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]

Arcane arcade

In the oceanic vastness of Varuna
Or the infinite expanse of Virata
Is wrought the immense law of the Brhat
It is the quiet reign of Vaishwanara.

The puny intellect of human being
Even if it is stretched to its limits
Barely manages to amass a pittance
Rest he settles for mystery and wonder.

The immensities and complexities
Of the interplay of worlds and realms beyond
Are themes with which mythologies are made
But leave the human mind in enigma.

Dreams and visions and imaginations
Drive us to fathom incommunicable
Clutching on to hope and slender techniques
More often than not, we end up in failure.

Caught up in the existential concourse
Some other concern calls emergency
Once again it is the fire-fighting mode
Always eludes the illimitable.

The subtle, the subliminal and causal
Are beyond the net of our perception
But strive we must to gain access to them
For they belong to us, not mysterious.

[Thu- 300904]

Plurality, Diversity, Multiculturalism is the new Trinity.

Construed almost synonymous with democracy, the idea of plurality and choice is also lapped up by the market economy. The more the merrier, is the new refrain. But what about consensus, synchronicity and solidarity? Are they not equally significant? This war between the modern and the post-modern has forced upon us lopsided priorities and warped perspectives. The fact that the divergent concepts must be applied in their respective locus is easily forgotten, and the contra attempted to corner browny points.

Conversely, none would like to trade patriotism or nationalism for plurality. They are sacrosanct down to the level of winning a Cricket match or some Beauty contest. Then what about creating such a consensus on a particular knowledge system or a philosophy? Can’t it be attempted in an informed environment by employing dispassionate discourse? Or, at least, is it not worth striving for?

Fears are certainly there. For when simple stipulations like electoral reforms elude us ever, to tinker with societal norms is fraught with far greater hurdles. Nevertheless, a conflated manifesto for the human race as a whole, addressing its existential concerns should be a plausible pursuit. Just like, Einstein’s objection to uncertainty, God doesn’t play dice.

Black and white

Is it not futile to find the square root of a sonnet?
Or to break a lyre to understand its liltings?
A vortex is not reducible to particles of water
A cloud knows not where it moves, how fast and why.

The whole is always more than the mere sum of its members
A hologram hoodwinks with dimensional shifts
The politician hides behind the cover of his image
If you have a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

Asses, May God bless them, would rather have straw than gold
In arts as in religion, the best direction is backwards
Brands, a fascist state where we all salute the Logo
All that glitters is not gold, nor are diamond for ever.

Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach, alas!
Those who know, live, those who don’t, write about it
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought
For, vision is the art of seeing things invisible.

Take out the H, and still a bit remains of habit
Life itself is a four-letter word, with if at its core
A nude turns vulgar, if appears to be conscious of it
Personal greed triggers an invisible hand of common good

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less
We want more and more of less, is the motto of Downshifting
A dog biting a man is no news, but man biting a dog is
All light of the world is hidden behind the black letters of books.

[Fri-280901]

Love and Knowledge

If you are such pure of heart and candid
To speak out the murky secret of your birth
Then be sure you are the son of a wise
And who can refuse your candidature.

So goes the parable when the sage of yore
Put his stamp of authority on a low-brow
Upturned a whole lot of norms and conventions
And heralded out-of-the-box truth perceptions.

Who the whore, who father and who’s progeny
Why the stigma, what enigma of love and sin?
The tussle of gene and gender astirs reason
And should learning be for a select only?

The wise anchored and vindicated uncensured
Even after his fall albeit pleasurable
And she has the birthright to rent her womb
Without any trace of shame to serve whoever

Teacher and disciple and master and maid
The wise and the whore and an unwed mother
Wives and families and the bliss of ignorance
Untruths, deceptions and mask of morality.

All are in ferment in this small episode
What to pardon and who to blame is not easy
From music to massage it has many masks
To hive off the safe-ways, must we legalize?

