Love, Life and Happiness

The media in India is going crazy about Modi's first visit to the United States. The global and American media reports are also being analysed and re-reported in Indian media for any trace of enthusiasm about the maiden visit of the newly appointed prime-minister of India. He had a warm welcome by the Indian diaspora and with the extravaganza at the iconic Madison Square in the New York. If reports are to be believed, the such crowds were seen to watch an Indian was in the Eighties when a show of Movie legend Amitabh Bachchan was held there.  Beyond the cultural show, the demographics, the mouse and the Mars, the difference which is most visible in India of late, is the swagger which has suddenly appeared in our foreign policy. Our administration in a long time, visibly reached out to save citizens from strife-stricken areas. Our near memory struggles to find some such effort apart from appeals and sadly pathetic condemnations in the past, quite helpless, quite feeble. We would wat

We are flooded with communications and a splurge of media is overwhelming our lives. The Social media is ubiquitous, addictive and imperiously intrusive in modern lives. It has fooled us to believe that it is a mode of communication, replacing something as humble and thoughtful as a letter. Communication is two people talking to each other, which is not the case with Social media. It talks at you. The letters, those humble things which arrived with promises and hope in the envelopes carried a little bit of the soul of the writer in them. When the reader read them, ran his or her fingers over the writings with ink smudged due to bad nib, damp weather or tears, we touched the other person. The fact that writing letters took time and effort made it impossible for one not to leave something of oneself on those pages. The letters tell you a lot about the person who wrote them and therefore reading letters of historical figures is a re-discovery of the great minds and souls as thinking,

The harrowing face of death A vacuous grief, Peeking from behind the shoulder, Watching through gray evenings And dark, unending nights Slimy and serpentine, Slowly slithering across the street Waiting for a faltering step, A heavy knot rising thought the chest, A broken soul, a weakened will, A shivering shadow of a fading love. Death has many faces Death, the faceless demon, The vampirish monkey lurking in the dark Ready to pounce At tired, unloved soul, Hungrily waiting for the moment When dust meets dust and Returns ashes to ashes. I laugh in hoarse voice, Face heavenwards, Mocking death, proclaim, For I will live forever, In love, in thoughts, In solemn, poignant moments of longing, In lingering laughter In pulsating ideas, In tears unshed, Which will live forever, A feeble breeze of my soul Contributing to the  thundering storm of eternity.

 The Sunday isn't rushed. It calmly waits with the benign sun resting over its shoulders.  Voices are slowly breaking in.  The cycle shop opposite my place has opened up, with metallic sounds  rising in rhythm as they take out their tool.  The plants on the terrace dance in the mild breeze.  Everything mild, nothing harsh, nothing hurried. The morning milk market  Is already gone, without trace Except for blue crates. Men on cycles ride by. I think, men who ride cycles are the first to wake up on Sunday. Autorikshaws are out. The man on the bike, looks bothways at the turn, confused, and then rides straight. The sun has laid its hammock over the trees and the morning languorous and glorious, lies in it. The newspaper lies neglected on the terrace.  A man with long tattoos on his arms walks in from the lane in the front. He is wearing a strange kind of pants. Sardarji follows him on a bike, his turban vibrant as his face his. Someone shouts in the cycle shop. Human voices still stru

" Every Parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of resurrection" so said the great philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer . A journey filled with tearful departures- a string of them, begun from the engineering college, NIT Raipur, where I spent a great part of foundation on which my later life was to stand was made. That was the place where to put it poetically, we turned from tadpole to the butterfly, and to put it plainly, we turned from boys to men. This 13th, September, we had a reunion.  It was in Bhopal, for two reasons- one was logistical connectivity and secondly, the city somehow had the most enthusiastic lot, the lot which could protect their enthusiasm through the years of growing up and growing old. I wanted to go and was inclined but some I spoke to weren't much. Why should I go? who was I to meet?   Is this whole exercise is to meet balding, graying men with slight paunch, like me, struggling to establish their own station in life and on some