1 Dec 2006

What burdens you?


What is it that stoops your shoulders?
What is it that weighs you down?
What torturous thoughts do those eyes hide?
But are given away by lines of frown.
 
What has possessed you? What has consumed you?
What possibly can burden a man so much
What has robbed you of your smile of youth?
What has enstraged you from your young wife's touch.
 
What needs a man who walks on earth
What needs a man of human birth
What could a man possibly require
That makes him so toil and ceaselessly tire.
 
What makes him skip his meals of today
To work to buy food twenty years hence
What use is food when you do not eat?
Because work makes you so constantly tense.
 
What makes him blind to his homely charms
While he saves to buy houses for tomorrow
What use is the bed not slept upon
And stress that permeates the house with sorrow
 
What makes him endure a restless sleep
As he labours to meet his job's demand
Pile money to sleep restfully in future
And surrender tonight to the bosses command
 
What needs a man who walks on earth
What needs a man of human birth
Food to eat? A place to live in?
Restful sleep? Loving Kith and Kin?
 
What makes him neglect the ones he loves
The very people he calls his own
A mistaken belief in infinite elasticity
That makes him think they wont be torn
 
What is it that stoops your shoulders
What takes away your youth from you?
What burden of earth need you to shoulder?
That takes the moments truth away from you?
 
 

2 Sept 2006

Dream world


I split my world into two worlds
In one I do as the rules dictate,
But in the other I left the familiar banks
And bared my true heart's state

I let the waters carry me on
I let the river take me downstream
The white water rapids came fast and many
And suddenly my life was a beautiful dream

I never knew I had such emotion in me
I had forgotten the sweet sting of love
I  knew not the expression of this much passion
That comes like a torrent of rain from above

I will not get up, I wont come back
To my boring world constrained in rules
I'd rather remain forever in the other
Dream world of love stricken fools!

28 Jul 2006

The setting of a Battlefield


My heart was heavy, my face was long
As I went from one news site to another
Bombs over here, floods over there
Men and Nature destroying each other
 
It made no sense, my tears welled up
Helpless and hopeless; surfing without aim
More news, a little child kills himself
As he plays the newfound , ‘choking game’.
 
I wandered for a day with grief in my heart
As frustrations and questions clouded my mind
I looked for answers, I searched for reasons
But nothing satisfactory, could I find.
 
Another day, more restless moments
Tonight I threw my hands up in despair,
As the last resort I picked up my Gita
Almost with a defiant and rebellious air
 
Talking to the book and to my lord
I addressed both in a quarrelsome note
Little was I ready for the immediate reply
Hidden in the verses a sage once wrote
 
Ah, the battle, it makes sense now
Why you chose such a gory scene
Pitted against his own close ones
Oh, for Arjuna the world looked mean
 
And you told him then in your gallant style
How birth and death don’t bind the soul
You showed him then your grander plan
How it all came together in your mixing bowl
 
You showed him a frightful vision of yourself
With warriors running into your open mouth
Destined to die, they were in your plans
And your rule reigned from north to south
 
And yet you tenderly explained to your friend
The ways of nature and the nature of man
Outlining the route that would help him live
As wisely and righteously as any man can
 
Even today there is a battle all around
With the appearance of a useless life
But the advice you gave holds meaning still
A ray of light amidst all this strife
 
You definitely chose a wonderful scene
Of the battle, meaningless and gory 
For it is a scene that continues to replay
It is what I read in today’s news story
 
It is in such times that we seek an answer
At such times we prepare to listen anew
At such times we cast our assumptions aside
And come open hearted to you.
 
 

6 Jun 2006

Eternal Holiday


Waiting for the summer holidays
Ah! Time to start playing now
My sister and I made two long lines
Dividing all our toy utensils somehow

She gets the Kadhai, I get the saucepan
But alas there is only one tiny stove
So I set out to gather little twigs
And make a cute bonfire with love

A teddy bear is made to sit
On the tri-cycle to act as husband
With a wave and a push, he is sent to office
Leaving us queens of our land

A 'chunni' hanging on a string
Separates both our houses
Sometimes we even put on sarees
And struggle with oversized blouses

Then the cooking starts, with strange concoctions
Some edible, some certainly not
But they are both equally important
For the concentrating tiny tot!

We wash the tiny clothes as well
And iron them, nice and straight
Then dress the dolls posing as babies
And comb their hair into a plait

The whole morning passes in play
But note! we call it 'play',
It is similar to what I do now,
But I call it 'work' today

So now its work to grumble about,
The never ending cooking and cleaning 
Oh this is just play, cant I see?
Its up to me to give activity its meaning!

This is 'Maya' operating full swing,
In our illusion it keeps us wrapped,
The mind that construes 'play' as 'work'
Causes natural energy to be sapped

Whoever called it the 'veil of maya'
Got it ever so completely right
For a veil it is that hides the light
Of reality from our sight

A make believe world we all live in
Some days we choose to smile
Some days we ourselves construct an image
That makes us shed tears for a while

No different is my life now
Than the easy days of childhood play
But what I then did as a make believe game
I do, with pretense of reality, today!

If I could only constantly see
The 'play' that makes up each day
I would have today my childhood energy,
And live forever, my summer holiday!

9 Mar 2006

The Homeless Man


You stand there in that same corner
The magazines in your hand,
It may be drizzling, it may be sunny
But I know exactly where you’ll stand.

In a neighbourhood full of strangers
Yours is the most familiar face,
In your eyes alone I sometimes find
The glitter of being outside the race.

Amidst the crowd scurrying along
One man stands in one place always,
You stand aloof from the rush of time
You are the stillness in my moving maze.

You are the symbol of things beyond
That which I want to believe is true,
You are the example to prove me wrong
To make me question what I thought I knew.

You prove with your life, a way of living
That does without almost all I run after
And yet you seem to exude somehow
The things most precious, love and laughter!

If God were to come and stand awhile
On this our busy running street,
Would He be you who looks at us?
While we run past blind with scurrying feet?

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