Poetriture

She was giddy with happiness when she held to open the gift. The black ribbons came off as if made of woven air and slipped into nothingness when she pulled them. She loved these gifts from her lover.  She sat down and put the gift on the ground. She wanted to savour the moment as long as she could. She almost cursed the dual nature of wanting to prolong this feeling and also for the climax to come.  She quickly breathe a few and closed her eyes as if saying a prayer before opening it. She held the gift in her delicate hands and opened her eyes with it.  It was a wolf pup. The cutest little baby who was pink at his nose with not even the eyelids completely open yet. It made a yelp noise as it tumbled inside the box clumsily. It rubbed its snout on the inside of the box looking for milk, but none came. After a while it got silent as went to sleep. She was dizzy with happiness. It was perfect gift she could have got. She absolutely loved it. Ev...

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 ...

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...

आज, 68 साल से लोह पुरुष की अनुपस्थिति, के बावजूद भी उनकी उपस्थिति सच्चे भारतीयों के हृदय में अनुभव होती है. हमारा निराला भारत, जब अंग्रेज छोड़ कर गए तब ऐसी परिस्थिति में था कि मानो किसी ने गोलियों से छलनी कर दिया हो. 562 अलग रजवाड़े, सभी स्वतंत्र होना चाहते थे भारत से, और ऐसी परिस्थिति को सुधारने का बृहतकाय काम केवल एक ही पुरुष को दिया जा सकता था. एक उच्च कोटि के वकील, अति प्रभावी वक्ता, लोह सी इच्छाशक्ति रखने वाले और भारत माता के सबसे समर्पित पुत्र, श्री सरदार वल्लभभाई पटेल, को दिया गया. उन्हे निर्णायक कहा जाता हैं. उनके बारे में केवल पढ़ने से भी उनके लिए सम्मान जागता है. उनके चतुर विचारो और शीघ्र समय में निर्णय लेने की क्षमता के कारण जोधपुर के महाराजा हनवंत, मोहम्मद अली जिन्ना के पाकिस्तान में जुड़ने के ब्लैंक चेक को मना कर सके. वे समझौता करने की कला में इतने निपुण थे कि उन्होने उस राज्य के लोगो को आनेवाला सालो के अत्याचारों से बचा लिया जो पाकिस्तान आज तक पाकिस्तानी हिंदुओं के साथ करता आया है. ऐसीही निपुणता उनकी लोक प्रशासन में भी प्रदर्शित हुई जब वे जूनागढ़ को पाकिस्तान के चं...

Today, even after 68 years of absence of The Iron Man of Bharat, his presence is still felt in the hearts of true Indians. Our wonderful country, when left by the British, was in such a state, that if looked at the map of India, it would look as if someone had shot my India with a machine gun. 562 different states, were all expecting dominion status from Bharat when the British left, and the herculean task of unifying all of them was given to the only man, who could have possibly done it. It was given to an impeccable lawyer, excellent orator, iron willed statesman and the most devoted son of Bharat, Shri. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. He was called the Man of Action, and the Man of Decision. Just by reading about him, we feel proud for him. His quick thinking, and decisions regarding intregration of Jodhpur, made the Maharaja Hanvant Singh to forego the "blank cheque" offer of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, to secede it into Pakistan. The negotiational skills of Sardarji were so p...

Stop glorifying Ravan into a hero. He is not a hero, he is not a victim. He is not a person vs God figure. That self-important fiend was a villain, more cruel than Hitler. Raavan killed numerous innocent people just because he could, to test his might. He spilled urine into yagna kunds and killed the poojaris, he killed the yogis who never hurt a single creature. The egocentric fanatic also broke down so many temples. He raped so many girls and women, unmarried, married, widowed, everyone. He killed children in front of their parents, he killed parents in front of children. He was no hero. He was a sick and egomaniacal monster, who had become so narcissistic towards the end of his life, that he could not even see himself igniting his own funeral pyre. The usual arguments against all this is that he was a yogi, sanyasi, or whatever the word the person chooses to diefy him. He was a brilliant learner, a good astronomy student, and he did refine a few laws in Lanka and in his ini...

