Skip to main content

Three Poems

Illustration by Copilot Designer


1.     Anachronism

Ekalavya is eager to learn

Unlike his contemporaries

Who are buried in digital graves.

 

‘What’s anachronism?’ He queries.

‘Anachronism is,’ says Bharadvaja,

He pauses, muses, and pronounces:

‘Sita Devi’s chastity was questioned

By a barber named Al Ansari bin Laden,

According to the latest grave-digging

Of Archaeological Survey of India.’

 

 

2.     Exorcist

 

History textbooks are haunted by the ghosts

Of Akbar and Babur and Gandhi and Nehru.

So the Prime Minister decides to become

The Exorcist of the nation

In order to save Ekalavyas

From graves that refuse to be

Closed by sward shroud.

 

 

3.     Redemption

 

Ekalavya opens his new history textbook.

Words look like petrifying ghosts

That want blood, Ekalavya’s blood.

So he chooses to leave his country

And settle down in Trudeau’s Canada.

At least.



PS. 2024 was a year in which I didn't write any poem at all. That realisation made me feel sad. Is poetry dying within me? That's why I decided to write these lines... I don't know if there's poetry in them. You decide. 

Comments

  1. AmbicaDecember 29, 2024 at 11:42 AM

    I'm surprised they haven't caught on to you! Exorcist indeed, let's create a new country, why migrate :D

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 29, 2024 at 7:04 PM

      I'm not migrating, Ambica. My students are. I think the youngsters have understood that they have no reason for hope here.

      Delete
  2. sathishDecember 29, 2024 at 3:18 PM

    I liked the answer for Anachronism.. Oh btw, I read Al as AI (artificial intelligence) !!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yamini MacLeanDecember 29, 2024 at 3:23 PM

    Hari OM
    Anarchic poetry requires no rules... 😉 YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  4. Liz A.December 30, 2024 at 4:00 AM

    Poetry only dies within you if you choose that to be so. Maybe it's gone dormant for a time. But it can still wake back up.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 30, 2024 at 7:13 AM

      True. But the sociopolitical reality around can stifle poetry.

      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
44 comments
Read more

Hospital the Killer

Paracetamol kills more people annually than plane crashes. A medical practitioner as well as academic, Dr C Aravinda, tells us that. The doc has written an article titled, ‘Over the counter, under the radar: can paracetamol be fatal?’ in the very first volume of Surf&Dive , a new publication from The Hindu . The article says that in the USA alone, paracetamol accounts for more than 60,000 emergency hospital visits annually and over 500 deaths. He draws a contrast between those figures and the 229 deaths that happened globally due to aviation accidents in 2023. The number of people killed by paracetamol globally every year will be many times more than the figure quoted above. There is no sufficient data available from other continents and hence we don’t know how many are killed by paracetamol there, let alone the victims of other medicines. Are our hospitals killers? I wouldn’t, of course, go to the extent of asserting that much. I have depended on the hospitals many times tho...
10 comments
Read more

If God is with you

Courtesy Here If God is with you, you needn’t fear anything. I was taught that in my childhood. That was a paraphrase of what Saint Paul wrote to Romans (8:31): “If God is for us, who can be against us?” I was reminded of that when I read about Madho Sing II, King of Jaipur, this afternoon. Madho Singh received an invitation to the coronation ceremony of King Edward VII (1902). But good Hindus don’t travel across the ocean. Crossing the ocean meant mingling with all sorts of people and thus losing your racial and caste supremacy or purity or whatever. But Madho Singh wanted to attend the coronation if only to please King Edward. Also to see London along with his entire family. Find a solution, he ordered the royal priests. After all, when the problem is related to your religion, the priests are the right people to find the solution. And find they did. Tell the people of the country that their favourite god Sri Gopalji wishes to visit England. Gods have no canonical barriers. Th...
6 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

The Republic of India

Dashrath Manjhi My country is completing 75 years of its being a republic. I’ve been asked to deliver a short speech in the morning assembly of my school on the occasion. How to speak to young students on a political topic? I expressed my concern to a colleague who then asked me what being a republic actually means. Isn’t independence enough? That was enough for me to get the stuff for my speech. Independence or freedom is dangerous without duties and responsibilities. The Constitution brings us those duties and responsibilities while also guaranteeing us the security we require as citizens. Liberty, fraternity, equality, justice, freedom to worship whichever god you like… No, I can’t speak on those things to school students. So, I contemplated a while… and remembered Dashrath Manjhi. In 1959, a poor young woman died in a remote village in Bihar. She had had a fall on the mountainside where she lived with her husband, Dashrath Manjhi, a poor tribesman. Dashrath wanted to save h...
14 comments
Read more