Meera

You are all that i know of longing, devotion
Oblivious of worldly attachment, at one with the Undestructible
For you baffle me with your casualness...
The way you gave away yourself to the Mute Marionette

What language could define your path
Loosing yourself, to get lost in His charm
Trading-off princely frills to eternal pining
No wonder then you became one with the Mute Maverick

Our love gurus have but no words to comprehend the phenomenon
For you make them sound so silly!
Alas, i would never know what to call a feeling so pure and high...
For now, i will simply call it 'Meera-Mohan'

~ Empty Baskets ~

Timid expressions might upset..
But lifetime journeys demand those half-empty baskets..

Because you never know what comes your way..
And how much you might have to sqeeze in..

thats why I prefer emptiness, which could transcend to numbness..
Trade-off Those Tightly Embraced Desires For Chance Happenings..

Numb Mumbai

I felt a grosteque numbness after the Mumbai blasts..its "all too common now". that is precisely the question..! like thousand other attacks..this too will pass..n dat is a tragedy impossible to fathom..India is indeed at war with itself..!

Dignity denied to a dalit girl's death..

A far cry…

We have been hearing lot of hue and cry over the recent rape and murder which took place at an 'exotic' setting of India, where the victim is a foreign national and the drama is ripe with drugs, sex, police lapse, political cover-up, personal diary scrutiny, British tabloid coverage, negligent parenting, cultural paradoxes, paradise lost and on and on and on.


True, there are many concerns hankering the media and the society at large in the Scarlett story. However, does our society concern itself only to the extend it can serve its sensational instincts? Does the 'low profile' rape and brutal murder of a seven-year-old Dalit girl in Kaushambi district of Uttar Pradesh on March 16 nobody's concern just because our media simply does not have any discourse on that? The young girl is anonymous for any regular newspaper reader as the story of her rape and murder was only featured in the Indian Express and that too without even a reference to her name!


That may be because the media would never be able to get titillating pictures of this Dalit girl at exotic settings! (see Tehelka cover story on Scarlett). The inertia is not new to a society that has chosen to feel for a Jessica Lal or a Priyadarshini Mattu, conveniently overlooking the inhuman murder of Bhotmange family in Keonjhar or the everyday death that many Dalits go through as they relieve themselves of the mandate of human scavenging.


When I tried to google the details of the recent Kaushambi incident, all I got were barely a handful of pieces. First was the March 19 Indian Express report with the headline 'Dalit minor raped, body found with arm and eye missing', which surprisingly got featured on the front page. The second piece was again the same syndicated story of the Express on the website of All India Christian council. The third was a story by the Hindustan Times, which carried the story with reluctance as evident by its lack of facts. It stated that the eyes of the girl had been gauged out and arm amputated by the rapists even as the body was sent for postmortem and no concrete facts had been established about the reason of amputations. In contrast to atleast one news report or editorial or opinion piece on Scarlett case daily in newspapers, the seven-year-old anonymous girl is just not good enough for any follow-ups what so ever.


Without underrating the concerns the Scarlett killing has finally evoked, I feel extreme anguish for myself and the society that we all are part of, for walking with blinders which only allow us to see what is convenient to the eye. The brutal death of this child by two Airtel employees working in the company's tower at the Koilaha village, should evoke a few concerns. Was a rural Dalit girl an easy prey to rape? Why for whole two days the body could not be found, while it was decaying in the fields?


Angry villagers torched the tower where the minor was raped and did not allow the fire brigade and police to douse the flames. They also stoned the police party along with blocking the movement of vehicles after keeping the girl's body on the GT road. The blockade was lifted after the SP of Kaushambi KS Emanuel rushed to the spot and ordered lathicharge.


Does the grotesque sight of the dead body of a seven-year-old raped girl being put on a highway by her very own parents, an act to not just demand justice and answerability?


But also a desperate plea to our society to register her loss?


Is it also an unknown plea to register the absence of any discourse by the media on many such anonymous victims time and again?

As I write this, I am aware that the last words in the Hindustan Times report on this inhuman act, sited the statement by the SP, who said, "Today the situation is normal

Oh! beautiful life....

Oh! Beautiful life

You are a perfect beauty of contradictions
Yet you pass the crown to our own convictions…
Making absurdities seem like a lost child
Who is in fact pretending and just playing wild!


Oh! Generous life

You are a perfect mix of novelties
Yet you pass the crown to our own frivolities
Making human swell with pride
Who is in a delusion, swayed by the ‘larger than life’ fancy tide!

and the moon winks at me...

I wonder how could we see the world with such different eyes

walking past the moon blanket, the moon seems to reply:

How could you complain under the aegis of my spendour?

palliating me at every encounter

I wonder could anything be more sounder

but what if He too becomes vulnerable

accompanied with the clouds of thunder

deriving strength I enter with calm inside

while He yearns for a reply

having darkness beside...

