Courage

Tonight I want to talk

About the courage

Courage of those who are

Facing imminent fatal threats

As fear looms large

No one is talking about leaving

Or fleeing the war

It has been a pattern

Among all the nations under attack

No one is leaving to make conquest easy

Tonight we need to talk about this courage

Courage of common people

Who take the batterings

Who are easy civilian targets

Yet they refuse to leave or flee

They bury their children and kin

They live in refugee camps 

They return back to the rubbles

To rebuild again and again

As long as the ceasefire lasts

They stand up to

The truth and power

While every powerful nation chooses silence

They don’t leave or flee

Their ancestral land and home

Despite all indignity and threats

They keep showing up as human chains

They keep recording

And collecting evidence

In the hope that civility and peace

Will return again

And one day wars

Will become redundant

Tonight let’s talk about the courage

The courage of four astronauts

Who flew furthest from the earth

To the dark side of the moon

To watch unseen craters and an eclipse

Perhaps knowing well

Their mission will be eclipsed

By the war and fear mongering

They saw our beautiful blue planet

Knowing very well how bad the things are

Yet they speak of One Earth

Tonight let’s talk about the courage

Courage in the face of the fear and death

Tonight I don’t want to

Write the saddest or angry lines

I want to stand in solidarity with those

Who are being relentlessly attacked

If they have the courage to hope

To bear it all and fight back

And have guts to die

What we think or do is inconsequential

Their land, river and mountains 

Will remember them

As a resilient civilization

I will just hope

Hoping against hope

This exemplary courage will win

It has to win against the evil

Fear is not even a choice

Fear was never a choice!!

A Fall

All it takes is a fall

To rise again

We haven’t reached

The tipping point yet

Where words

Will eventually give up

Their meanings

All languages will fail

To express the pain and gratitude

All the love will be a foregone conclusion

And death?

It is now a  kids play

Their playmate doll dies

Just like their friends did

They know the rituals

They know the burials

Death seems so routine

Mourning has turned

Into a celebration

What else can we do?

Except for changing

Our perspectives

We are running out of

Perspectives and paradigms too

There are no masks

Emperors take pride

In their nakedness

That brave little boy

Has been buried

They don’t care even if

They are called out

It will take big fall

For the humanity

To rise again

We haven’t fallen

Enough yet!!

Hycean

Hycean was a hypothetical

A theoretical exoplanet

Made of Hydrogen and Ocean

The exoplanets which

We now know exist

Thanks to the  presence

Of essential bio markers

Evidence of life elsewhere

Far far away

Whose signature spectra

Can only be seen

By powerful telescopes

It is exciting to know

We are not alone

Life can be elsewhere

Ah! Life is elsewhere

Maybe not be the kind we know

It may not be earth-like

It may be completely different

But here we are

Living evidence of

Existence of complex lifeforms

In the entire universe

Also having intelligence to

Decipher it all

From smallest to largest scale

A sea of evolved beings

Refusing to look inwards

Very reluctant to look at

Darker side of humanity

While we send missions

To the dark side of the moon

Absurd humanity

Which wages wars

With itself

We have pushed

Our pale blue dot

(Also made of 70 percent water, hydrogen and oceans)

To the brink

Maybe it will survive

Once we eliminate ourselves

Future will perhaps remember us

As dichotomous beings

Glorious ambitious ones

Who turned into blood thirsty beasts

And as beautiful intelligent ones

Who saw signatures of

Far far away exoplanets

Who were delighted

To figure it all out

To create knowledge

Ask and experiment relentlessly

We did live, they will know

We had our own sun

Our year was made of 365 days

They will find it all –

Evidence of our existence

And extinction!! 

