Symbiosis

Why fear the clash of civilizations
Why panic at demise of languages
Why dread the prospect of abolishing
Of geographical boundaries.

In a constant state of flux, the cultures
Are always competing with each other
For war is the father of everything
Spur of growth comes from antagonism.

In a tacit pact of mutualism
They are seen at times in commensalisms
Parasitism is not tolerated
It is verily a dog eat dog world.

The cross-cultural choreography
Is spreading contagion of fusion
It is to be seen in the days ahead
How the castes would preserve their purity.

Traits and preponderance of qualities
Hallmarks of ethnic identities fuse
What emerges from the post-modern cauldron
Would go against monolithic notion.

Let a million freedom-flowers bloom
Let us sing in a billion strong tongues
May we unite in our aspirations
To build the one Gnostic community.

[Mon-151104]

Protocol

May be with all good intentions
When we called them ‘Harijans’
It became a political ploy
Where the symbol reigned over substance.

The idea of God in man, ‘Nara-Narayana’
Became the voter-based ‘Janta-Janardan’
God, the Lord, the Omnipotent king
Was now represented by a human being.

His Excellency is the titular head of state
Although in his name the administration runs
And he goes through mock rituals and reverence
In effect, a mere rubber stamp: the sham thickens.

Then what to talk of an ordinary voter
Doesn’t matter if he dies of hunger
As a beneficiary of the welfare state
The citizen is hardly a stakeholder.

Justice is no less a pretension
It’s virtually an arbitration
One court over-rules another, so often
In their self-righteous make-believe world.

Each ‘Pradesh’ is seen as ‘pardesh’
Nationalism idea seems contrived
Democracy, patriotism, all alien
Everybody enjoys this cloaks and masks game.

[Fri-070901-md]

Momentum

No point simply to straddle along
Quick, quick! Clamber up, bugger
To catch up with the rest of them
You must drum up that killer instinct.

There’s always room at the top
And when nothing short of sky is the limit
It certainly pays to be ambitious
And be in the pursuit of excellence.

Even if fame lasts for only fifteen minutes
Everything is fair in the age of unreason
Beg, borrow or steal, whatever you can
For heaven’s sake, somebody become.

Hell with to be in the queue
One must become at least a who’s who
Once there, you must learn a small trick
To pull the rug from under the others’ feet.

Nobody would offer it on a platter
You must do your own positioning
To be able to snatch when the chance comes
And grab it for as long as you prefer.

It is a curse to be at the receiving end
Hierarchy, a hard fact of life as of Nature
To be upward mobile is of course a virtue
But an inward gaze is infinitely better, still.

[Thu-270901]

Herald

If the Life-heavens are immune and pure
Free from any Manichean double-fault
The promised Harmony is very much a possibility
For being a blossoming pure potentiality.

Whence the deity’s three-some steps
Pervade the earth, the heaven and inferno
And what is grotesque is pressed into the past
Still chaos rules over the present-world.

Let’s be sucklers of the future then
And aspirants to the hidden harmony
What hasn’t come has of course to come
The heralds are but sure signs.

It has been a long wait of epochs together
For lilies and birds and swans and seagulls
Man’s reach is extending from moon to the sun
Yet his heart’s spark is out of his bounds.

And that one day when all would change
We shall swim in the plenary sunshine
Dwell in the happy home of Harmony
Of love and knowledge as warf and woof.

It’s a promise of possibility, unimpeachable
It’s because of tomorrow that today becomes bearable
Let’s awake to the lure of that alchemy
And pine for a pinch of that Panergy.

[Wed-150801]

Mask

‘Formula fixated’, ‘go-with-the-flow story’
‘Optical opium’ of ‘Good triumphs’
‘Reflection’ hard on a pre-reflective habit
‘Porous chorus’ cuddles the ‘spoon-fed’ crowd.

Culture shock in ‘intricate patterns of morality’
Soaked in ‘rich textural ramifications
‘Dense dimensions’ of ‘psychological inferences’
If falls on deaf ears, it’s of no wonder.

‘The all-pervasive darkness of mood’
When ‘good-face bad-face mask’ is unveiled
And ‘taking the audience into confidence’
Perhaps it’s crime to ‘treat the audience maturely.’

With all that excellent promos and hype
Raunchy music and ‘sleaziest’ dance numbers
‘A classic in retrospect,’ no small consolation
Even as its tribe ‘sets impossible standards.’

