Some Stray and Broken Thoughts- Poems on Weekend

This weekend, the mind is numb and heart is beating with some heaviness. The skies are unkind and the weather is unforgiving. Wrote some poems today, which I am putting here as this week's post.

A Noisy Silence
A silence
So loud
Hangs in the room
That it
Pierces through the hearing
And in the din of it
Drowns all
The soft and mild
Whispers of sweet love.

A Gift to be Earned

Love,
is not a divine entitlement.
The very idea of
love\
on account of being what you are
is flawed.
It is a right to be earned
you need to
struggle,
Get cleansed and grow,
into better being,
... Else it is all
narcissism
or sheer stupidity.

It is everything
but love,
admiration, infatuation
anything, but love.

(c) Saket Suryesh

Apart from this, a Short Story, Betrayed by Time got a life today, which I will share in following week. This is the second short story I wrote, after The Death of a Soldier which I wrote some time back. 

Ponderings of A Proclaimed Mugwump-Need for Positive Politics

Mugwump- is a term which stands out because of its peculiar sound, if you do not know the meaning, and stands out for the liberating meaning, if you understand the meaning of it. I came across this term while reading the The Autobiography of Mark Twain , wherein he wanted to petition the government and hesitated on account of being a Mugwump.

 

The term finds first usage in the English of Eighteenth Century and refers to one who is free of political inclination and derives its origin from the reference made to the Republican who refused to support his own party nominee in 1884, US elections, James Blaine. By the team, Mark Twain used it in his autobiography, it referred to someone independent of political leanings.

 

The term is confusing in pronunciation and meaning, though in today's time of political turmoil and quicksand ideology, to be a mugwump seems to be only reasonable political affiliation. Which party would you stand with when you do not know what ideology they stand for. The party in power resembles so much those out of it, that it is only minor difference in the level of arrogance which differentiates.

 

In times of turmoil, it is always better to build your own cocoon and stay in that, with a hope that some day the grey will melt into black and white on the either side and you will know which side to stand on. These are times of shifting loyalties and unclear convictions. To be stupid is alleviating and to be intellectual is a recipe for mental trauma. The world around us has lost balance, and its no wonder we don't know which way to head.

 

We are brought up to believe in a world in which the right and wrong, the just and the unjust, co-exist and the world stabilizes and prospers in the middle of these forces and counter-forces, which strike an equilibrium. The citizen today is at loss because there is no positive to counter-balance the negatives any longer. The negatives are responded to with negatives. The riots at the behest of one side of the political world, is responded by belligerent posturing by the other side. One man's inflation is other man's theatre.

 

How many times do we find, opposition parties travel to riot hit areas and set up camps to ensure restoration and rehabilitation? Inflation hits the poor, and the food on the plate goes scarce, but then on the street we find the theatre of absurd, with opposition leaders dancing with garland of tomatoes, highlighting scarce vegetables. Citizen is at loss, unable to understand who is being mocked, the party in power or the poverty of people. Are they blind to understand that the world needs balance and negative can not be countered with negative? When will we find them setting up food camps, emptying their ill-gotten election funds, thus creating a force of positive.

 

The light has to come in to fight darkness, you can not counter dark with more dark or funny dark. The world seeks the light and the political class is failing it. Violence needs to be answered with sanity and huger with prosperity. It is a difficult task, but is only hope that we as a nation have. Till then, I proudly continue to be a mugwump and the disease is spreading. You can not shame people into participating in the political process, you need to give them hope that things can change. We need to grow from the politics of protest to the politics of persuasion and progress.

 

I, being a mugwump, do not usually write on politics, not that anybody cares, but sometimes it gets too much and has to come out. Writing about desperate situations do not make them better, but it gives a moral satisfaction of blurting out my mind, with a hope that may be someone will listen. Your views??

Incoherent Thoughts on a Mother's Day

Mother son relation is the most secure relation..how can you ever doubt the umbilical cord which fed you when you could not feed yourself. It therefore fall with a thud when for a moment any doubt of lack of love creeps in. That is a thud which screams loud in the loneliest of the nights.

Men tend to make their spouse believe, early in their lives that they are no longer Momma's boy. They go to length to prove how their Mom's no longer hold the last word in their lives and decisions they are  to make going forward.

This is a little conspiracy to prove that manhood has been gained and adulthood has been attained, and it is entirely untrue. 

As long as it stays a secret and is contained within the realm of the two original perpetrator and the lady being wooed, there is no problem. 

The fault line appears when it reaches then mother as well. It gets worse when she starts to protest and in a sense legitimises the claim which anyways was untrue. A man can never outgrow a mother's love. For a mother to believe anything like that and to protest that is detrimental to the relation.

All men, even the middle aged ones, live with a secret desire to get exposed of the lie which they tell to their wives. This is a lie which they want to be called out and it breaks their hearts if their mother believes in what it untrue and abandons them. No child is old enought to be abandoned by a mother. A child always loves to be prioritised and laughed off for his small slips..and for him all his slips are small..as far as the mother is concerned. 

I don't know what I am writing, and it seems rubbish. It is incoherent and lacks design. But it is a Mother's Day and society crept between me and my mother, and drove a divide so deep that I could do nothing more than getting my daughter speak with the grandmother, on the Mother's Day. I wish she could never believe that son's love is lost and that societal correctness is a pre-condition of a mother's love for the child. Nothing can be a pre-condition of a mother's love. I wish she knows that even when I walk out of the home, I will always love her. And I wish she believes it, and believes it without requiring me to prove it.

Read it without prejudice..it is not a post, it is a wail of loneliness which travels to the skies. It comes from a life which is forlorn and tired and would do well with a mother's love. It is from the other son, who could not claim "Mere Paas Maa hai".

The Pursuit of Words

Our lives is a pursuit of meaning. We live in a constant pursuit of a meaning which we intend to attach to the life that we by an accident of nature have been bestowed with. It is through art and literature that we pursue that elusive meaning. Rest is accidental, existential, meant only to sustain life.

Some people give up this quest early in life and oscillate between two extremes. They either consider their own lives a nuisance, lacking any value and devoid of purpose, or they place a crazily high value on otherwise inconsequential and ordinary life, and demand that the world at a pedestal as high and sacred as the pedestal on which they place themselves. They have no balance in live, and though troubled, are not searching for any. Few who are unable to bear with the animalistic life of extremes, set out on a quest.

But why should this life be sustained? It actually makes no sense, if the purpose of life were to be sustaining life itself. We are not even a dot on the timeless scale of the universe. What difference would a couple of years here or there make to you as we'll as to the world. The quest for the meaning of life is through words. Man invented language to understand the world around and also to tolerate it.

Without words, it is hard to survive the brutality of the world which passes by us in such a brusque manner that we are apt to be left with more than a few bruised thoughts. With words we explain the unlove to ourselves and reach out for love which could be ours. Words rise from misery, but every written word announces the demolition of one such misery, in its own small way. People who haven't felt miserable ever, can not write. I am one such soul living in constant misery and gain intermittent relief through words. But I am not a writer in that sense. I do not write on the workdays to submit to magazines, and I do not have a study where I retire to, in order to weave words. 

But words are small bandages which I put on my soul, thus hoping to embalm the pain that I earn through the week. Every weekend, it opens a door through which I enter in to a world, an underground with dim orange lights and loud music. I meet some kindred souls there, some partners in crime, who are also there nursing their wounds. We rest our weary shoulders against one another, and suffer in silence, and come out of this little spa for soul, healed, recovered and ready for more