Skip to main content

My car has no headlight


Chasing the headlight you drive the car
With single-minded determination to the destination.
You are in a hurry. Hurry!
There’s a whole world to be conquered.
The highway is as alluring as the holy grail.
Highway is a mark of development.
Development is the key to happiness.

In the undeveloped underbrush
In the darkness on either side
Lie mysteries sighing mantras of bliss
Fairies and dryads beckon
Unheeded
Rivers and mountains sing songs of beatitude
Beside the highway

Highways are full of light.
Dazzling light.
The world stands bathed in brilliance.

I embrace the magic of darkness
Away, away from the highway
Far away from the brilliance of your lights.

PS. Inspired by Indiblogger Edition 164


Comments

  1. Nice metaphors - highways, holy grail.....

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am afraid of missing out on things that lie on both the parts of the world. The highway for the societal pressure (pleasure?) and the starry nights for self contentment. Afraid of getting stuck at the middle of the road vying for both yet afraid of choosing one over the other.

    A beautiful poem. Hopefully someday I will get the much needed clarity to start my blog afresh.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Clarity is a difficult thing to achieve, I think. Better to move on and clarity will descend in its own time.

      Some people just don't fit in on the highway. They have to find their own way which will be much better.

      Delete
  3. "Development is the key to happiness". We are where we are because of development or lack of it. Human development is also development. Is it not unwise to expect human development when basic physical development is not provided?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. When it comes to poetry, there's only understanding or no understanding. No questions 😁

      Delete
  4. nice article
    visit our website : http://swamidevidyal.ac.in/b-pharmacy.aspx

    ReplyDelete
  5. Car Mirror Power Non-Heated in USA
    ackauto.com offers Car Mirrors in USA, Car Mirror Power Heated in USA, Car Mirror Power Non-Heated in USA, Car Mirror Driver & Passenger Side in USA.

    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

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...

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...

Goodbye, Little Ones

They were born under my care, tiny throbs of life, eyes still shut to the world. They grew up under my constant care. I changed their bed and the sheets regularly making sure they were always warm and comfortable. When one of them didn’t open her eyes after a fortnight of her birth, I rang up my cousin who is a vet and got the appropriate prescription that gave her the light of day in just two days. I watched each one of them stumble through their first steps. Today they were adopted. I personally took them to their new home, a tiny house of a family that belongs to the class that India calls BPL [Below Poverty Line]. I didn’t know them at all until I stopped my car a little away from their small house, at the nearest spot my car could possibly reach. They lived in another village altogether, some 15 km from mine. Sometimes 15 km can make a world of difference. A man who looked as old as me had come to my house in the late afternoon. “I’d like to adopt your kittens,” he said. He...

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...