Scratching

I just wanted to scratch
And leave a mark;
But now I am depressed
Thinking of transience, mortality
and the like. Words can kill
I knew, but did not believe.

Picture Victure

  

Sometimes I just want to fly

Away from the clouds, into the sky;

Fall free and cold and naked....

There is something about grayscale pictures, I always think of them as being slightly cold to the touch, just as I imagine the moon is: made of something soft, cold and white.

 

A little picture of Kathakali, that deadly ( but not so dead) piece of feudal art, where men are of  five different types, but women of just one. And of course, all enacted by middle aged men of varying degrees of plumpness.

 

Yet somehow the colours of the art form still turn me on, make me want to draw in paper and on walls. Above is depicted a call to war ( പോരിനു വിളി in Malayalam)by a villainous ചുവന്ന താടി (a.k.a red beard) character.

Remembering Vivekananda: the Right way (a.k.a Quotable Quotes from Vivekananda)

We all remember Vivekananda as the arise, awake, stop not till the goal is reached man. So I was surprised, a bit (too) unpleasantly, when I discovered some his not so well known words and thoughts.The revelation was shocking, and made me wonder about all the Vivekananda adoration that goes on in this country, especially among middle class Hindus. What amazes me is the process of creation of icons, which whitewashes their lives to create a veneer of respectability and acceptability. Here are a few quotable quotes from Narendranath Dutt a.k.a Swami Vivekananda.

1. On race
"The Hindus believe--that is a peculiar belief, I think; and I do not know, I have nothing to say to the contrary, I have not found anything to the contrary--they believe there was only one civilised race: the Aryan. Until he gives his blood, no other race can be civilised. No teaching will do. The Aryan gives his blood to a race, and then it becomes civilised. Teaching alone will not do. He would be an example in your country: would you give your blood to the Negro race? Then he would get higher culture." (on February 2, 1900 at the Shakespeare Club, in Pasadena, California)


2.On the differences between man and woman
"Now, you see, a woman never drinks wine or eats meat. It was a hardship on us when we were students, but not on the girls." (Delivered at the Shakespeare Club House, in Pasadena, California, on January 18, 1900)


3.On the hardships faced by lower castes
"In India, even the lowest caste never does any hard work. They generally have an easy lot compared to the same class in other nations; and as to ploughing, they never do it."(Delivered at the Shakespeare Club House, in Pasadena, California, on January 18, 1900)


4.On the institution of caste
"The older I grow, the better I seem to think of caste and such other time-honored institutions of India." (from "Swami Vivekananda on India and Her Problems")


5.On the duties of a wife
"Even I, who never married, belonging to an Order that never marries, would be disgusted if my wife, supposing I had married, dared to displease my mother. I would be disgusted."(Delivered at the Shakespeare Club House, in Pasadena, California, on January 18, 1900)


6.On widow burning in India
Vivekananda denied that people burned widows. It was true, however, that widows had burned themselves. In the few cases where this had happened, they had been urged not to do so by holy men, who were always opposed to suicide. Where the devoted widows insisted, stating that they desired to accompany their husbands in the transformation that had taken place, they were obliged to submit themselves to the fiery tests. That is, they thrust Her hands within the flames, and if they permitted them to be consumed, no further opposition was placed in the way of the fulfilment of their desires.(from a report of a lecture at Detroit, United States, in the  Boston Evening Transcript, 5th April, 1894)


8. Caste again
"To the non-Brahmana castes I say, wait, be not in a hurry. Do not seize every opportunity of fighting the Brahmana, because as I have shown; you are suffering from your own fault. Who told you to neglect spirituality and Sanskrit learning?"( excerpted from "Swami Vivekananda on India and her problems")


7.On slavery
"The history of the world teaches us that wherever there have been fanatical reforms, the only result has been that they have defeated their ends. No greater upheaval for the establishment of right and liberty can be imagined than the war for the abolition of slavery in America. You all know about it. And what has been its results? The slaves are a hundred times worse off today than they were before the abolition.
Before the abolition, these poor negroes were the property of somebody, and, as properties, they had to be looked after, so that they might not deteriorate. Today they are the property of nobody. Their lives are of no value; they are burnt alive on mere pretences. They are shot down without any law for their murderers; for they are niggers, they are not human beings, they are not even animals"(Complete Works, Vol.3)

What a load of bullshit has this man said!
How come we all think of him the way we think of him? Beats me.

And a shame it is that his birthday is national youth day. Whatever that is.

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.