Missing Words

Missing Words

The canvas waits for the missing stroke
The symphony is one note less
As my astray heart wanders alone
To be blessed and to bless

As the singsong of thoughts
Carries me through the untried way
I feel a heartbeat amiss when you
Think of me, somewhere far way

There’s a petal amiss in the flowery youth
There’s a star amiss in the dark of the night
As I follow my dreams to find you
Eyes aching for the succoring sight

You bring me joy, make me a man,
Shape my shadows to form reflections
And when you are away, I am left stranded
Searching for the lost directions

I can hear the music but miss the beats
I can see the sky, but not the moon
I can speak but not hear my words
I stand in the crowd but all alone

I miss my life,
I miss my soul,
I miss my heart,
I miss my thoughts,
I wait for you to fill the gap
To touch my heart with a healing kiss
Even as I write my pain out,
For you, my words go amiss

Where the Lord was Born

Today the world celebrates Muharram, a day of mourning, a day to remember the martyrdom of the great Hussein, a day to celebrate the cause of truth and justice… the kind of day which makes every Indian proud of the rich culture of his motherland.. Today I had the chance to see the tazias being taken out in a procession to remember the martyrdom of Hussein. A sight worth remembering… the kind of experience that gets etched in your minds for the rest of your life… But I am sorry to say, for all the wrong reasons.

Siwandih, a suburb of Bokaro , a little place where most people lead their quiet lives all round the year mostly working in the steel plant. I had never imagined that such a small, out of the way place had so much energy in it. An undirected force, that was worth millions if properly channelized and directed. It’s a Muslim dominated region and Muharram is a big day… We were held up in the bus as the procession went on. Boys riding in the most rash and arrogant way you could imagine on their motorbikes, armed with swords, baseball clubs, hockey sticks and bamboo sticks. For once it didn’t seem to be a festival but a scene from the Hindi movie “Josh” … a gang of rowdy boys imposing their brawn and strength on the city.

This is what the wikipedia says about Muharram.

Muharram (Arabic: محرم) is the first month of the Islamic calendar. It is one of the four months of the year in which fighting is prohibited. Since the Islamic calendar is lunar, Muharram moves from year to year when compared with the Gregorian calendar. Muharram is so called because it was unlawful to fight during this month; the word is derived from the word ‘haram’ meaning forbidden.

“Fighting is prohibited”

 What’s the point of bringing out swords, baseball clubs and hockey sticks then to the streets? Is violence only a physical thing or does it have something to do with the mind? If it has, can we term these processions to be non violent? Anyway, our bus crept at snail’s pace through the mob and we reached our destination harmlessly, but definitely an uncanny sense of fear gripped me as I saw the huge mob crying out slogans and brandishing their weapons. That fear will probably stay with me for a few days. I could only imagine what it would be like to face a mob trying to kill you just because they don’t consider you to be one of them.

The worst kind of mass crimes that the world has seen have been in India… Be it the Muslims or the Hindus, both have been guilty… I suddenly remembered a few lines from a poem I had written down few years back when our country was facing one of the worst examples of violent mob mentality ever… the Gujarat riots. I think it is only apt that I put down those lines here after praying to god not to let his sons repeat another Gujarat, another Ayodhya.

The Occupant… (short story)

Hostels are weird places. Rooms, corridors, hallways… Every forlorn corner, every cracked window pane, every mysterious staircase, every forgotten wall has a story to tell. And every room has a life of itself. It has probably known more people than some of us have. It has spent all these days staying where it has always been, seeing old occupants leave to an unknown destination, waiting for new people, and soon getting to know them, getting to know them better than even their closest of relatives. They are with their occupants every second of the day… in their most secretive of moments… And then never revealing those incidents to anyone, like a true friend… no questions, no conditions, no arguments, no backstabbing… just a queer, quiet relationship between the room and its occupant… a relationship that can never exist between two people for their sheer “humanness”.

He had a gift… an exception. Very few people have that.

The Grand Illusion

There’s a reason why I started writing this stuff…or is there?  …Do such questions or for that matter any question that has ever bubbled up in the human brain have a perfect and precise answer? Is even asking questions a justified act or is it just a habit our brain has concocted for itself to give itself an illusion of intelligence and consequent superiority over other beings? Are we really any better off than the moth in the garden or is it just an illusion that we are faced with?  …Some bloke called Darwin said that we constantly try too change ourselves to suit our needs (like we got rid of our tails when we no longer needed it) and even made up a fancy name for this…”evolution”. . Is our brain any different from the rest of our body or does it behave the same way and if the latter is true…then …could it just  be possible that our brain is keeping us under a grand illusion of supremacy and knowledge just to keep our race in the “fittest” position.. Definitely a smart, happy monkey would be fitter than a sad, dumb one in the struggle for existence with all other factors remaining the same for both. Maybe our brain has “evolved” in a way to give us the impression of being the way we find and think of ourselves to be and showing us the way everything seems to be.