Thursday, 26 January 2017

2084

Tar myself with days.
Twenty eighty-four swore and
Is in; golden spring.  

Sunday, 22 January 2017

Meter

Night coffee at Tim Horton's discussing Moxie would be sweeter
Now that I discovered your name is in iambic dimeter.

To the Uber driver who drove me to the New Delhi #IWillGoOut protest

This is the problem: when it is most essential for us to keep our wits and deploy our arguments in the battlefield of debate, our tongues fail us. The time and place of crucial skirmishes are never to our choosing. Caught wearing our airport brains, reluctantly shuttling between our air-purified bubbly bunkers, we splutter in righteous ineloquent indignation, and fail to defeat in conversation the very person we most need to convince into submission. Untouched by our ideas, a billion people with voting power vote into power the powerful while we shout slogans and articles at each other.

“If girls dress the way they dress (every day, less!)
how can young men not want to cop a caress?”
“But should they not possess the Freedom To Dress
 that you and…” “Nonsense, young man, you're a pawn in the chess
political parties play every day, sway
kids like you who should be studying not shirking;
these protests prevent people like me from working"

In similar rhyme and with similar reason my fellow citizen, this 5 foot 8 inch long summary of everything my blue-and-white opinions oppose went on until he begrudgingly dropped me off at my protest march against the New Year mass molestation of women in Bangalore.

Saturday, 21 January 2017

Lotus Temple

This entire atrium seems to be stuck inside a wobbly 30 year old soft white silica-gel silence. Every action, every thought relaxes into existence. Every sound persists, trapped, fades rhythmically down to the floor until all that remains is a far-off roar — like that of the sea — undercurrent to the quivering silence. A girl behind me coughs; I hear her cough a thousand times. A boy beside her swallows, and I hear the two sounds mate over and over again, the friction achieving resonance. This dense lake of sound is the anchor to the silence superstructure, the rock upon which this temple is built. The silence is merely an airy ideal.

...

The girl coughs, louder this time, and everyone chuckles at the loudness.

Monday, 9 January 2017

Nests (haiku)

Inspired by Tagore's letters to Victoria Ocampo.

...

Hard to kiss mothers
Goodbye; nest is a worthy
Rival of the sky.

Thursday, 5 January 2017

demonetized

So cashless,
That I have no cash left. We are all
Finally equal
in the name of "doing something".
Makes sense:
We gave the world zero.

Hindu

Unable to fall in love
With human beings, I
Make my parents proud. Like a true
Hindu, I only worship
Old photographs.

Trump

Scantily-clad ideas
In a gold-trimmed pageant, exhibit
The Cheerleader Effect for opinions:
Individually deplorable but collectively
Presidential.