Skip to main content

The Love Song of the Prime Sevak



Let us go then, you and I,
When the country is gasping for breath
Like a patient who has been given the extreme unction;
Let us go, to Kedarnath and Badrinath,
The muttering retreats
Of restless souls who have reached their wit’s end
And comic costumes guarded by a royal retinue:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of my sincerest intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the yards Pappus come and go
Talking of Sickularism.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the Mandikini,
The saffron that shrouds me as I withdraw to the cave,
Camera flashes lick up images for Twitter and Facebook,
And all other media that stand in drains.

Wait, wait, there will be time
For the yellow fog and saffron shroud to envelop you,
Rubbing their backs upon your pygmy chests;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that I choose to don;
There will be time to assault and lynch,
And time for the works of rashtra-building,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the next surgical strike.

No! I am not Prince Dynast, nor was meant to be;
Am your Prime Sevak, one that will do
To swell a rally, start a scene or two,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous –
And ready to wear the motley, at times.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the saffron closer to my 56 inch breast.

I have set yogis and sadhvis riding to thrones
I have put strategists in places that matter
We have lingered in the chambers of history too long
Now march we shall, march to the glory of our ancient civilisation
Till all human voices die on our way, and they sink.

PS. With due apology to T. S. Eliot for spoofing his Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock


Comments

  1. Dude! You've got some serious talent.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Of late, the talent is shining better thanks to our leaders.

      Delete
  2. That's a perfect spoof Sir ! A genuine devotee does not need camera flashes and need not circulate (carefully posed) photographs of his 'DHYAAN'.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. How degraded this man is! He has made a mockery of the Prime Seat in the country too.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived

Octavian the Guru

Octavian was one of my students in college. Being a student of English literature, he had reasons to establish a personal rapport with me. It took me months to realise that the rapport was fake. He was playing a role for the sake of Rev Machiavelli . Octavian was about 20 years old and I was nearly double his age. Yet he could deceive me too easily. The plain truth is that anyone can deceive me as easily even today. I haven’t learnt certain basic lessons of life. Sheer inability. Some people are like that. Levin would say that my egomania and the concomitant hubris prevented my learning of the essential lessons of life. That would have been true in those days when Octavian took me for a farcical ride. By the time that ride was over, I had learnt at least one thing: that my ego was pulped. More than 20 years have passed after that and I haven’t still learnt to manage affairs in the world of people. That’s why I admit my sheer inability to learn some fundamental lessons of life. Th