Both came from white light!
In a strange city
Trees grow
In abandoned homes
And uprooted people
Dwell beside the roads
There is no place
To plant trees
There is no home
For migrants
Trees grow
Inside old homes
And people grow old
Without homes
Both trees and people
Have become refugees
And homes are empty
Devoid of love
And compassion
Trees and people
Search for roots
In a strange city
On a strange planet
Under the Canopy
Here She lies
In Paris
In exile
At Pere Lachaise
A mother, a queen
With a vanquished dream
She crossed seven seas
A sin in the 1850s
In the hope of justice and freedom
From the Queen of England
Mocked, ignored and bribed
She told them
They could not own
The kingdom of her son
And her pride
Here she lies
Our own Queen of Oudh
Next to a bush of roses
Growing in the wild
In exile
at Pere Lachaise
Resting quietly among the greats
She sought nothing
But Peace and Freedom
Among all the shiny graves
If you see an earthly grave
Fractured by Time
Under a green canopy
Know that it’s her
India’s brave Queen Mother –
Janab-e-Aliah Mallika Kishwar
Who crossed seven seas
A sin in the 1850s
To seek Peace and Freedom
And fair political justice
From the Imperial queen
And did no compromise
Do pause
And pray
If you may
But do tell her tale
Here She lies…
I exist therefore I am
I am therefore I exist
I am the means
and the end
I think
so I do
I do
so I think
I stand
so I believe
I believe
so I stand
I reason
to be
not to be
I protest
for Justice
That is blind
I am free
but chained
by law
But the law exists
to free the chains
what is Right
is also Left of Right
But Right is not wrong
so Left is Right
History stares at me
Full of tales
From different eras
From different perspectives
A walk
Back in Time
To re-build the Time
To know the present
To shape the future
That’s what Astronomers
Do as well
Look back in Time
To connect the cause
and the effect
In a chaos that reigns
There she lay
In a lonely grave
By the Brook
Unseen and unknown
Till a lonely shepherd
Stumbled upon her
And found her tale
A glorious tale of
Love and loss
Of a royal Princess
The most beautiful
Tormented soul
Soon the stories
Were made
And unmade
Shepherd loved
The dead dame
And his fame
He tended to
The tomb
Soon lovers came
To be blessed
By the cursed Princess
Little did anyone know
Six feet under
Was a sad refugee
Who had lived,
In pain,
Loved,
And died in vain
Little did she know
Her death will give
Her a life, care
And a fame
And not far away
In the grand Cemetery
In an unmarked grave
Was the real Princess
Finally dethroned by Time
They both stood vigil
Just like lovers
With surgical precision
Lines were drawn
And lives got thrown
Into disarray
One thought Nation did not belong to them
Other was too young and weak to claim or protect
The two great lovers
Stood and watched
As a Nation got ripped into two
And precious lives ebbed away
No one realised
It was the very idea of love and freedom
They had aborted that day
As the Nation bled
Along with lives
Homes
Identities
Peace
Love
Humanity
All was lost
And alleged lovers stood vigil
Arrogantly announcing
Their Nation’s tryst with destiny!!
Mad Decadence 