The son when grows up might follow his father
His hallowed education would goad him ever
Notwithstanding his occasional failings
Knowledge is a whip, good for all seasons.

[Sat-170704]

Awareness

At the end of umpteen performances
Once you realize one fine morning
That it is not an end in itself
And the real key is disinterestedness
You are born anew.

Thousand masks you have worn
Tossing a new demeanour every evening
Dishing out fresh imitations
But today is different and difficult
You must act yourself.

In the Sublime lies the real pretension
And true superiority in pure equality
Art is for ascension, an effort
You go through a thorough fitness regimen
That you can run naked.

Amidst crudities aplenty
And everyone angling for assortments
You can go on sampling endlessly
Trying to con the connoisseur in you
But one day one must wake to the call beyond.

There are no options in effect
Awareness signals the right track
One devours just by dispassionate observation
They also serve who simply wait and watch
There is but one way to stay.

[Sat-100704]

Either or

The value of land is settled in the mind
Valaya shirts can cost 1500 to 15000
Share prices are a function of sentiments
What if the tribals live on mango kernels?

Paracetamol is new wine for Dispirin
History has two suitors, red and saffron
Barkha vs. burqa, war to publi-size
What’s wrong with tarot or parrots?

Race is biological caste cultural
Law overrides the people’s mandate
Satyagraha damned by the court supreme
What’s the objection against NDA inn?

School is seen as a form of prison
Democracy itself an irrational notion
Positivism no more a prized possession
What is madness, genius or a disease?

Starvation deaths despite of Amartya
Pimping is fair in public interest
People out to see a St. Marx’s order
What is our icon: Ambani or Dr Kurien?

What is politics if not populism
How to reconcile reforms with swadeshi
And teach patriotism to the fringe populace
Dilemma is as old as the Mahabharata.

[Fri-070901]

Nomad

That’s quite unsettling, especially
In these days of political accuracy
If somebody says something against
The supposed gender equality.

Although in the path of spirituality
Lauded are the traits feminine
But in the world of our own
Of weakness they are the sign.

Male is male, female female
The twain can never resemble
No wonder as symbols of morality
One is obligation and the other aspiration.

The female is earth-bound the male can fly
His trait is to migrate explore and go away
She is more acquisitive he distributive
Man is a nomad women a different breed.

From a room of one’s own to the second sex
There have been attempts to see with kindred eyes
And to compare and contrast only leading to
Varying degrees of exaggeration and over-emphasis.

But why juxtapose the opposites
And compare the chalk with cheese
Besides the biological dissimilarities
They are poles apart as social beings.

[Thu-060901]

Diffidence

For a horse of a race marathon
To pretend to tend a kitchen garden
And feign running by jogging at a spot
It’s all a nice hide and seek game.

To run with the hare and hunt with the wolf
It’s rough and tough to live so dangerously
Yet to stay put is but the Hobson’s choice
For to know how to wait is a heroic trait.

While on the brass-tacks, at times it’s hard to take
That when all seems to be lost that all is saved
But what is this hue and cry, after all
If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

Platitudes galore, irritating and hard-nosed
It’s a dog-eat-dog world, un-humane
And the apparition of the future growing
Larger everyday and ever intimidating.

Of good and bad or art and beauty
Tomes abound by a plethora of authors
Then why is it that Truth Good and Beauty
Stay as distant as ever, the more we aspire.

Log on to love then rather than to logic
That is the cue since time immemorial
Give must not spur any give and take
The time-worn words are the life-giving props.

[Thu-160801]

Monad

I am one with all others, though
And a mere ripple in the cosmic ocean
I am the one and only, the unique
All else is alien, none resembles me.

My thoughts and habits and temperament
Impulses emotions passion or action
Are peculiar to me and bear my stamp
None can betray them nor can I share.

My history and my destiny
Traverse a unique track
How many hurdles or how many ladders
The quota is uniquely mine.

The ideas and ideals of some other
Are absolutely specific to him or her
Howsoever I persevere to imitate
It would be surely a futile affair.

