Skip to main content

Rhapsody on a Delhi Road

Source: Reuters


A winter morning.
Sentiments burn the road awoken by the gentle sun,
The cathedral spires poking the heaven behind.

What have you lost that you cry for?
The King was reciting the Bhagavad Gita
Ensconced on the throne of Indraprastha.
What belongs to you today,
belonged to someone yesterday
and will be someone else’s tomorrow.

The beggars’ kids in tatters
With bones gnawed by the fangs of winter
Nagged the developed citizens in cars at the lal batti
With roses, teddy bears, airplane models,
All made in India with Make in India’s plastic.

Whose India is it?  Wondered the journo
As the King’s police arrived in vans
And heckled people who claimed insecurity
Not being the King’s own clans.

Children bearing placards shouted slogans whose
Meanings or future courses were drowned in winter haze.
The present, the present is what is yours,
Whether you be King on the throne, or beggar on the street,
Or a citizen seeking the security of his God.

Whose India is it?  Wondered the knife
That lurked in the street’s bend
Ready to proffer the relevant twist
At the right time, in the present time.


Labels:

Comments

  1. KalpanaFebruary 6, 2015 at 11:26 AM

    Wow! I didn't know you were a poet. Very profound and well written. And now, on a different note - hope you will attend the blogger meet I'm organising on 13th Feb at 6.30 pm in Delhi. Details on my blog.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 7, 2015 at 7:33 AM

      Thanks, Kalpanaa, for the appreciation as well as the invitation. I' m sorry I'm not free on Fri.

      Delete
  2. AdminFebruary 7, 2015 at 11:54 AM

    Very nice !!

    ReplyDelete

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

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

The Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...
6 comments
Read more

The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan . The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisat...
12 comments
Read more

No Problems Only Opportunities

You’ve probably heard this joke. A young man walked into his office one morning and found a beautiful young lady sitting in his chair. He called the MD and said, “Sir, I have a problem.” The MD replied, “Don’t you know our company’s motto, young man? No Problems, Only Opportunities .” When Suchita of The Blogchatter sent me a mail with the topic of this week’s blog hop –  - the first thing that came to my mind was the above joke. I know many people – too many, in fact – who went through terrible problems. My own life was a series of problems in none of which was there the consolation of any beautiful woman. One essential lesson I learnt from life is that life is a series of problems. You solve one and then arises the next one. Now I have reached an age when problems are no more problems: they are life itself. If you ask me what was the biggest problem I ever dealt with, it was my last years in Shillong. I was a lecturer in a college drawing a fat salary stipulated by the U...
13 comments
Read more