Monday, March 13, 2006
Thursday, March 09, 2006
A Vacation to remember
SIKKIM
Can’t tell you about the people
Can tell you about the Land
Of a
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
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
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