obtuse thoughts

Monday, January 30, 2017

Eye of The Storm

Reminiscing the days gone by,

When I waltzed,

Brushing gently through their hair,

Ruffled a few feathers albeit with care,

Pulled a few pranks at the leaves,

Pranked with a dusty layer.

I glazed through the glistening,

meandering rivers,

Flew through hamlets, bringing cheers.

Transcending through the trees,

I passed gently as a breeze.

Befriending the birds, enjoying their chirps,

I played with the kites, scaling new heights.

Going past the doors ajar,

I breathe through the windows at the tired hour.

Swept the sweat, caressing people to sleep,

I set the sails of a waiting ship.

What’s gotten into me, I don’t know.

I feel the difference, as my powers grow.

I gain in strength, lose in subtlety,

Add some features, hitherto unknown.

What are these pressures, internal and external,

Which have stirred the pot,

And made me something I am not?

Looking at my image

In the mirroring lake,

I try to see past the daze,

And pause for a take.

I see many things, but myself, and I gasp:

What a wreck!

Laden with scrapes and plastic,

I feel heavy from within,

An embodiment of a less familiar thing.

What’s left of me and what have I become?

Gone are the days,

When my soul was clean,

And my conscience clear.

Now it looks different shades of grey,

With conundrums of a maze,

And confusions of a haze.

I walk down the green fields,

longing an embrace.

What I am left with,

Are destruction and disgrace,

Engulfed in a deadly swirl,

I see leaves twirl,

Roots seem uprooted,

as my memories unfurl.

Skies turn morose watching the disturbance,

As everything falls apart in my circumference.

Is there something,

To put me out of my misery,

And erase my 'not so proud' history?

I will have to break myself over the shore,

To forgive and forget 'myself of the yore’,

To regain my soul and original form.

I am the eye of the storm.

Saturday, March 12, 2016

Dichotomy of Choice

You had me at hello!

Should have better said it with red roses,

Than gifting carnations yellow.

Is it just a few chemicals working overtime?

An irrepressible, heady cocktail in its prime -

Adrenaline rushing my heart,

Cortisol and anxieties pricking like dart,

As serotonin brings back memories, my mind can’t thwart.

Is it just me doped by dopamine,

Or is it something more surreal and divine?

But as this melody chimes,

And works on us at different times,

As asynchronous as cosine and sine;

Meeting only momentarily,

At the reciprocal of under-roots of us two, by design.

If the roots and the path we take are so similar,

I don’t know what keeps us apart, oh dear!

Even the functions and constants,

As disparate, irrational, elusive and complex

As exponential, pie, and ‘i’ -

First, representing acceleration and escape;

Second, symbolizing perfect symmetry,

Bending a line, and binding it in a circular geometry;

Third, under-root of negativity,

Finding its existence in a world imaginary -

Combine wonderfully with unity,

In Euler’s Identity,

To lose themselves

In the purity, simplicity and nothingness

Of a timeless, dimensionless zero.

All the pieces of jigsaw, so complex

Find each other through warps of time and space,

Surrendering themselves to completeness.

Waxes and wanes,

Our feeling for the other.

Sweet, it is sometimes, and sometimes sour;

As asynchronous as cosine and sine;

Marred mostly by thoughts asinine.

All we need, is to increase our power,

And unite to be one, in the new equations we discover.

Otherwise, we remain a couple of functions, defunct,

Where one of us has to fade, for the other to rise.

Friday, February 19, 2016

A Soldier to his Sword

As I lie wounded

By your side, my sword!

I see you soaked in dust and blood.

The din is dimming in the battlefield,

The lights are fading as our armies yield.

Vision blurs as our energies flag,

Astray, we lie from our flag.

I know it’s a little late

To think about a few things and rewind,

Still, some thoughts cross my mind.

Let’s go down the memory lane,

And see if this soothes some pain.

Do you remember:

How many have we killed,

And how many did we save -

In the boulevard of our kingdom,

Between the throne and the grave?

Do you remember:

The days gone by,

When you were starting as my ally?

We were soft, young and just starting,

Our affair with battle, death and mourning.