‘Keeping the faith alive helps a creative’ soul
‘To abide by his convictions’, ‘success or failure’
Set him free in he ‘visualizes’ ‘the way’
May the ‘Mera-Naam-Director’ have his say.

[Sun-050801-Aks-Skj]

Conundrum

How ecstatic is the first sight of the sea
The vast body of blue overwhelms you
The arch of distant horizon takes afar
One feels instantly some celestial joy.

But a few moments later it vanishes
Giving way to a gloomy state of mind
For the comparision brings home the fact
That man is such a puny little creature.

From Chaos and Strings to Games theory
Man strives to get at the driver’s saddle
One tsunami or Katrina dislodges
All his claims to superiority.

The Logistics follows no sane logic
The manners of Marketime are secret
One Invisible hand rules everything
Evolution or creationism.

Secular affairs in the meanwhile
Continue pretending to be wholesome
Man works and earns as if all on his own
And leaves some tip for sentiments god ward.

The conundrum of sacred and mundane
Is the most riddle-some issue for man
The illusion-of-the-obvious blinds
And man gropes for the real road for ever.

[Sat-131005]

Collusion

The newspaper and its staple offerings
Politics finance and the current affairs
Are apparently matters of no concern
To a religious-minded spiritual person.

The secular and all mundane contraptions
Are engagements of lower persuations
But isn’t this world of multiplicity
Another facet of Divine reality?

Where and how then to draw the dividing line
Between the sacred and the undivine
To see in a murder or some misfortune
The Cosmic hand is not unreasonable.

To adore the Divine in its seclusion
Would be to acquit it of patent collusion
And hence why not insist on an open trial
Till it divulges the Midas magic formula.

Till then to banish philosophy from life
And the world would be myopic ventures
For if we really look at it aright
It’s all the playfulness of the sacred.

So no point in drawing separate charts
For all fall under the concurrent list
What seems secular or merely academic
Is nothing but whims of an Imperiality.

[Thu-120902]

Teleology

Parents, grand-parents and great-grand-parents
My life is half-way of a long story
Of innumerable births, growth and deaths
Like philosophies rise from each other.

Earth’s solar parentage and Milky-way
With its fraternity of galaxies
Speak of a fine mysterious epic
And sing the glory of epiphany.

History or science and technology
Are garlands connected by unseen threads
Events or objects are mere facades
Imbricated, inter-penetrated.

The world we see and live in with others
Is crowded by our countless worlds within
And in constant exchange of the forces
And influences of the other worlds.

Tales like Bush & son vs. Saddam, Laden
Are therefore not easy to comprehend
Social sciences which fail to factor in
The ET are futile speculations.

The many-layered existence of truth
Complex-notions of teleology
Must seize our thought and action all the time
That’s how we become true to ourselves.

[Wed-031104]

Logistics

After Krishna Chaitanya left Jiwan Pani
And Raghav Menon followed suit on Tuesday
Music or dance, art or philosophy
The brute body is the bottom-line.

Whole life spent on deciphering right
Between the lines or behind the screen-
For being creative is to have ‘vision to lie’-
And finding beauty in her original home.

In times of mass massacre by missiles
When freedom is in ferment, justice means war
And oil is the issue and not ideology
Ethics and aesthetics seem as distant dreams.

From invisible hand to surplus value
Survival of the fittest to reification
Nothing comes easily, nothing comes free
And ‘everybody is against everybody.’

Peace and non-violence and human values
And such other cherished goals of civilization
Appear as a false promise and a sham
And the future of mankind a hope forlorn.

But again it’s the play of Time-spirit
What it aims at is quite hard to foretell
Still, in spite of its rough exterior
It loves to chase a bit beauty and order.

[Thu-300801]

Juggernaut

Gandhi was a radical, wrote Jerry Rao
Who moulded conservatism to suit him
Kishen pattanayak died almost unsung
The rebel at heart was most unassuming.

Indu Jain calls for a non-violent army
Neera Chadhoke dreams Civil society
Peoples war-groups are settling for dialogues
World Social Forum is a jamboree now.

Musharaf ditches military solution
The world is one voice against terrorism
Borders are breached by Satellite TV
Oil-pipes and train-lines are knitting the world.

It looks like that portentous End of History
Where the cool law of Mammon reigns supreme
The sun doesn’t set in the on-line exchange
Equity, debt, commodities and what have you.

For de-mat money, the world is its oyster
Silence! M&A talks are in progress
For which democracy is docile courtesan
And all this in the name of liberalism.