I can only tread my way, at my pace
And follow my bliss, as they say
Opportunities golden and visions sublime
Of what use they, if are not mine?

The private space of my consciousness
Must relish its own narcissism
And seek freedom and fulfillment
So as to say I am that I am.

[ Sat-110801]

Leadership

Spies are eyes across the wall
Climb up a hill to a broader horizon
If only outlook mates with insight
Can a commander a leader become.

He and her men within the organic whole
Are a matrix and how does it perform
Is a question linked to its raison de etre
And hence handling people is so crucial.

Not to manipulate as if a mechanical being
But to see his intrinsic worth
Each person, a bundle of difficulty
Heralding the hope of what she can become.

Hurdles come and are meant to be overcome
In order to earn a sense of triumph
An innate urge of self-exceeding
Is the secret of success alone

Harmonizing the contraries is the key
And to unshackle resistance to change
To stoop to conquer by being a servant
And capable to pardon if to punish.

Games of adult or parent and child
By recognizing the other as nothing but you
To be a master of oneself, Swarat
In order to lord over the world, Samrat.

[Mon- 100901]

THE THINKER

Man is the measure of all things
I think, therefore I am
The real is rational, the rational real
Man is something that is to be surpassed

To be is to be perceived
Existence precedes essence
The mind of a child is ‘tabula rasa’
The phenomenon manifests the essence

Know thyself, and you’ll know the universe
Flight of the alone to the alone
The incognito of the eternal
God is dead.

War is the father of all and king of all
The child is the father of the man
Man is born free, but he is in chains
Workers of the world unite!

Pleasure of the text, death of the author
Signifier precedes and determines the signified
Love is giving what one does not have
To somebody who doesn’t want it.

Conquer yourself rather than the world
Your action is limited, obviously, by your death
Man is free, but he is not master in his own house
There is no thought which embraces all our thoughts.

[Wed-050901]

POSSIBILITY

Myths and legends, fables and lullabies
Fodder for gossip, food for thought
Lilies and birds, wolves and lambs
Birds and bees, bulls and bears.

Fairies and angels, cabbages and kings
Batman Spiderman, birds of same feather
Whales and seagulls, cock and the crow
Mountain and squirrel, dog in the manger.

Tarzan and Phantom and the Trojan horse
Godzilla, Dinausers and Jurassic Park
Hound of heaven, tiger burning bright
A spider saves, another seduces a fly.

Sphinx and dragon, unicorn, centaur
Goat meets rat, fickle Mickey-mouse
God’s eye view, pre-thought life-world
While one bird eats, the Other looks on.

Jackal and black-cat, camel and lion
Two goats on a bridge for right of way
To bathe like a crow and contemplate crane-like
Vehicles, Avatars, Gurus and zodiacs.

The bat is a mammal, dolphin humanly
The parrot speaks, postal-pigeon, police-dogs
If a squirrel comes to collaborate with God
Why can’t man forget his animal past?

[Sun-050801]

ARCHETYPE

There are worlds after worlds, they say
Whether flying or perched it matters not
Imagination is an endless game
And so is creation as its outcome.

The magic-lights of the rain-soaked town
The lilting music from a broken pot
Are real, there in the worlds beyond
Like Rimina tip-toeing behind the mirror.

Colours splashed on a large canvas
May appear as cowherds or circus-tents
Or human forms quite weird and strange
But they exist by their own right.

Each tune is a town, each song a world
Each Raga a whole universe, delightful
Music beckons to wander in the wonder worlds
One sings and strays into worlds apart.

Truth and beauty and good and justice
Must be having their own home somewhere
So also pity and love and brotherhood
Radiating their virtues upon us.

Trees and flowers the sky and the moon
Should not bind us, we must see beyond
Fermions Bosons and the receding galaxies
Need not blind us, we should invade the unknown.

