Politics – a poem by Mamata Banerjee

Politics has become a dirty game
Earlier it ment great fame
Now politics means big bussinesses
Party Offices have become commercial complexes.

Politics is for what — values or ideology ?
Now the word is changed, it is criminology.

The real power in politics — is it manpower ?
Alas ! In a real sense it is money power.

Credibility, honesty and sincerity
In politics now these are in scarcity.

Forgotten is service for the country or nation
For politics has become ‘glamour and fashion’.

Until and unless we change such politics
Politics will be lost in its own whirlpool of politics

Stay hungry. Stay foolish

Today’s horoscope:
“The astral energy indicates positive financial news – a settlement, grant, or bonus of some kind that you’ve been anticipating for a long time may finally manifest. You may want to go out and celebrate, dear Leo; a chance to attend a large social gathering might come your way. Have fun! Tonight: Don’t be surprised if some vivid dreams, some great, some sad, come your way. Keep a notebook and pen by your bed so that you can write them down”

Well that’s what the daily horoscope at Yahoo said, when I checked it early in the morning, before going to bed. Truth be told, I had almost forgotten about it after I woke up late in the afternoon. It was a deep sleep, black, pacific, un-punctuated by dreams.  I lunched alone, at 3 o’clock and again went back to sleep. Finally woke up at seven in the evening. Watched TV till dinner was served.

And now I sit here wasting away the independence of the ir-retentive hours of darkness, Steve Jobs for company!

Headache

 

Upon closing his eyes he was amazed to see a kaleidoscope of blue, red and green making loops and splashes instead of the familiar soothing blackness. It was intrusion: he couldn’t tolerate this. So he opened his eyes, looked up at the untiring ceiling fan, making black loops in the ceiling. It irritated him, much like the stiff spring that seemed trapped in his forehead. He tried to relax it by pressing his temples, with his stocky thumbs. Aah! He tried to take a deep breath, seeking to lubricate the stiffness of the spring. Upon exhaling he found that the spring has grown bigger, much to his dismay.

 

He closed his eyes again. Now, on the aforementioned background of red, blue and green, he could see spirals of white wires meshed sloppily diving deep into infinity. He tried to push the spring up, with his index fingers pressing his orbits. It didn’t happen. It made the spring recoil, which made it even more uncomfortable. He now tried to massage his forehead in an attempt to push the spring back into the deep dark recesses of his brain, where he kept most of his whatnots.

 

Now it was even more irritating. He could feel a bumblebee entering from his left ear going right through his forehead, within the spring (which was now beginning to form a pattern of recoiling and expanding), and coming out of his right ear. He tried to stop this: he put his palms on both his ears, to prevent the bee from entering. However he realised quickly he had failed, the bee was now trapped in his forehead. He took a deep breath as if to nauseate it with the polluted air he inhaled. The bee fluttered at the sudden gush of air, and then stood still. Then with a joyous flutter came out through his nostrils, victorious.

 

He removed his palms from his ears. Folded them on the pillow to prop his head. And he watched fan making black loops on the ceiling, resigning himself to the bemusing anomalies of life.

Welcome to the Jungle

 

Welcome to the jungle where man lives. Where the sun shines through the neons of the sapphire nights. Where love birds mate with the staccato of lounge bars. Where foxes dance in moonlight glow of discotheques. Where ribbons of traffic move like ants in fall. Where sultry dusks swelter the tan off malls and multiplexes. Where towers blossom high into cirrus black. Where eagles dare fly from where they never return. Where dust and gems shroud the streets in the wake of autumn’s demise. Where innocence is lost in scarlet sheets condone. Where paradise is regained with a puff of smoke. Where mirrors are black, and revenge is sweet. Where phoenix rises from the smoke of factories. Where lions go for the kill in quagmires of hubris and lust. Where peacocks are stamped on a ten-rupee note. Where the sun sets in a landscape of a dungeon of concrete, over bustling ruins.

 

Welcome to the jungle, where you can’t kill!

Please Don’t Try This At Home

We have all watched it at some point of time in our lives. Wrestling: not of the sumo or the Olympic kinds, but professional wrestling on TV that sells as sports entertainment, WWF in yore, now WWE.

 

This is being written in the wake of the murder-suicide of pro-wrestler Chris Benoit. The ‘rabid wolverine’ in the ring and now the ‘roid-rage’ murderer off it. Killing his wife in the drawing room, and then his son upstairs, he went to hang himself in his gym. Well he is not the only one. There have been other pro-wrestlers who have died a rather untimely death. Owen Hart for example, who died in a car accident while driving to a pay-per-view, he was supposed to perform in.Owen Hart expired while being lowered on to the ring when the rope snapped. There have been numerous others. Not surprisingly there is a connection.

