Shadows

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Your words dance across the pages,

They swirl and twirl and laugh.

Mine are like bits of coal before them,

I hide them away in embarrasment.

When I miss you, I seek their laughter,

Your lightness and your fooling around.

Then I remember that though like coal,

You hold them close to your face.

How else can I put a finger on my joy,

That comes to me during saddest hours.

How else can give a reason for your face,

Dark and long for so many dreadful days,

The dark shadows are still on your face,

Though it's been a long long long time.

One last word

In the bright season of May

years ago our paths diverged;

not that I didn't love you,

yes, I did but there wasn't time.

Time, for us to start afresh

with stubbles of old loves,

for you, with your silences

and me with my clowning...

after the tears wore away

and my heart forgot its pain,

nothing remains of the old,

except a few flashes in words.

But now the world forgets not,

even after years of tears

it brings your name to me

in whispers and laughter.

True love it may have been

No longer live but in words.

Butterfly

Boanarges

The years have flown so fast, 

she says, in her soliloquy voice,  

a sign for me to sit up and wait 

for the final dart.
   

When it comes I'm already 

to swallow it down easily  

with a lot of lousy phlegm 

and heavens, plenty of patience. 

Yes, she loved listening to herself.  

You need to do what she did. 

You need to do things exactly  

How she used to do it all along

Hate and love, love and hate,  

She advises all her adversaries.

The poetry of trees

Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky, we fell them down and turn them into paper, that we may record our emptiness. Kahlil Gibran

The Indian Terminator

The world as portrayed by books and movies are fragments of a bigger world, events and people and objects given importance based on one's perspective of life. Jane Austen's world view was influenced by the importance she gave to love and marriage; while George Orwell saw a world that was afflicted by forms of political power; the mainstream commercial movies of Bollywood told love stories, the old wine in many new bottles.


Given the amount of publicity given to the movie, Ra-One was disappointing. The movie is only Bollywood's version of Terminator 2 : Judgment Day though not as good as the orginal. As you start viewing the movie, you are shocked by a kind of comic beginning starring Shah Rukh Khan, Priyanka Chopra and Sanjay Dutt. You feel a surge of disappointment as the movie progresses. The graphics dominate the plot and you feel that may be this movie was made for kids. But the jokes on condoms and poweryoga startle you into realising that it cannot be. As G-One bids farewell to Sonia, you are suddenly reminded of the farewell scene in Terminator 2 : Judgment Day. 


The movie comes alive somewhere in the last 45 minutes and you feel that you have wasted a lot of your valuable weekend time, watching a movie that is badly arranged anyway. The world view of the creator is rather confusing: to defeat a machine you really need another machine. The saving grace is the song "Chamak Challo" that somehow makes up for the entire movie.

Cross-roads

Your coffee will be cold, the very words,
That fetched you back to me just now,
When I felt years could erase a memory
That I do not wish to bring up again.

Drawing a boundary separates the terrain
Into many different nations on a map.
But is erasing a person from life the same,
For us who were so much like each other.

Conflicting memories the mind brings back,
One of love, one of hatred, one of desire,
All etched against the summer rains
And cross-roads in our individual lives

Yes, I had taken a lonely path away from you
I remember, drinking coffee.

Woe-man

Out of the rib of man, she was created,
The source of life and mother of all men,
(And women), her yoke made heavy
By the first sin of disobedience.

Yes, she was not alone in her sin,
But his paradise was taken away
Though not as condemned as her,
In sinning against the Creator.

Thus sorrow became her fate,
She shrieked as her flesh tore
And brought forth her children
And her husband smiled proudly.

A strange tale is a woman’s
Whose flesh takes a man’s name.

Love at first sight

She stood before the holy place hands folded,
Her face all aglow with the beauty of her heart,
Her eyes closed as she muttered her prayers,
Enough wisdom to live well and nothing else.

Stepping out into the courtyard, her eyes met,
A radiant face, equally aglow with radiance,
Purity and love so much that she forgot herself
Felt as if she was looking in a mirror.

Climbing down the steps, her racing heart,
Flashed to her a future of mutual joys,
Her heart, a butterfly fluttered and flew
As she saw the rituals around the holy fire.

She mused wisdom indeed God has given
To walk away from love at first sight.

Where knowledge is free

 “You and your Google Books”, that’s what my friends keep telling me all the time. A few years earlier, friends teased me about quoting from books and living by some book or the other and planning to write books. 

But now with the changing times, I swear by Google Books. Anything from Literary Theory (I’m a student of English literature; the fascination never ends) to cooking, I find this library extremely useful. 

Even the MLA handbook has a format for Google Book entries. So, this is a season of reading but not in any library but from where I am. Thanks to technology!