Looking out of LH 426's window

The sea of white clouds
the snaking river on orange-brown silt
within the sea of trees
The sea itself
The snow-white earth-black mountains
the snow crystals all crazed
on the window
The wing and the sun and the blue sky
betraying nothing.

There's so much beauty on any side of us,
that you can keep writing and writing,
and buying refills and beautiful fountain pens,
and singing songs, and making movies,
till the audience is bored so much that
it gives purpose to boredom
and still
you can keep writing and writing

till your bones grind down in the process
and that will also be beautifully poetic
like love

Accomplished Fugitives

Flow through Crowds. / Surety of Knowing. / (Like Carbon on Cellulose.) / Baby accomplishes Blindness. / Grown-ups help. / Escape the Fearful. / To the Wonderful then / In the Accomplished Fugitive. / Celebrate precedes Elevate.


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PS : We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within… By middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.

- John W. Gardner

Slaves of Ego - I Nagarjuna and Taking Offence

You can never see or tell what goes on behind a pair of eyes. Even after beers or any substance that claims to chill them down. Even when you are discussing philosophy of life or meaning of existence, topics that are supposed to bring out the best. (Perhaps it was mixing of the two - beers and philosophy - that is to be blamed.) Wonder how Nagarjuna would have reacted to his detractors. A pair of eyes landed on his book of philosophy centuries after his time, and made gentle fun of the "deep-sounding"ness of some random statement in it without analyzing too much. Very cheeky since Nagarjuna was not there to make fun back, in the right spirit of course. To this the other pair of eyes, till then distracted by other things, to this said fiercely, "Nagarjuna is the one of the greatest philosophers there is !" They took offence at Nagarjuna being made fun of, the first pair supposed. What did the second pair really see ? Or was it blinded by the knowledge of knowledge ?

"Deep-sounding"ness has a seductive charm of its own. Thankfully """deep-sounding"ness"" has nothing going for it sonically.

Sermon on Selfish Tears and Pity

I shed tears for the world and its hapless children
when I am starving for affection
and love ....

Rumi or Iqbal said,
"In presence of Beauty is Liberation"
(Independent of sad or content ....)

The Megalopolis

.... is where you can die in full anonymity
if you so desire
do not worry
the horns, headlights and headphones
will drown out,
tall pretty photos in shopping malls
will hide your deathly silence,
even if you are committed to a communal death
as an anonymous part of a small crowd
say in an average chawl on fire,
even if you are the poor white tiger
that comes once in hundred generations.

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Tribute to Krishen Khanna's The Dead and the Dying

Let the Painter immortalize you then
while you are dead and rising with a shroud covering your eyes,
or while you in death watch the dying
perhaps playing cards (play the game)
from a weird angle, God's mad pastime.

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For 9/11 and Iraq victims :

(Consider not dying with a big crowd in tall buildings,
who knows your desire for a too anonymous death
turns out to be the weirdest starting point
for killing the wishes of good family people
to die in peace, among friends, not in full anonymity,
if you care that is
for all the pedantic brouhaha about people-power democracy,
globalized disconnectedness, universal connectedness, etc.)




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2/jul/14, Mumbai

PS : Krishen Khanna's The Dead and the Dying, and shout-out for Arvind Adiga's White Tiger