Do you remember:

My momentary hesitations, as we brought them down,

My lost appetite on days, we saved our town?

When the dead haunted me as I slept,

And my fists clenched you, as those shadows crept.

It did start, as an art -

With the elegance of music in our moves,

With the force and fluidity of a waterfall in your arc.

An oath we took, until death did us part -

"Protect the good, Destroy the evil,

Be a shield for the society with free will.”

Pleasure in wielding you was immense,

Doing what we were doing made a lot of sense.

“To be the best, and pass every test” -

Did we care about anything rest?

As you shone unblemished,

In the rain and sunshine,

I felt invincible, when you were mine.

I now ponder,

If we kept our oath of the yore,

Or did we respected the borders and the orders more.

I know not, till which point it was an art,

And when we became mere pawns in political-mart.

You are abashed of the wielding hands, I worry.

Of the lives we took and the bodies we left to bury.

You may be weighed down and a bit tense,

By the blemishes of blood-stains,

Relentless war-cries, and lifeless gains.

We played our part in a violent worldview,

Where unscrupulous battles and bloodshed grew;

And righteousness gave way to

The avenge and revenge of a few.

As I lie wounded

By your side, my sword!

Far from my orchards and the ploughed fields,

In the deafening din of the battlefield,

Confused, if I should fight the fate,

Or just lie and hug my death.

I know, I can fight some more,

Kill some more.

But to what effect and what for?

A dilemma mildly troubles my mind.

Is the goal worth the grind?

As we fight with all our might,

Do two wrongs make one right?

"Will the world be better with or without it?", I wonder.

Will we leave a world for the kids to play, and the old to saunter?

Death, lurking behind the scenes,

Slowly deepens its gaze on me,

And extends its soothing arms,

To end my misery and set me free;

As if asking me to submit.

It prefers fading away to an abrupt exit.

Submit I will, eventually.

Not now, not today.

I will slay some more, bleed some more.

Doing justice, neither to my existence nor theirs,

But to our art, and to you my sword.

Though I wish for my death, more than the ones I kill.

But I have to protect the honour of you my sword, I wield.

Again, I turn deaf to the cries and much more.

I turn blind to the scenes which unfold.

There are a few stories better untold.

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Oh, Tears!

Oh, Tears!

Next time you come knocking at my doors,

Would you first identify yourself please?

Are you here to settle,

Or will pass by like a breeze?

Will you thicken my skin like a scar,

Or will you bring tranquil and lighten my heart?

Will you give me wings and with it fire and armour,

To chase my dreams again, and this time even harder?

You sometimes soothe me,

And make me compassionate and humane;

And at other times expose the brittleness of a hardened core.

You sometimes bring the freshness of a morning dew,

Show the colours of the rainbow visible to a few.

But, each time you leave indelible lines of water,

Contours on cheeks where smiles, laughter and sorrow

Have, in different seasons, dug their burrow.

What if the things I can see through you is not that clear?

Do I close my eyes and let you trickle down?

Do I fight it and try to make sense of the blur,

That lay in front of me,

Or just let it dry as the Time passes me by?

Sunday, November 22, 2015

The Eloquence of Silence

Once, the silence of a person talked to

The silence of another person.

That was the best conversation they ever had -

Sans any confusion, any noise or any misconstrued notion,

Sans the words,
Which may have failed to convey the underlying emotion.

Eyes fixed to the horizon,

As they sit on a jetty in the evening by the seaside,

With the breeze stroking their hair,

Opening their thinking wide.

Their thoughts gently caress each other,

And as silence comes to a din,

Souls get a chance to intertwine.

The conversation gets as deep as the horizon,

Only to be mildly pulsated by the heartbeats,

Which fill the soft, surreal narrative -

Like the melody of chirping birds,

Engulfing the eeriness of the cold mornings -

Mildly, yet decisively, dispelling the night.

As the roughness dissolves in the new found softness,

They see the futility of their coarse monologues.

The differences are melting away, like the setting sun,

And they think -

“In relationship with each other,

Even the mighty sun and the immense ocean

Dissolve into each other on the brink.

