Poetriture

The function was as good as any. All family and friends dressed in their best, flaunting the wrong amount of wealth they carried on their necks. The bride looked beautiful, as royal as a queen. But she was beautiful for someone else, and wasn't my type anyway. My eyes were locked on someone else. Someone, who was far more numinous. My friends had already retired to the dinner, I was finally alone and I wouldn't have to come up with reasons for looking in a particular direction. Peace, at last. Now I could see her in her beautiful red dress. She looked like a rose. She was not looking at me though. Earlier I thought that it was a good thing, I wouldn't have to stray away my eyes for a chance of contact. But she was not looking at me even when I stood in front of her. Something was wrong. I followed her over the huge fest. She was looking for someone. Someone who wasn't there for her, while I was. She wouldn't even look at me. But my God, was she beautiful! It ...

When we say that India is a great country, we say that in a sense that not only is the size of the country great, which it is, and not even describing the huge variety of landscapes, which we also have, but rather the huge amount of lines on which there is work to be done, the huge amount of people whose welfare is to be seen, the huge amount of brainpower required and is available for the same in the vibrancy and vividness of a gigantic talkative democracy. I invite you to look up a word in the English dictionary called ‘sonder’. It essentially means that every individual we see around us, or the ones we don’t see all have as complex a character and life as we have. Democracy is one of the few government systems which try to uphold this unachievable ideal, most other forms mostly reduce the people mere statistic or workforce.   When the sonder is applied to family, we can grasp it, but when the line of sight is compounded to include the entire nation, the concept just flies o...

Today, in the fury of reading everything there is to know about ISRO, I was struck by a very righteous question and subsequently got hit by the right answer. At the very least I feel that it is right. Also watching the movie “First Man” didn’t hurt either. I learned about the various missions we have undertook and how after facing extreme peril won over them, or won them over. I learned about the feelings of the entire nation after the “95%” success of Chandrayaan 2 as I too was in the flood of feelings when at 2.1 km above the surface of Luna, we lost our Vikram and Pragyan. The constant efforts to establish communications with it will continue till 21/9/2019 after which its lifespan will end. To the curious, that will be because of very little heat protection, the sun will literally fry the wiring in the instruments, rendering it obsolete. After that, as everyone says, we shall move on. We have come a long way from INCOSPAR in 1962, and since the formation of ISRO in 1969, ex...

I was once told that I should not define a teacher as, first of all, we all have an intrinsic sense of what a teacher is and secondly, more importantly, “Who are you to define a teacher, let alone your teacher?” I was told that it was demeaning and misguided, though being well intentioned. So, what I had decided to do was to describe what my teachers have been to me. They were never infallible heroes in capes, or magicians who waved their wands and put stuff into my mind. Even though there have been such people who held the post of my teacher, but were extremely unsuccessful in teaching me a single word. But I don’t consider them my teachers, anyway. They were just people, who could not teach. I might have been a tough student, to them, but I was never afraid to ask questions. I never felt silly or stupid to ask a question on fundamentals, in advanced classes, and such “teachers” never left a chance for me to not feel ashamed of myself. But that is where my teachers shined. They t...

It was just a normal morning stroll. It is the month of August as I write this, right in the center of the months of monsoon. The winds were certainly, particularly volatile that day as all the trees near my house were violently swaying. Dark clouds, all ready to pour down on my little village were curling from the winds. It had rained heavily moments ago, so the ground was wet and the road to the beach, slick. I had unwillingly woken up quite early in the morning, even before the break of dawn, with vain efforts of going back to sleep. After being couped up in the house, behind closed windows, it felt really nice to witness the rain and the subsequent wet atmosphere. My father had also got up, but unlike me he had woken up out of habit. I told him I was going to the beach for a walk. He was busy with whatever he was doing so he just smiled at me. I knew it would rain soon enough. Secretly hoping to get wet, I kept my phone at home. I wore my slippers and ventured into the strong...

Recently, I was having a discussion on this very topic with a dear friend of mine. It was on how it seemed cool to denigrate our culture, our values just for the sake of a few laughs, and that got me thinking how an empty rebellion, with no thought under it, was being flaked as it attracted scores of people behind it. Why did it feel cool to be an atheist? That answer is easy, it just means that you have at least thought about it. You are not sheep following traditions just for the sake of it. You take a scientific temperament or a template rather and apply it to the rituals and the stories told to you by your family. But this is a dangerous phenomenon, because once Occam's Razor is applied to thousands of years old history, it seems impossible to reconcile it with the mindset of today. What is so dangerous in that, you might ask? We'll get to that later, but keep that in mind that, once a framework of not just 'how to act' is replaced by 'what the world is...