Skip to main content

Picaresque

 And then as always, suddenly, I would feel like the city is out to kill me. Its horns assault my senses, its garbage and incivility grates me. As I run towards fifty (age), the glitter and the shine of large urban clusters start looking more like monoliths of enslavement. I feel that Indian cities enslave the human soul and convert us into automatons. Shorn of kindness and joy and art and village greens, we become tools for the relentless advancement of its chaos. As I see it, only the city lives and thrives and we simply die. We die slowly, in sectors and crossings of our being.

And then, as always, I packed my bags and went on a road journey. All 37 days of it.

Back to the city, the clinical anomie of it all waxes and wanes and continues unabated. Nothing changes. The same set of dirt poor migrants walk back home in the evenings to their shanties, with their infants and their belongings on their heads. A BMW 7 series sounds its horns as it zooms past on the same road to paradiso. The place where the Gods live and the poor come to die.

 








Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Long Winter Chill

If I could do a Neruda, You would have smelt of summer roses And Autumn pine. There would have been sheer love Of the kind that causes our hearts to ache And loneliness bordering the divine. You would have had so many secrets Welling up as in a girly giggle And so few friends who would hear them all. I am no Neruda I can't paint you a Summer breeze Amidst this long winter chill.
13 comments
Read more

Castles in sand under the weeping willows

I know I have been busy I have been busy digging Little pits in shifting sands By a choppy sea, and waiting For my little dreams To form puddles in my living And slowly watch its walls collapse Into itself Water to Water Sand and all Amidst the roaring of the waves And the silences Of the droopy willows Crying In the falling rain
Post a Comment
Read more

Travelers All

Not all days are the same. There are those nameless faceless ones that are born out of ennui and quickly fly into oblivion. Nothing good comes from them. All they do is burn rubber. They don't take us closer to our destination. Then there are those days when the skies open up. There is an earth scattering screech, the kind you know will give way to a loud bang. Scarred for life you limp along, again. Crying over those who died and hurting for those who refused to ride with you again, you ride, for this is the only option you have known. And then there are those rare rare fairytale days. The ones that starts off without a cause but go on to transform themselves into days of momentous impact. These are those days that leave behind magical memories. That feeble hint of a smile amidst deep furrows of pain are from days as these. Travelers in time that we are, let's pray for short burst of sunshine and a fair share of fairy tale days.
9 comments
Read more