Image courtesy: Artemis II mission, Nasa

Irony

I became you

And you became them

All boundaries blurred

Between predators and preys

Every role flipped

In a role reversal

Victims turned into proud bullies

Preying upon helpless victims

Me, you, us and them

We keep changing our roles

Going in circles

Irony itself has become ironical

Like never before

I has been replaced by AI

Human by machines

Humans have turned into

Well dressed mannequins

Frozen like zombies

Doom scrolling away

Devouring themselves

Life has turned into monstrous death

In the finest of all role reversal

They feel most alive

When they kill

A movie showing severed flying head

Gets all the screens

While life affirming Space film

Finds hardly a space

Addiction to violence!

Ironically life always wins

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Didn’t change anything

Cherry blossoms do bloom

And paper cranes are still a craze

Ironically the victim nation

Never built the bomb

It ended the cycles 

Of trauma and violence

But the bully nation

That built and used it

Is back with the same flex

Ironically bullies often

Call themselves victims

What scares them?

Addicted to violence and power

They refuse to give up

Their carnal desires

While Artemis II is on its way

To the darker side of the moon

Humanity has plunged

The planet Earth

Into one of its darkest phase

How diabolical

And Ironical!

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?

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

Light and Dark

Light and Dark

Light and darkness
Both fill my home
I have made peace
With both
For, I dwell in the greys

I never had a life plan
But life did have a design
Without a choice
I went along

I chose life or
Life chose me
Here we are
Conversing daily

I don’t know
What happens tomorrow
Or day after
Or years later

I am fatigued
I am just arriving
At my present
Made of nows

Don’t ask me
About my future
Or the path that
Hasn’t yet appeared

Perhaps, I will forever
Dwell in the greys and greens
To soak in the blue hour
Seeking stars, comets and the moon

My Happy Place

We all look for it

A proverbial ‘happy place’

A place where

One can be oneself

One can find yourself

One learns to look

At self and world differently

In the life’s roller coaster ride

There is always one place, one city

Where you know

You are safe

Not just because of people

But in spite of people

You step out

And the breeze simply seems

To blow to carry away your worries

Making breathing easy 

The green canopies and flowering trees

Waft of filter coffees and dosas, 

The flower fragrances 

Aromatically you are home too

You may not have roots here

But it lets you grow and rediscover 

Your own forgotten self and dreams

Though the traffic is traumatic

It soothes your trauma

Bangalore, what else do I say?

I literally got my second life here

After that near fatal accident

The neurologist too humoured me

With a local humour which is mild and raw

But punches do land

No wonder stand ups thrive here

The city where startups are often born to die

In a shortest span of time

People know how to pick themselves

Where uber drivers too have tales

Of bad investments and losses

You taught me to pick myself up too

Many years ago and later now

I find my broken self here in the bookshops

In science spaces and conversations

Where people still assert

While respecting boundaries

They listen, they let you have the mic

This city feels like my happy place

I can be anyone here

Educator, poet, archivist, traveller

Storyteller, photographer, reader, writer

And be them all at once too

Mankind consists of all kinds

But I always find more of my kind

In this good old charming city

(Which is fast losing its charms)

To which I keep returning to

With my scars and bruises

To my utter surprise

People call me a healer 

That’s how we just heal each other

With conversations over cuppas

Of filter coffees or walks

Undramatically, unknowingly

A calm city which is no hurry

To be smart, fast or the best

Maybe hostile and unwelcoming to some

But then we all need to

Find our happy and safe space

Which lets us be…our unapologetic self

MK

(Un)Loved

Un)loved

We need to learn to mourn
The passing of the (un)loved
From our lives

These (un)loved ones
They are around us
Unseen and invisible

They simply don’t exist
They go (un)noticed
(Un)cared and (un) acknowledged

These kind invisible people
Actually pass on even before
They are actually dead

We take them so much for granted
We use them as cheerleaders
We need them as doormats

They are so kind
That they never learn to fight
For visibilty or to be seen

They are simply happy
To exist as trees
Or non-being in the house

We don’t even realise
That we have stopped
Noticing them or loving them

And then when the greater evil arrives
Be it war, accident or disease
We regret their actual passing

We make mourning and grief
All about ourselves
The grand spectacle of empathy