 

These sportspersons, rather performers, lead a life that can be euphemistically called on-the-razors-edge. They work out, obviously heavily doped with steroids, learning to perform with raging pain and then party late into the nights. That’s alright if one’s routine is getting punched in the abdomen, jumping from 30 feet on to hard concrete, or fracturing ribs while running into a steel ladder, or, even at times, getting hit by a speeding car! Not surprisingly these ‘athletes’ have pathetic personal lives: a saga of multiple marriages and divorces, an often punctuated by domestic violence. Falling prey to the script they perform for a living!

 

The astonishing, and at the same time, obvious, part of it is the popularity this breed of neo-gladiators enjoy. Thousands miles from where they break their bones, you see kids jumping in a sadistic joy at the revelry. Kids trading cards enumerating behemoth biceps-triceps they have never hope to possess. Kid who choose to believe they can face any challenge like their heroes on screen, with dignity and brute force. Not to mention the devious script of the entire show that can give any saas-bahu soap a run for its money. Don’t blame the genius of Vince McMahon for it.

 

Blame the parents. Parents, who push their offspring to achieve what they never could, be it at the cost of their childhood! Parent, who do what ever they can to make rock stars and IITians, scientist and cricketers of their kids. Parents, who prefer their kids to ogle at television and computer screens, to flying kites, playing marbles or football in the muddy fields. Parents who are helpless and prosaic, who cant help if all it takes is to be a rat to survive in this world sans magnets and miracles.

 

And if you know what a statutory warning means, here is another (pretty self-abnegatingly obvious): Please don’t try this at home.

Zen and the Art of Walking

It all began with my futile attempt at getting my driving license ratified for two wheelers. Futile because after three hours in a tout-infested government office, I realised I was up against forces that Hercules dare fight . Luckily, sooner than later, I found a contact in the department, and he promised me that if all goes well, I’ll surely have my right to the road in a couple of months. Much obliged that I was, I decided to explore another avenue to peace.

Walking. I have never cared much to ambulate along the crowded lanes of the city of mini-buses and hawkers! For starters, the footpath no longer belongs to the pedestrians. Secondly, walking is something I have always associated with a certain alpine hobby of mine. I was not ready to compromise on the experience.

So when I put on my sneakers one fine dawn, I realised it was not my doings, but certain powers beyond human realms that was goading me on. Amen. Day one was much like the first date: uncomfortable, tiring and seemingly boring. Day two discovers new alleys, throws in a few nonagenarian for company, and the boredom being replaced by a certain stoic acceptance. The next few days progressively makes the birds sing, the leaves rustle and the morning dew soothe my wandering soul. After the first week I discovered my natural pace, learnt to keep my Walkman at home, and not to read the morning newspaper on the way back.

Walking means recollection of memories that have been besmirched by the passage of time. Thoughts that otherwise get bogged down by apparently more important preoccupations of the day would surface like bubbles in a rivulet. Needless to say, the obvious temptation being the connection with nature: all that is green and fresh. You get a chance to meet her in all her unadulterated glory, if only as a mirage, nevertheless. Of course, the well-nourished can shed those extra pounds.

However the best walks are those that are inwards: the sojourn within. When you don’t run away, but walk on to find yourself, far from the maddening crowd!

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“There is a story told about Gabriel García Márquez by another Latin-American novelist, who was once his neighbour. Every night, after slaving over their respective sentences, the writers would meet for a drink. García Márquez would tell his friend about what he had written during the day and the friend would eagerly await the next installment.

 

This went on night after night until the book was finished. Then, one day, García Márquez’s friend walked into a bookshop, only to find there was not a single aspect of One Hundred Years of Solitude he recognised – not a character, not a plot twist, nothing. He realised that García Márquez had, in effect, produced two novels: one written and one oral. He didn’t know which was worse – the fact that he’d been strung along or that there was no record of the fabrication; it had evaporated with all their hard-earned drinks. “

 

Such is the man. So when you expected a sequel to “Living to Tell a Tale” comes knocking at your door, what is undoubtedly a coda to his distinguished literary career, “Memories of my Melancholy Whores”. A book that is more lovable for its atmosphere and style than content and plot.

 

The content might as well raise a few eyebrows. When the novella begins with “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” – you can almost hear a few chortles and a lot of disgruntled sighs. And to add to chagrin of the latter, the next paragraph rather boldly declares, “Morality is a matter of time”. All for a lover who sleeps in a dilapidated brothel, as the protagonist narrates her stories from Arabian Nights. Quite a tale.And deceptive too, punctuated with tricks Marquez loves to play on his readers.

