Tag: dystopia

The ASK

You ask

How could you do this

To your own

Partner/Home/Country?

Without answering the

Same question

How could you do this

To your own

Partner/Home/Country?

After pushing to the brink

You ask why the center doesn’t hold?

The center ought to collapse

Without the dialectical force

But you desired one-sided

Undisputed brute force

Every stable star is in equilibrium

Because of the perfect balance of forces

You desired to be the single force

How idiotic was your plan?

Leading to the implosion/explosion

You wanted to be the center

There you are collapsing

Under your own self claimed glory

Responsible for it all

Yet you turn around and ask

How could you do this?

Without answering

How could you?

You plunder the very planet

Then you blame the god

Your war games never end

And then you ask

Why does peace never get a chance?

You never play fair

Then you ask

You fixed the game?

The ask is a big ask

With no easy answers

Let’s enjoy the spectacle

Of this collapse

While blaming each other

You will win this blame game too

Then you will ask

Why didn’t you win?

The very game rigged by you

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

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?

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!!

Kafkaesque II

Kafka wrote about it

Long before

World turned into

This dystopia that

Pre-dates Orwellian one

Was human condition

Predisposed to be

Such a nightmare?

Making up rules

In the favour of power

At the cost of powerless

Cohen famously sang too

“Everyone knows dice is loaded

And the fight is fixed

The good guys lose

Poor stay poor, and the rich get rich

That’s how it goes”

What kind of a matrix is this?

How do we escape

This labyrinth of our own making ?

We are the predators

We are the preys 

Perhaps, human condition

Cannot be redeemed

Even though

Christ has been crucified

Wars have been lost

Upon which religions were built

We are spiralling

Nobody knows

But yet everyone knows

Trials are punishment

You never get a sentence

For what you didn’t do.

But you were charged guilty

And given a Sisyphean task

Of proving your innocence

A lifetime is spent in seeking

Justice and freedom 

Validation and acceptance!!