"When we think we know, we cease to learn." this idiom is said by a 16 times Nobel Prize nominee for literature, and 11 times Nobel Prize nominee for peace, along with being awarded Bharat Ratna, and a knighthood, holding the title of ex-president, and the first Vice-President of India, Dr. Radhakrishnan Sarvepalli. The westerners awarded Dr. Sarvepalli, because he criticized their philosophy, and did so with so much artistry and proficiency that he was one of the first person viewed from the East, as an authority on the Western philosophy. Though he studied in an evangelical Convent, he was a Hindu to his core. And it was his core beilefs that made him question and subsequently answer the profound questions raised by the Hindu theology, undertaken by him. He could easily breakdown any form of a critique on Hindu, which was a spectacle in his time. He reverted the western thinking, that Hinduism was superstitious and narcissistic, by showing them that their own philosoph...

When you read the letters on a page, you don't find meaning in the individual letters, but in the collection of letters called words. So dissecting a word to find its meaning may seem obtrusive to our aim. The meaning of the letters has now transcended into the words. So now, even if you know the individual letters, you still need to know the meaning of the word as a whole to understand it. This is understood by the society. As this society and culture is the transcendence of meaning from individuals, to a bigger whole. A collective meaning higher than the sum of its individual parts. Similarly an individual, has a bigger meaning than its individual organs, because now are not simply the assembly of organs, but we are also the interactions between them, and it's the personification of those interactions, which is you. Or if we continue on this path, we may reach atoms. Individual atoms, having zero meaning on its own. But when put together, they can study themselves i...

The emptiness that we feel in our lives, the ebb and flow of temporary satisfaction that we get from our routine, and the conformationally biased understanding of reality all propose the same thing that we do not know anything for real. The constant mugging up of the facts, is not even information in its definitive sense. That is just data, unprocessed, meaningless, raw data. The human brain is a far better judge of this concept. We tend to realize this fact, quite early, during our student years, that we don't even know the reason why we are studying the things that, we are studying. We just fall in like sheep, while consciously being painfully aware of our 'sheepness', and still follow a specific protocol of actions, this flawed society has imposed upon us. We are far better than this, and we have had proofs of it. People letting go of conventional education turning out to be absolute masterpieces of their time. They made this world a better place than when they f...

When we observe the definition of a monster, different dictionaries give different definitions, but they all circle around a few specific words. Huge, ugly, evil, imaginary, angry and troublesome, are the adjectives commonly used to describe them. Also, when we take up the quest of searching where these monsters are found, they are found everywhere, i.e: monster of the seas, monster of the forest, etc. These examples, are enough to conjure up very vivid descriptions of monsters, though different for each of us, will all be in similar veins. But when that gaze is directed inwards, we also find some of it inside us. Anger, greed, lust, and so on. So we ultimately infer that monsters dwell in each and everyone of us. We are all capable of being bad. And not just plain old bad, we are capable of being absolutely inhumane, cruel and evil. History has enough examples of that. The monsters existing in each one of us, is the reflection of what is the worst that we can become. When small c...

We can easily imagine nature to be a detached, cold entity. It does not concern itself with the lives of so many that thrive in it. A sudden earthquake and a million lives lost, all to be seen blankly by the cold eyes of Nature. Important personalities, villages, humongous cities all turning to dust. A few good cultures survive for some time, then even they crumble before the strength of time. This is one species, entire kingdoms fall, none can be said to be permanent. All this is seen by the nature to be a mere passing of a flock of pigeons to us. From this one infers that, the nature is a disinterested power, merely waiting for all the life to end. And not just life, all things to end. The only constant entity that exists from the beginning of the universe. It sits there, observing without interfering the mechanisms of the growth of grass, flap of wings of birds, to the explosions of supernovae. None seem to stimulate a reply from the nature. There seems no way from which we ...