[Sun-251294]

LIFE, A PRETEXT

The countless words that the cosmos hears
Everyday and the numerous rehearsals
Are a text of proportions, mind-boggling
Reality is just another TV-channel.

Call it meaning or theory or truth
It’s all merely some interpretation
Oscillating between history and culture
And stirring conflicts and suspicion.

The dynamics of reciprocal reference
Is an elegant structural scheme
It is an arena of free-for-all
Bake your own text according to your sweet will.

Whatever is said or what remains unsaid
What is feigned, concocted or concealed
Are grist to the mill of games people play
Loose talk needed for inauthentic life.

And that is praxis and the lived-world
The word spoken walks in regal status
Whatever is scripted gets a bad name
Thus we return to the life of the nomads.

Granted that discourse is always uncertain
And communication tends to be tentative
Our existence is a construct of language
And life, a pretext to unravel a text.

[Thu-030403]

GLASS, HALF-FILLED


When you throw tantrums
And I take umbrage
We forget it’s churlish
To crib and quibble about.

A tangled skein of lies
Or a slew of new demands
Is enough to bomb a day
The crater to fill takes long.

To punch your careful rationale
Just to break the humdrum
Is not taken kindly
The poor humbug wails.

A silly little thing
Is not worth ruing about
Why to fret and fume
It’s infinitely better to forget.

Meeting in the half-way house
Beneath the half-moon at midnight
Why ask for the plenary sun
Life’s always a half-cooked meal.

So let’s stop worrying and start living
Make friends and influence people
For if I’m OK, you’re OK
And shore up our EQ by positive thinking.

[Thu-270901]


NOT A DROP TO DRINK


When you know that there are, to be sure
A hundred ways to look at a thing
Then you know that you do not know
And how difficult it is to take a stand.

It is surely impossible to know for certain
Just about anything or any petty affair
The truth is always at a discount
Invaded by falsehood and exaggeration.

How easy it looks to sail in a small boat
Well insured in its cozy comforts
But come the waves from a large vessel
You tend to panic and tumble and fall.

Little learning is a dangerous thing
That blinds and binds with rigidities
It’s knowledge and ideas that set you free
And leave you at the shore high and dry.

Whence you are unsure which way to go
Whether to say yes or no at any point
The thin demarcation between good and bad
Or true or false is obliterated.

When one thus enters a blind alley
And is driven to the wall of doubt
Then only it often dawns upon him
That only Grace can come to the rescue.

[Sat-220901]


A DROP OF INK


It’s a different game altogether
For the words-industry to prosper
Silence and solitude help
Huge output for the pen-pushers.

Armed with a calm without
And a tormented heart within
They write as if with their blood
Turned blue with anguish and disquiet.

Self-love turning a love for man
Suffused with utopian aspirations
Even when everything seems to be lost
They see light at the end of the tunnel.

A quiet resolve and certitude
To find a way amidst the darkness
With enough sagacity and fortitude
They essay on to write the right.

To write is again to fight
Against a host of hostile values
Tyranny of the contemporariety
Hedonism and the herd-mentality.

By cultivating the nation’s mind-space
They strive to make it more fertile
Be it commerce, economy or politics
All follow their edicts and their will.

[Sat-220901]

VERSATILITY

I have the right to write
Good bad or worse
Poetry is foreign to me
I vote for the verse.

I am hardly bothered
Whether it makes sense or not
My task is fulfilled
If it subverts.

Vanity and righteousness
And all such idiot views
By shooting a couplet or two
If I enact a coup.

Words go abegging
For meaning and sense
If I sit them for a drink
Then three cheers for my verse.

Diverse forms of expression
Whatever is left to write
Many may come and many may go
But verse will go on forever.

For when I am alone
And I converse
With who else than myself
It’s but through verse.

[Mon-200801]

TURBIDITY

It used to trouble me that why can’t they
Say it, the essential, in a direct way
Why can’t we read and listen in clear terms
And learn of the things quite plain and simple?