Only to usher in an epoch,

One emerging rejuvenated, and the other incandescent;

But only after they let go off their egos.”

They realise,

How pointless their earlier conversation, rather commotion, was,

And how eloquent this silence is.

When you are comfortable with silence, as such,

The noise won’t disturb you much.

Sunday, March 29, 2015

Land Acquisition Act - Assessment

Purpose: This piece is for working people like us, who don’t have much time or the bent to go through the ennui of reading clauses of acts/ordinances that. But ‘Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013’, I believe, is a serious issue and can have a profound impact. It, therefore, requires us to have informed, independent opinions and not to follow the herd. It merits a rich debate.

Key points:

In five areas such as national security, defence, rural infrastructure (e.g. electrification), industrial corridors and housing for the poor – under PPP, the ownership of which lies with the government – mandatory 80% consent clause (meaning consent of 80% of land owners) has been revoked.
Impact assessment under LARR Act, 2013 (which is being amended) included landowners and dependents. Both landowners and dependents had to be compensated. Under the proposed amendment, only the landowners need to be compensated.
While acquiring land for the five mentioned sectors, fertility of land and suitability for agriculture will not be considered.
Under the current regime, there is a LARR Act and there are 13 riders using which LARR can be violated under special circumstances. Under these circumstances, rehabilitation and resettlement is not uniform and depends on decision of state government.
Compensation package – 4x the market price for rural and 2x the market price for urban land – remains the same (even for the above mentioned 13 riders).

Up till now, it was all objective, without any inputs/opinion from my side.

My opinion on this issue:

Is it necessary? Absolutely. Without enough jobs, the land ownership continues to be divided among inheritors – thus reducing per person income. Migration to cities, towards a worse living standard, continues.
Have you visited villages in recent times? Sizeable population in the working age group has migrated to industrial areas as unskilled labourers. This causes increased pressure on resources in the city and to the overall health of the people migrating. Bigger farmers or farmers running with better farming techniques and capital have consolidated and expanded their farmlands. Marginal farmers and landless farmers have moved towards MNREGA.
How do you balance acquisition of arable land? Such acquisition has to be compensated, from food production perspective, by increasing irrigation facilities. Arable land should mostly be acquired for developing irrigation facilities. This is the area most prone to corruption and loss of livelihood.
What if the Act is used for the wrong reasons? It depends on the intention. But with centralised, uniform system, as compared to a system of special cases and riders, the misuse is reduced and the implementation is consistent. Anyways, states are enacting their versions, in absence of a conducive, central act. As long as the ownership of land is with government and not private players, chances of misuse is less. Furthermore, compensation has to be a lump-sum payment and recurring income for a stipulated time, or an equity stake.
Overall intention of LARR Act 2013 was good. But it was not thought through, and was a nightmare from the perspective of all the stakeholders. Even Congress states want the Act to become more conducive for lad acquisition. Just having the heart in the right place does not cut for growth starved nation like India, it has to function properly too.

Sunday, January 27, 2013

How I Wish

How I wish,

That each mistake is a discovery,

And not a painful, slow realization;

That success is a divine experience,

Sans a trail of stinted, unfulfilled yearnings.

How I wish,

That, Truth would be as pleasing as a lie,

And could be told without guilt or compromise;

That, Jokes would forever remain funny,

And not lack entertainment with vicissitudes of life.

How I wish,

That, I never stop dreaming,

Even in the face of worst nightmares;

That, while speeding into scenic pastures,

Objects in the rear-view mirror were closer than they appear.

How I wish,

That, amidst all the things material,

I discern the dispensable;

That, I can always enjoy the twinkle of the stars,

And remember that ‘God is the finest decorator’.

obtuse thoughts

Monday, January 30, 2017

Eye of The Storm

Saturday, March 12, 2016

Dichotomy of Choice

Friday, February 19, 2016

A Soldier to his Sword

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Oh, Tears!

Sunday, November 22, 2015

The Eloquence of Silence

Sunday, March 29, 2015

Land Acquisition Act - Assessment

Sunday, January 27, 2013

How I Wish

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