Monday, March 13, 2006


Bush on the sidewalk Posted by Picasa

Thursday, March 09, 2006

A Vacation to remember

SIKKIM

Can’t tell you about the people

Can tell you about the Land

Of a New World

in a (now) Old World

Of uninterrupted verdant green

Of horses within harness distance

and Man lets them Be

Of air that smells of beer

Of a river that gushes and meanders

through a nook there, a cranny here

Of wispy clouds shrouding Kunjenjunga

Of clear dawns and foggy morns

Of a sky spitting rain

on serpentine roads that coil round

Of sounds that defy silence

and reverberate of peace

Of jostling drives

and breathless climbs

Of scriptured flags

On untraversed heights

Of chang in glasses

held down by chains

Of brightly robed child lamas

with cheeky smiles

Of red-stoned riverbanks

and white-colored landslides

Of paddy fields on mountain slopes

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

A Mourning

Beneath the smooth voices

And the cultured veneer

Lurks the barbarism of war

Each aye of every man

An affirmative for an unjust war

The rumbling in the sky..

The roof blown off

Drenching the family

Not in rain but blood

At least they died free

Aye, Aye

They hail

The real axis of evil

Pounded and battered

A strong people beaten into submission

Hands coloured rubble

with what was once home

A fruitless search in destruction

for a future… their future

Tearless weary eyes

Lips moving

shaped into a soundless wail

A mute song of mourning

Out of rhythm with the

drums of war

Drowned out

by each aye

of every man

An affirmative for an

Unjust war.

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Starting out-calling to the apolitical

A hot summer afternoon; a stifling classroom; a pencil in the hands of a non-artist - doodles of inattention. What started off as wayward lines that crisscrossed on the margins of my books took the form of notes to myself and now I let them out into the internet cosmos. They are no longer doodles in the strict sense of the word - they are more like random thoughts but it seems somebody thought of that blog title before. Breaking no copyright laws, some of these blogs will be random indeed and some only seemingly so.

I've been a student of the politics for seven years now first as a major in journalism and then in political science. I would go as far as to say that I have been taught to be political - I have learnt to be so. I saw this as an occupational hazard - seeing the politics in and behind everything. I could not and I can not understand how anybody can be apathetic or indifferent or apolitical. We are what we are today because people before us realized the value of political mobilization. I wouldn't have the right to write this and some of us wouldn't have the right to read this, or diss this or discard it if that wasn't so.

It seems ludricuous to me that it takes a hindi movie of a "generation awakening" to realize that there are things that need to be done and that by default we are the ones who have to do it.

I find it disheartening that just about the time the Indian middle class started finding politics corrupt and dirty was the time the most marginalised sections of the Indian population started getting their voice heard through elections and otherwise.

I find it alarming that engineers and scientists and technocrats think that the political has nothing to offer and that there is such a wide gap between the social scientists and them that it seems unbridgeable that even when we do talk, we talk at rather than to each other.

End Note