Uncut Poetry

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.   To awaken every morning is to reward oneself.   The day is desperate for us to discover it, to unravel its mysteries and find its surprises. We do not have to fly or be special. We merely need to be excited.   Then we can see birds with new eyes, and feel the air on ou...

The other day I was reading a poem called "At Night, I Let All the Women Inside me Roam Around the House" by the marvellous poet Kelly Grace Thomas. And it made me realize how interweaved our lives are into a hundred other iterations of our own lives, and how so many unconnected things and occurrences in our world instantly become ours, how the tiniest things which might be happening because it is...

Love is, finally, comfort. To talk, to tell the uncomfortable truth, to tell the story of the day, to share a silence, to share a film and disagree on it, to find a thing of beauty and to think of him.   We all need one such person, for us to find a resting place in our Sisyphean lives. Often I think a poet is merely that one person who is all alone in this world, putting her deepest concerns into...

Relationships are so amorphous - and so complex. You can’t hold them in your palms, yet they can crumble in front of your very eyes.   I have no idea about the statistics or the studies, but all around me I see dead ties that persist. And I’m glad they do.   In a world where we demand perfect relationships and expect them to become shiny almost overnight, there is something worth remembering: rela...

Oh that delicious feeling of never getting out of bed. The battle within. Knowing that routine was king, and would win, because life is weaved around a framework, which urges disciple, and gives rewards, which are really life's gifts.   But once in a while, just sometimes, when the windows lay unopened, the curtains remain drawn, and the body pleads for respite, sometimes as a false alarm for rest...

I am forever left bemused with how unprepared we are to the inevitable. And I talk not only of deaths, but consequences. For every action, thought, word of ours pushes the engine of our existence and our world forward.   A dear friend always chastises me when I say something dire, even when it is in jest. He then rattles off five examples of things which went wrong because someone spoke of them -...

We carry so many stories inside us, which keep dying small deaths. Nobody to narrate them, often lying in the dungeons of memory, sometimes forced there, often simply ignored.   So much of what we are, and why we are what we are, are these stories. But we are afraid to tell them, often even as they are happening. Because we don't have safe zones in our lives. People who will not start looking at u...

So many people in good jobs and thriving businesses, find out, some day or the other, that they have lost their way. And frittered away life by focusing incessantly on a living. On the promise of a something-promise, a glittering, a destination, a kind of a fulfilment. Of course it is. It is a pursuit, a dream of so many. And we are blessed for anything which brings us our daily bread.   But after...

I can never stop writing about how beautiful this world is and how much we shortchange it. As we drown in its inequities and issues, we lose focus of its true meaning and what it means to our lives.   Because to obsess about its warts, its slings-&-arrows, its knockdowns, is to lose track of why these come into our lives. Not to move away from them, not to brush them away or try to machine gun...

What do you fear the most? Ma went around the table asking each one to tell.   Son was quick off the bat - losing all of you. (Isn't that a given, wife said, misty-eyed, she held out her hand. Still doesn't stop being a disaster, he said, unless - you reach an age of 150, become batty like hell, and I have to go to god and say, you're having fun buddy eh? Isn't it time you took them up!)   Dad mul...

For an agnostic, I'm pretty vigorous in my temple-hopping. I don't let go  even a single opportunity to visit a religious place. Earlier it was a visitation only if the temple was scenic (!) then I transitioned to "if it's accessible, I'm in".   Along the years I realized I could treat the Almighty as an ally -  often for resolution (success rate 50%), sometimes with a request for a miracle (large...

Too many love stories are about a single self-love. One person's agenda determines the relationship. And a couple subsumes into a singularity without a merger. There are those who survive, through will, by finding a life outside the relationship, considering it fate, or by just adjusting expectations.   And the couple misses a significant beat.   Two people together have the opportunity to discove...

Would things have been better if I had used different words? If I hadn't said what I did? If I hadn't done that, which in retrospect, seems short-term, short-sighted, short-everything. We realize mistakes, often whilst we are making them, often much after the deed is done and dusted, often only when we face the consequences. Anf sometimes not at all.   We are human. We are a cauldron of weaknesses...

Human beings. Our blessed lives, this gracious breath, this universe. And then the small infractions blown out of proportion, the disputes, the ego play. Human beings doing what they do best - destroy what's good.    And then men & women with their particularities starting to chip away at the very foundation on which their worth and purpose and joy is built on - the people they love. Simplicit...

Darkness slips into every life. But it is upto us to allow it to slip into us. Except for lives marred with extreme deprivation and choicelessness, each one of us has the power to give direction to our destinies.   Mystery enters our lives after determinations.   But if we die every day, there is only so much of a safety net life can provide us. Death wishes are not looked upon kindly by the unive...

Covid was an incredible time for humankind. Rarely have each one of us confronted, in real time, and with examples pouring in daily, death as an occurrence which could hit any one of us, suddenly, irrevocably, and often in lonely quarantine.   Reality, and confronting it daily as a tangible occurrence, became a horror story. We were forced to confront our worst fears - and ironically realize our b...

We are just ordinary people, living lives which often don't make sense, seeking our share of meaning, joy and fulfilment in our own ways. Embedded deep within - undefined, unspoken of, often unrecognised as such - are tiny and eternal stories of love. There are no bells and whistles attached to these stories, nothing to define them as special, but in their quiet ways, they light up lives, and make...

Love can be pretty unrelenting. It's turgidity and its persistence can be intimidating to people who see it collapsing under its own weight and can't understand how it is still standing strong. People in love can separate without disengagement but equally they can continue loving with separation.   Anything anchored in emotion has moorings which may seem fragile but are often unrelenting. Nobody k...

I love this poem because it condenses the thoughts which partners who separate from each other might have of the other.   It's subtle, often the first flush of love, often the first separation. When you know the highs of love, but have not known how the valleys are to be navigated: and you think the first bump, the first infraction, a fight, a being-away-from-one's-sight could actually be enough c...

Summers in Kolkata slide rather than blister, which is what happens when I visit Jhunjhunu. Both are experiences. There's no hiding place here because the humidity is omnipresent - but a shaded tree is enough to save you from the dry heat in Rajasthan. And then I go to a Delhi - where nothing can save you except an airconditioned room, because what does not melt you burns you down.   There's very...

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.   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....

A home is a person.   I think I realized this a long time back. I loved all the homes I've stayed with my parents. Every time my dad changed jobs, and consequently cities and homes. And then in his final assignment in pristine Tribeni, on the outskirts of Calcutta, he kept getting promotions and we kept changing homes. The last one was a colonial bungalow with an acre worth of gardens, and a view...

We complicate relationships because we deny simplicity or simple ways of loving or - maybe - the simple solutions to complex things.   Every relationship starts with a clean slate. Pure, unencumbered. Then it gets layered. One incident at a time, one feeling expressed at a time, and often (more vitally), one feeling unexpressed at a time.   And the grooves get cut and get deeper, sharper, as the u...

To awaken every morning is to reward oneself.   The day is desperate for us to discover it, to unravel its mysteries and find its surprises. We do not have to fly or be special. We merely need to be excited.   Then we can see birds with new eyes, and feel the air on our skin. We can sit quietly, sip a cup, gaze out of the window, and know this is what it is to be alive.   An ordinary life.   Many...

There's so much in this world to be unhappy about. The reasons are endless. And we can fallow in the silky self-indulgence of not being in control and letting circumstances take their toll on us.   It's an irony of humankind that in the positioning of action and result, we bring in destiny as a critical component, and instead of letting it be a possible catalyst, we seek to substitute action with...