Uncut Poetry

Poems have a way of showing truths and making us recognize what we are often blind to - that the best we have is adequate and the worst we think we are can also be beautiful. There is so much we lose out to life because of our fears - of what we think we are, of what others might think we are, of what the world thinks when we fail.   The sad truth is - nobody cares. Everybody is immersed in their...

As new year eves crack our worlds open into two - a past and a future - albeit as tenuous in concept as they come, deep inside we know the celebrations - like those we do for birthdays - is just messaging of mortality for all things we hold dear.   And embedded within that reality is our realization that the experiences and relationships we live and seek and want to linger in are what sustains and...

We are privileged enough to linger in beauty without thinking of livelihood. We spend time with the skies, linger over petunias, chrysanthemums, dahlias and marigolds as they burst in exuberance, watch a frog jump onto a lotus leaf, spend a day in Givenchy, go rapturous over a Zaha Hadid design, go pensive over a Selma poem, linger over a drying leaf in the walking path, bite slowly into the sumpt...

Darling, make no mistake.   There's so much of you I crave and care for. My morning gratitude wishes are of you, whatever nightmare you might have put me through a sweaty night.   I've learnt the hard way that married life is less a game of naughts and crosses, and more of remembrances and erasures. Because the burden of memory in a marriage is Krishna's Butterball rock in Mahabalipura, balancing...

Summer makes me light and present. The monsoon pulls me into its flood of feelings. Autumn turns me inward—part stranger, part seeker.   But winter is where I truly awaken. In its drifting mists and sudden shafts of light, old emotions unseal themselves; warmth rises gently from the cold. My mind clears, my questions deepen, and I feel myself walking through unseen passages within.   I’m reminded...

We are such fools, we are, knowing all about inevitabilities, but never (ever) prepared for them. We will lose loved ones, they will die, some in their prime, some before they would have discovered their worth, some even as they burned themselves on both ends.   Such is the life of denial we live. Refusing to acknowledge what we know as truth in the deepest fibre of our beings. And when the end do...

Love is as you define it. Often a search. Often a precipice. Often an infraction. Often an acceptance. More often then not, a home we finally settle in, a comfort, a place to step out from the edginess of search to build stories of reconciliations.   But life has its outtakes and inputs, twists and twirls, bells and whistles, which do not allow love to rest. Because it does not want one basic thin...

Everyone comes in our lives for a reason. The bad ones, the good ones. It is all revealed in time. Sometimes as a slow-burning mystery, sometimes as a spark in a deep night, sometimes in quiet secret ways even we fail to understand, until we get to look back and retrospect.   So many of our relationships tether on the edge, so many drift to seeming nothingness, so many are treacherous like the Ann...

So much of what we are is the amalgam of hurts we carry deep inside. As past life regression reveals, sometimes the hurt runs deep, bringing forward traces of what's left unresolved from the ages before.   However accomplished or complete we might think ourselves to be, we roam the world raw, susceptible to the random snide, reacting to the perceived insult, ultra-sensitive to derision.   And we r...

It is sobering to realize how insignificant we are in this universe, how much of a speck. And how much the grandeur of nature - a spectacular lunar eclipse, the sun shining on a quiet sea, a moonlit desert - shows us both the incredible world we live in - as also bring us back to the joy of minutiae, if only we have the eyes and time for it.   And it brings us back to the gorgeous littleness of ou...

I am so often in awe.   Of another being’s endurance or grace — perhaps a lover, a river, the sea, or even time itself.   I want to learn how they do it -from borrowing calm, to letting life flow through, to finally resting in stillness and reverence.   To see life as a moving tapestry of happenstances, tragedies or ecstasy; living through them, but not allowing any of these to change the essentia...

We give up on those we profess to love too soon.   There is something primordial, something gossamer, to do with the body, to do with first inchoate impressions, which attracts us to one another in the first place. Because relationships often begin in shallow waters.   As things start to become serious, the couple traverses depths. It's not easy. And unexpected. Murky, weed-laden, algae-full. The...