The story set in an antediluvian colonial setting of Latin America, meanders in the bye-lanes of love, lust, erotica, unbridled innocence and a certain surreptitious humour. His atypical aphorisms: “Sex is the consolation when you cant have love”, “Among the charms of old age are the provocations our young female friends permit themselves because they think we are out of commission “, “the invincible power that has shaped the world is unrequited, not happy, love”. And his inimitable style wrought with a life that people like me can identify with, makes for a refreshingly dreamy afternoon.

The 76 year old Marquez who has been seriously ill for the past few years, has produced another of his gems, maybe not of as grand as Solitude or Cholera, but definitely opalescent by its own rights. One definitely worth reading!

Job Satisfaction

Ramdas works in Texmaco Limited. He has been serving his sentence at the fitting shop for the last 24 years. Still today he is yet to fall in love with his job. When the siren sounds at six in the evening, he knows he has a home. His granddaughter comes running to him, thrusting him her tattered notebook with numbers spangled across the margins. Ramdas doesn’t know how to read; never had the means to go to school. Yet when the six-year old with her oily braided hair babbles her tables, he knows with a lump in his throat that he has not been far from finding El Dorado.

 

 

 

Debu is a clerk in a local sari store. His days are drowned in an oily fluidity of fat ledger books and incantations of zealous retailers. He comes back home late at night, at eleven, and if the business is good, maybe twelve. His young wife waits for him at the veranda of his two-room cage. After chapatti and dal, he put on the transistor that he presented his wife on her birthday. When he sees the blue silhouette of his wife in the neons of a city that is fast asleep, he feels a breeze of a smile across his face. He realises his happiness of being.

 

 

 

Parimal sells vegetables at Sealdah station. His days are spent in the amnesia of bargains with local hoodlums for his space on the pavement, and haggling with daily passengers for two-penny profits. His evenings, tired and spent, hiding from the ticket checker at the vendors’ compartment. His nights, eyelids heavy with alcohol, barely make sense. Yet, when he lies in his poppy field, staring at the sky spread with puffed sympathetic clouds, he knows happiness cant be far.

 

Pitch-black

I can hear the clock ticking away seconds to its death. I can hear insects clicking their tongue, waiting for its prey. Now that have found one they click away with a renewed ardour. Then I can hear the breeze whistling away fronds and clandestine murmurs of burgeoning connubial bliss. Shattering the mosaic of cadence of these nightly slumbers, there barks a dog. There goes a train, ferrying the nights of railway-sleepers of one world to honeymoon dawns of another. And there cries the crone. I don’t know why, I don’t want to know why.

And there the inebriated stars twinkle away their credence. And there the palm brushes the intoxication in the air aside. The sleepy cat sniffs the air, and goes back to sleep. Sleep.

There barks a dog again. There clicks the insects. There ticks the seconds. Sleep.

And there tucked in the bliss of a sonorous slumber, the world dreams on. Dreams of blackness. Burnt with ambitions, calumny and pride. Of wingless angels and fairies in décolletage, of skyscrapers and disaffected pastures, of caprice of yore and blithe premonitions. More dogs bark. More insects click and more seconds tick away. Sleep.

For the world sleeps.

Such a waste of Time!

Stuck in a traffic jam for over half and hour. Nothing under the sun to do. A humid mini-bus, a sticky tee-shirt clinging on to me like a strait-jacket. And nondescript oxymoron in dangerous proximity! Just wanted to break free…

Thought: It was much easier to survive, before. Now, it a dog’s world!

 

Afterthought: Today is but yesterday from tomorrow’s.

 

 

Thought: Why is the world so full of hypocrites? Damn them!

 

Afterthought: What is a hypocrite?

 

 

Thought: Living the same old life, over and over. The same old dreams, the same old sighs, the same old tears. The same waking up every morn, the same cup of life, the same essence and the same pains, the same going back to bed, the self-same waste…

 

Afterthought: Who doesn’t?

 

 

 

Thought: Everyone lives for his own happiness. Own as in his own family, his own circle of friends, the ones for whom he cares.

 

Afterthought: Don’t I?

 

 

 

Thought: Ah! We are all so alike. Everyone’s my friend and brother! Everyone’s me!

 

Afterthought: Such a terrible waste of time, thinking!

 

 

 

Thought: Clichés, all!

Afterthought: [Sigh]

 

Green Signal at last…