Just a little something

Let me write a little something
For old time's sake:a couple of
words, lines, a few mistakes.


It is noon and my mind says,
Listen, it is not the time for poetry
Or any of your ridiculous ideas.


But then the heart insists and
I must sin again, here on this
e-space which neither looks


nor feels like paper. For once
I am composing straight instead
of bothering with books and paper,


the creed of ball pens and HB pencils.
Goodbye to those tools of the past!
Now i am modern and i can feel


the e-heat in me. How many likes
will i get, i wonder, how many will
tweet about me, my words?


How many netizens will let these
words float through their eyes
before their brains wander off


into another dream? The statistics daunt
me, i write for my audience
but no one cheers. But then,


we poets live and die in silence,
though not the silence of the lambs
but the sharp silence of protest.


Maybe i should stop, methinks

i have written too much crap.
Goodbye dear keyboard, for a while.

The Vacuum shaped like You

You are gone and now all i have
to caress is the vacuum.

Thanks to physics i know
that a vacuum is never really empty
But things keep popping in and out,
Small things like atoms, electrons,
and sometimes big things,
like universes and universities.

I know the chances are small,
(i did take a probability course once)
but i keep hoping that one day
from that vacuum you left behind,
You will pop up again
And surprise me.

The Length of my Penis and other concerns

Of late I have been getting a spam mail that promises to increase the length of my penis by four inches. Now I never asked for this in the first place. One must learn to be satisfied with what one has.:-) But the mail comes again and again, alongwith another one about a 25% discount on Viagra. These are, I guess indicative of my demographic. Indian males of my age who have little ( read no ) sexual activity have all these crazy things to worry about. Of course, size is a major male concern across the world, irrespective of country. Of late, the advent of the internet and internet porn has further heightened this. The well endowed gentlemen who appear in this branch of the fine arts often are too well endowed, much to the chagrin of many of the viewers.

Why all this fuss? Penis length, for some, symbolises virility and ultimate maleness. For them, the more of a snake that you have in your trousers, the more of a man you are. However, this is quite a recent phenomenon. In the classical age, in Europe, smaller genitals were considered to be better. One only needs to look at the multitude of statues in marble and stone to study the disproportionately small genitalia of the subjects. Michelangelo's David, for instance. Large frontal parts were considered unrefined and animal. Of late, however, we have returned to and accepted our animal roots. :-)

The word penis is another curiosity. In its Latin root it simply means tail. It started off as a euphemism, a substitute for a word that people were too uncomfortable saying aloud. What the original word was, no one knows. But then, how many people know that? The substitute is now as good as the word - or rather, it is the word.

So why did I write this piece? Three reasons:
1. The mails were so irritating that i wanted to scream.
2. Just for fun, for shocking friends.
3. I just wanted to see how many hits Google will bring me after this. i.e, a short social experiment.

Adios.

Love Song

I wait till i reach a state from which there is no escape but to write.


You are white, so are
your clothes.
But your hair is black.
At your age, it seems alright.
It smells of oil and shampoo
And essence of vanilla
and then there is some other scent
i cannot fix, but takes me
twenty years back, memories
of a destroyed land where
there was a well with ferns and mossy rock,
big buffaloes, large lizards
and birds and frogs and flies.

To Wilhelm on his 447th Birthday

Shall I borrow thy line, William?
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

William Shakespeare died on April 23,1616. But no one knows for sure when he was born, because the only record that we have is of his baptism, which makes no mention of the day of birth.Nevertheless, many people(mostly conspiracy theorists like myself), like to believe that he was born on the 23rd of April, because it gives a poetic roundedness to the life of the Bard.

Below is 'Friends,Romans, Countrymen' from Julius Caesar(1953) rendered by Marlon Brando as Mark Antony. After hearing this for the first time I realized how Shakespeare must have wanted it to be said. Quite unlike what people used to do in school in Declamation competitions - all they could manage was melodrama. But this, this is real Drama!

Everytime he says Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend me your ears, I get goosebumps.

Shakespeare is to be watched, not read.

Against the grain

An alternate look at the whole Anna Hazare episode.

http://kafila.org/2011/04/09/at-the-risk-of-heresy-why-i-am-not-celebrating-with-anna-hazare/

Changes in our Times

Change is here. It is here, there, everywhere.

Little did I know that I would live(indeed, a long word) to see a revolution of the people. But my thesis was flawed. What happened in Tunisia, what happens in Egypt? People have come forth and raised their voice, and towers have come down shattering. Such change is awe inspiring, it is thrilling.