Skip to main content

Words are Ghosts


Words lost their souls and turned into ghosts
            that haunted the pulpits and public places.
The King is a great orator who conjures up
            paradises of soulless words and gimmicks.

Verbal ghosts are hungry for blood
            that was shed in the dark alleys of bygone days.
They travel on witches’ brooms between
            Rama’s Treta yuga and the Mahatma’s Kali yuga,
Their forked tongues spitting poison
            presumed as nectar by fortune-seekers,
            the sexless witches impotent to make love.

They make war,
They make places of worship,
Where the gods are always hungry,
            creatures of infinite hunger,
            they swallow love and truth;
They are gods of words,
            words turned ghosts,
                        ghosts that haunt a nation.








Comments

  1. Anita SabatJanuary 31, 2015 at 12:40 PM

    Hope we make better use of words. So that we have friendly ghosts to better our nation :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 31, 2015 at 6:47 PM

      A better nation can be created with words provided the speaker has a vision.:)

      Delete
  2. MeenalSonalJanuary 31, 2015 at 2:14 PM

    Words used in proper way can avoid swords. Thanks for sharing a word on words :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 31, 2015 at 6:48 PM

      Words are the tools of the human species. Civilised if

      Delete
  3. UnknownJanuary 31, 2015 at 11:34 PM

    These days words haunt me the most. Words have gone diabolic in today's world. They can kill.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 1, 2015 at 7:45 AM

      Words can heal too. My dream is for that India which Tagore described: "where words come from the depth of the heart."

      Delete
    2. UnknownFebruary 1, 2015 at 8:52 AM

      People from my generation (mostly) speak some random rubbish all the time. They speak I don't know what and why. Sometimes,I get a headache. If people are getting to these levels I don't know when Tagore's words would get realized.

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 1, 2015 at 12:28 PM

      I understand that, Namrata. I'm sometimes shocked by the behaviour of some of my own students: more by the arrogance than the ignorance.

      Delete
  4. KalpanaFebruary 1, 2015 at 12:01 AM

    I like the lines 'Verbal ghosts are hungry for blood' best.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 1, 2015 at 7:47 AM

      Ignorance fed by our leaders coupled with instinctive hatred is the cause of bloodthirst.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...
10 comments
Read more

Taliban and India

Illustration by Copilot Designer Two things happened on 14 Oct 2025. One: India rolled out the red carpet for an Afghan delegation led by the Taliban Administration’s Foreign Minister. Two: a young man was forced to wash the feet of a Brahmin and drink that water. This happened in Madhya Pradesh, not too far from where the Taliban leaders were being given regal reception in tune with India’s philosophy of Atithi Devo Bhava (Guest is God). Afghanistan’s Taliban and India’s RSS (which shaped Modi’s thinking) have much in common. The former seeks to build a state based on its interpretation of Islamic law aiming for a society governed by strict religious codes. The RSS promotes Hindutva, the idea of India as primarily a Hindu nation, where Hindu values form the cultural and political foundation. Both fuse religious identity with national identity, marginalising those who don’t fit their vision of the nation. The man who was made to wash a Brahmin’s feet and drink that water in Madh...
22 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more