So never again say ‘there are alternatives’
Let revolutionaries be pragmatists
Business must flourish in peace and calm
Hail! Economy and technology.

[Sat-021004]

Doom as boon

From chrysalis on to apotheosis
When toddler dreams are about to take wings
Is heard the calypso of apocalypse
And lucidity is limped by a lisp.

The sight of a spider weaving its web
Or a chameleon changing its colours
Speak us of the mystery of creation
Through a process of steady expansion.

Then the law of the hand-drum operates
Thus begins the era of contraction
And the whole thing recedes progressively
Till it is ingathered in a point.

A cold cathartic cancerous kill-joy
Stealthily takes out the lynchpins of the carts
And then how far can be the disaster
Catastrophe follows as per the script.

The frightening fury of a vast flood
Or the volcanic ruin by an earth-quake
Are mere modalities of destruction
The driving force being the dissolution.

Seeds of detriment broadcast all over
Are waiting for their hour of sprouting
Still another insurgency can strike
The message of the new-age may mushroom.

[Fri-011004]

Senators

A Star-shaped salver-form fragrant flower
Petals cream with orange corolla tube
Blossoms in the night, falls on the day-break
But blessed to represent Aspiration.

Periwinkle in colours rose or white
Rounded petals, narrow corolla tube
A common flower represents progress,
To say ‘the reason why we are on earth.’

Dense pendulous clusters of fragrant white
Rotate flowers changing through pink to red
With long tubular calyces, creeper
For ‘we can count on you’ Oh! Faithfulness.

A golden-yellow funnel-shaped flower
Is Victory, ‘will triumph over all obstacles’
Marigold, yellow or maroon denotes
Plasticity, ‘ready for the progress.’

Zinnia, double compositae flower
Admiringly represents Endurance
‘Going to the very end of the effort
Without fatigue or relaxing’ that is.

Dahlia, small and large double flowers
Some are obstacles, Pride and Vanity
Others Dignity and Nobility
No pettiness in Aristocracy.

[Fri-011004]

Watch out!

In the immensity of unity
Replete with sheer impersonality
Or in the experience of nihil
There seems to be a big conspiracy.

For when you are pleased to have him banished
And happily basking in the glory
Of sovereignty and autonomy
The god appears and says, Hi! I love you.

That is rather unbecoming of him
Not to respect somebody’s privacy
But the attempt to challenge the loneness
Becomes a far more serious offence.

Zero versus one versus several
In an amply confusing conundrum
No point in splitting hair or breaking head
The proof of the pudding is in eating.

No theory has the monopoly
Over such arcane facts like god or truth
And so it is wise to be circumspect
Before believing in some rigid frame.

Our love for linear and symmetry
Hates the insurgency that god incites
An anathema for rationalist
God returns at precise frequency.

[Sat-091004]

Beyond

In this post-metaphysical era
A keen contest is underway between
Genealogy and teleology
Originary, imaginary.

Who would bring us the all important view?
Post-modernism or pataphysics
The quorum of quarks and quantum physics
Or gestalt and phenomenology?

Convolutions of the embodied being
Imposes its compulsions of cruelty
No amount of metaphorical stuff
Can heal and hence, failure of the poetic.

The stakes are quite high perhaps, for quick-sand
Of ambiguities and polyvalence
Are pointers to potency and deep tunes
In contrast to claims of empiricism.

I have a thousand suns sealed within me
Why should then I be dictated by one?
If I am one with the earth and cosmos
How can my body be a barrier?

To look at, why do I need a locus?
Why must my feelings tag as visceral?
One can be a new-fangled post-er boy
Post-poetic, post-philosophical.

[Mon-111004]

Chemistry

Community and collectivity
A group, a tribe, an army or a phalanx
Ever ready to fight the adversary
But not unknown for the wars fought within.

Lofty pyramids of society
Or intricate organization trees
Are well-oiled systems of fraternity
Deep-rooted discontents notwithstanding.

Democracy and liberalism
Anchored by free-market economy
Have come up as the biggest twin-virtues
No statistics as to the social costs.

Neighbours, colleagues, peer-group and customers
Codes, customs, rituals and tradition
Relationships operate in fixed grooves
Lull outside concealing conflictual flux.

Interpersonal interface travels
In tangential trajectories ever
Bereft of nodus or penetration
And hence the eternal alienation.

Neither religion nor fornication
Nor the arts, culture and congregations
Have succeeded in forging just two hearts
Wanted, a new alchemy of fusion.

[Sun-101004]