Benaras: the Ageless

Benaras:The ageless

“The river of life just keeps flowing, from the mountains through the great lengths of this land and all around it, life has past by, living as it were in paradise…it spread the wisdom and the glory that souls must unite, river of life has just kept flowing, gathering at its banks the sands of time…river of life’s eternal journey will tell the tale of this great land…” , these infamous verses by the urban folk singer, Sushmit Bose, were companion to some blessed moments of reflection during a journey to a city that has inspired many to take dips in to the deep spiritual spaces within…evoking ripples of never forgetting reflections.

As I left for the mystic ‘sacred soil’ of Benaras, as some people fancy, my unabated train Kashi Vishwanath Express slogged through every station in between, making the first ever journey to the ‘holy city’, a series of snapshots. Weighing upon my lower berth, peeping through the train window, which I always fancied as nothing less than a kaleidoscope’s eye, I wondered if these snapshots would only be a space in my memory closet or their sight will soothe my eyes yet again. The wonder had more to do with my aspired admission in the master degree course in Mass Communication from Banaras Hindu University. If the counseling leads to the final admission, it would mean traveling regularly now and then through those snapshots of open fields bowing and waving at my arrival, erect windmills saluting the impeccable and notorious wind, mango trees overwhelmed with their first flowers of the season and strange ravaged houses leaving mysterious impressions of even stranger associations and affinities. Bose’s songs transcended to those snapshots with baffling readiness; they are by my side every time I travel (especially during those train journeys when I travel through my spiritual space miles more than I travel physically). As I proceeded to reach my destination, all this reflection became a prelude to prepare me for what was to come ahead!

Reaching the station, I was reminded of the city nooks informally colored in red by the city pampered pan lovers, who are as easy to spot in Benaras as it is to spot folk singers in Rajasthan or Sardars in Punjab! I planed to spend my first evening at the ghat Assi after a brief rest in my hotel room. Assi, as the name suggests is the 80th ghat of Benaras and lends its name to the city’s new name, ‘Varanasi’, with an array of steps and boats lined up along the riverside. It was quieter than I imagined it to be, for it faced the river like a child facing an adult with a blank look. I took a hand full of irresistible ‘Banarsi jalebi’ and sailed into the Ganges alongside all those ghats, which have been a witness to the river’s moods and appearances over times immemorial. As evening broke free, the golden-mustard river infected by the setting sun was preparing to get even quieter and serene as soon as the sun would betray her. For she seemed like a to-be abandoned lover, who becomes even more fascinating and charming in a flux of heartbreak. Unknowingly intoxicating with her mourning state, she seemed more unattainable and mysterious than ever. I have been in awe of her ever since then, because she was one of the first to speak to me even when I was a complete stranger to the town.

The next day we thought of having an experience of the nerve of the city life. We set out in to the bazaars and mohallas. The beatific faces…old and young intrigue you amongst the chaos and hullabaloo of the city life, which you soon realize is breathing noisy peace. The red-mustard Tilak on these beatific faces color your first thoughts as an outsider, and so you say, that’s a city of morning prayers. Strolling through the much talked about snake like narrow galis (lanes) of this mystic city, I was in awe of the irony that resides here. Its legacy of old way of life in its aging semi-ravaged traditional houses, mandirs, masjids, dargaahs, age old shops of sunars, darzis and banarsi bunkers with their kalakari on display are all yours to make for a whole new experience, few among the several motifs of the past era, leaving you with an open mouth in a look of disbelief! Nothing seems to have changed here, and this is what makes Benaras ageless, becoming the ancestor itself, even as it is referred to as the ‘oldest city’. The terms like antique and old are connotations of outsiders who compare it with the modern times and hence give it ‘old times’ terminology. However, for the people who have had all their generations’ right here or the ones who are in awe of the soul more than the skin, this city insists to be called ‘ageless’. A city that has not just resisted time but has freezed it to be part of the same picture over the ages…but as Pamuk says in his transcendentally evocative memoir ‘Istanbul’ reminding us of John Ruskin’s ‘The Seven Lamps of Architecture’ , which says that picturesque beauty rises out of details that emerge only after the building has been standing for hundred of years, from the ivy, from the herbs and grassy meadows that surrounded it…it only becomes beautiful when history endows it with accidental beauty and grants fortuitous new perspective. Though I read these lines much later than this visit, I felt just the same, strolling through the ravaged abandoned structures, old mandirs adorned with tulsi leaves and old dargahs brightened with diyas, forlorn lanes, moss green colored shops with dilapidated paint, workaholic wooden boats and particularly the steps summoning the ‘river of life’...it seems that the sheer time lapse of ages made them come out in full vigor…never foreseen by their makers. Banaras, is indeed a city carved in the factory of ‘passage of time’ itself.