This is a repeat of one of my more popular poems, replayed here with a hope of getting a new audience, who might have missed it, Childhood is a town we have to leave. Home is a destination we have to leave and recreate again and again. Memories are the wealth we carry as reflux. And we create ourselves as our own saviours as we search strange lands. Even as we flee our abandoned bicycles in empty...

Revisiting a place where one has one's roots is tricky business.   On the one hand, there is enough familiarity - relatives, school chums as unrecognisable adults, hazy lines of playgrounds, peacocks, changing views from rooftops, familiar cracks now deeper - and on the other, one enters the familiar as a complete stranger. The air is lighter, the light is sharper, the language is alien in spite o...

Love is fragile but can withstand blows; it is easily dismantled but can be unrelenting in its persistence. It can disintegrate in a word, but can stand unbreakable after the worst of happenstances.   Love is both ordinary and a maverick. It can breathe as if it is taking its last inhalation or linger as if infinity is a friend. There is lassitude, there is energy, there is determination, there is...

Pondering as I do on relationships, the beauty and brokenness of them, I continuously marvel, nay wonder, at both their tenacity and tenuousness. And how, at the bottom of them all, they all exist on the basis of a single decision: to be together.   However old, however strong, whatever the optics, the couple is together only because they want to be. Years might slip by, a thousand experiences mig...

We don't always realize, how much of our lives belongs to others, is determined by others. Their concerns, their insistences, their jealousies, their phobias, their happinesses, their frustrations. Their blank stares, their under-the-breath comments, their lack-of-joy. Their obsessions, their obsessive need to control. Their potential reactions, their prejudices, their silences.   In time, what we...

People drift.   Love leaves home. Life becomes a refugee. We become migrants in our own cities. What brought two people together often becomes the reason which tears them apart. Poetry is often a glue, often it it only a record-keeper. Often it is a bystander, checking out its own pulse.   And the two who loved how poetry defined them, find the suburbs of love - where they finally have to settle -...

Relationships often run their course. But we don't. And I'm both heartbroken and frustrated at the phenomenon. As I try to decipher the possibility of a rich life, now existing as an afterlife.   It's not a question of toxicity setting in, but of a river in full spate disappearing into an arid empty bed.   And I ask - why do we hold onto relationships which subtract us as human beings? Because wha...

What did my palms come to know what did my skin feel what did my eyes own as I transversed universes as I clasped light    conscious we are captive of time and age held together in ways undefinable on the wings of unsaid hope,    possibilities held as a moment's gift    who are we if not fools   holding love as a talisman a bushel of kisses as proof that when all fails there's a touch which knew  ...

Someone said something very telling the other day. In a court of law, the criminal knows he's the one, the accuser knows the criminal is the one. So in the scheme of things, it's actually only the judge who is being judged.   I was reminded of this when I realized that our relationships are intrinsically not of the other, but about us  - the person in front of us is a mirror in which we can see ou...

So much of our time is spent in yearning.   A slow despair of knowing life is slipping by, and of somehow not being able to wrap our arms around its fullness. Of, time and again, sinking our fingers into something we see as compressible but finding mere nothingness.   Of having touched love, but having lost it before experiencing its infinite lushness or its prickly pleasures. Because through love...

We are what we make of the minutiae of our daily lives. Because love resides in them. We have a simple choice - we can curse at the commonplace or be masters of the mundane.   The ability to observe and feel and let go, all at the same time, is what determines both the trajectory of our days as also the journeys of our heart.   Because the other choice is of getting overwhelmed with the negativity...

A colleague committed suicide today. 7 am. He woke up early, took a bath, did his pujo, and then hung himself from a fan. His wife discovered him when she didn't see him in the pujo ghar.   I'd met him the day before getting into office, and asked him how he was doing. He was cheerful. I asked him to drop by for a cup of coffee. Another colleague did two meetings with him. Another one said good by...

I was reading poet Joy Sullivan's book of burnished sepia-tinged poems "Instructions for travelling west", and followed the footsteps of her poems into my childhood. Trying to catch the magic without sinking into syrupy nostalgia. And was amazed at how much I remembered - the games, the bruises, the sweat, the moths, ice-cold drinks - and just that feeling of unencumbered joy.   But much more than...