If one employs an economy of words
And harnesses them in a logical order
To express what is barely necessary
Why shouldn’t a fine piece of writing come up?

But then I discovered the blemish myself
By tumbling upon the slippery synonyms
Which allure and entice to seduce us astray
Whenever you embark upon a straightforward journey.

Adjectival adornments athwart all the while
Idioms and phrases and proverbs lurk around
Clichés and catchwords and jargons galore
And you’re an Alice in the wonderland of words.

The work of thought too no play of innocence
It beckons and plays a thorough hide and seek
It exchanges words in the manner of coins
And is always unsure of what would come through.

The last nail is that what we call communication
Is impossible; there is only interpretation
The medium is the message, the reader is king
The icebergs of sub-texts offer no firm ground.

[Thu-120902]

RECTITUDE

Pursuing incessantly the cause radical
Offering realism a critical stance
Hoping to transcend the dialectic triad
Reason was the helper, reason is the bar.

Appearance and Reality, Truth and Method
Process and Reality, Time and Eternity
Being and Nothingness, Being and Time
Visible and Invisible, Time and Narrative.

Experience and Judgement, Sense and Non-sense
Conjectures and Refutations, Freedom and Limit
Difference and Repetition, Critique and Clinic
Humanism and Terror, Discipline and Punish.

Identity and Difference, Ethics and Infinity
Matter and Memory, Totality and Infinity
Eros and Civilization, Ideology and Utopia
Reason and Revolution, Totem and Taboo.

Blindness and Insight, Criticism and Crisis
The Raw and the Cooked, Theory and Praxis
Speech and Phenomena, Models and Metaphors
Holism and Evolution, Toys and Reasons.

Violence and the Sacred, Myth and Terror
Madness and Civilization, Art and Illusion
Motivation and Personality, Love and Will
Realism and Reason, Surrender and Catch.

[Wed-XX01]

GRATITUDE

When Whitehead tells that the whole of philosophy
Is but a footnote to Plato, it's a great tribute
Nietzsche likewise says that it’s Dostoevsky
From whom he really learnt some psychology.

Aristotle is The Philosopher for Dante
Merleau-Ponty has been pedestalled by Blanchot
Bakhtin too is beholden to Dostoevsky
And Heidegger to Holderlin’s poetry.

Kierkegaard adorns a special place for Lukacs
Just as Leibniz enchanted Bertrand Russell
And Spinoza was the noblest of them all
Merleau-Ponty, a true disciple of Husserl.

Virginia Woolf spoke so highly of Proust
All his life Lacan unfolded Freud’s dream
From Althusser to Habermas, Marxists galore
Marx himself was a known Hegelian juggler.

Saussure was inspiration to Levi-Strauss
Nietzsche was a Schopenhauer admirer
Derrida is a sly pursuer of Heidegger
Ricoeur pushes on the project of Gadamer.

Bergson redefined Darwinian evolution
Lukacs reiterated Marx’s reification
Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel inspired many
And the Kantian Critiques have never ceased reigning.

[Sat-131001]

LATITUDE

Once upon a time to write was being exact
But since then much water has flown down the Rhine
To write at present is to be re-written
And seeing the world as ever transfiguring.

The framework of grammar and semantic system
What with dictionaries and poetry and fiction
The fortress of language seemed invincible
But meaning turned out to be the horse Trojan.

A word is a sign and a symbol and still more
A text has its sub-texts located in context
The artist and the work and Art are a circle
Borders of visible and the invisible.

Order and symmetry are a slippery track
Rhythm and rhyming are a feigning drapery
To unveil the fake and to walk straight to the truth
Is to unravel the meaning of the meaning.

The emotions may be same for the human race
But myriad are the languages to express
In addition the spice of interpretation
It is a tower of Babel, of confusion.

Where is the sound of the Word originary
Where to discover that state of pure absence
What is the clue to disinterested pleasure
And the way to unconcealment and disclosure.

[Mon-171001]