The dying animal

Desert the keyboard,I shall
for the ink's still wet,waiting
for the birth of the poet.
First,a folded forehead smoothens,
loosens the trappings of knowledge.
Eyeballs and eyelids,
like the baby and its mother,
now like the mother and her baby.
An ever crooning television ,
serves as silence.
Have a good day!
said a man and a radio.
Daddy ,is that the radio-man
Yes son,replied the radio in the man.
Crawling past my pen,
is an ant,a lonely one
probably on a food foraging trip
like our ancestors.
Dodging the paranoid nib,
brave ant,it survives.
fortune favours the brave,innit.
As if in search for someone,
a lizard races up the wall
and so does my eye and
with a heart heavy with envy,
I leave them alone.
While a flickering tube flirts
at once ,with many a moth
a dry leaf drops suddenly
drops not like a stone,
but like a leaf
Gravity brought Newton's apple
alone to the ground,
but god guided my leaf down
give me my god back,Oh Reason,
for another god saved my chivalrous ant
and another brought my moth to the light
but the god who was greatest of all,
He gave the poet the life of
the animal man refused to be
But as he let go his pen again
he rejoined his dead brothers walking.

Waking up to life

In between a passionate draw of the bow across the strings ,Hari raises his head to claim that "this is what is classical Carnatic music".As if I care,To me,it is nothing more than noise filling up silence.
And silence appears so very exotic,doesn't it?Oh,the lost sound of silence,how intensely I crave for it.Infinite peace.Joy.A Zen-like state of pure consciousness!
But this degree of quietude is supremely impossible to achieve,or so it seems.For neither can I lull the twitter of sparrows in the veranda,or gesture the cooing peacock outside to shut up.Let alone hushing up the wailing tot in the construction worker's arms or pleading mercy to the raucous bathroom singer and it is pretty obvious that I am not the least bit interested in kicking up a quarrel asking Hari to stop fiddling with the violin.
What I need is a bomb,a powerful one at that or perhaps a bagful of grenades could also do. Everyone,everything killed,nothing left to even cry over.People dead.children dead.pregnant mothers dead.birds and dogs and cattle dead.There you go,there is the silence you wanted ,the peace you pined away for.You have got it,now stop cribbing and be happy.

My eyes blink furtively but I seem to have gone blind,my muscles twitch restlessly but I can pass off for a numb,half-dead corpse.I have lost myself in the opulence of freedom,of choice,the choice to deem one thing boring and to ignore it,to nullify another's existence and call it worthless.Blessed with a capacity to dream,I have forsaken the beauty of reality.
Don't I see that this music,this noise,the coo of the peacock,the twitter of the sparrows,the cry of the infant,all,all of them hold the secret of the enigma that is life.


I wonder if you share the same disease,the disease of delusion,of being anesthetized,of feeling half dead ....The moment,we are born,we begin to die and we are all racing towards the bucket before the ultimate kick.Death only completes the process of dying.Sure,we cannot beat death,the grim reaper awaits us all, but we can atleast stop being deaf to our own heartbeat.We need to reevaluate our existence.We cannot afford to forget that for every single breath we take in ,we are relishing the volatile gift that is life

I intended to write this two months back.Hari had been to Karol Bagh in Delhi exactly one week before the 13th of September when a fierce blast rocked the place.As he facetiously shared with me the joy of being a suitor to the capricious lady named good fortune,the unmistakable shudder in my spine did not show up on my face and I actually managed a chuckle .Looking back now,I wonder if the place was really so important.That day Delhi,Mumbai today,Calcutta tomorrow,Madras the day after....or now,right now... perhaps you are reading your last words.Perhaps you are not?then,just thank your dear respective Gods(yes,you heard it right,this is an avowed atheist telling you this),just go ,share a word or two with your loved ones,just start up on everything you planned for a future that may never come.

Hari still plays the violin. He has not only resumed intense rehearsals in Carnatic music ,he promised he would soon be able to play my favourite Godfather theme for me, and whenever,in between his playing sessions ,he feels like sharing some technical subtlety ,I,one of the biggest music noobs ever,no longer frown and just feign attention till he is finished. for I understand now how important it is for the music to go on and never stop.