Hapless Gemini
Except if you are wearing a mask, there are two faces to everything.
And when you come 'down',
To my city of amorous joys.
Amidst a social chaos in a plethora of faiths,
Fantasizing and prostituting religion,
Loud vociferation of hypocrite secularism
And to sum it all: "a diverse culture!"
Amidst constituted vindictive politics
Unaccounted powers, vested by unaccounted population;
Where every ballot is a dramatized guillotine -
In the world's most comprehensive constitution.
Countless crippled NGOs amidst imposter donation camps.
Beggars with contemptuous eyes behind the dark glasses,
Exposing children borrowed @ Rs. 15 per hour.
In a city one among the top ten developing!
Amidst the dwellers of vote-earning intrepid slums,
Meeting ends with their rehabilitation flats given on rent
And amidst hundred acre self-contained highrise,
Of high society walls filled with fractures of poor workmanship
Amidst unkempt crowded lanes
Meandering between rows of pomp hawkers,
And six-lane highways,
Built keeping the state in debt.
Amidst unemployed abstract poets
Dying out of sheer mediocrity of the audience.
And son of a son of an engineer,
One more among the thousand complacent self!
Amidst six hundred Chevrolet Optra
And thirty thousand Auto-rickshaws,
Amidst you
And amidst me.
I wonder where am I 'up' to,
My city of idealized dreams!
PS: I was inspired of this poem from Romitda's post http://obcynic.blogspot.com/2005/11/subcity.html
© Shamasis Bhattacharya (Twentyone Innovations)
Age and Innocence
When you swear, you do it in agreement with the hypocrisy of swearing!
But, I believe (strictly) that age is not merely the number of times we have revolved around the sun. And if you are a staunch believer of "standards," you may disagree with me. This is not tricky. And I am not being sarcastic. From this point i will go lucid.
Since when I learnt that age comes at the cost of innocence, I wondered what it is when I bite into a bar of chocolate or start jumping for no rhyme or reason. Is it that I wanted back my innocence? Or is it that ageing made me sick? Nonetheless, when I still run behind a butterfly and imitate the crow as it crows, there is some feeling that is inexplicable. There had been recent times when I went to the zoo to have fun, times when I walked up the Pirate Ship, times when I messed my nose while biting onto a candy floss. And at all those time, I knew that I was recreating my days of milk-teeth.
Oh recall those moments when I fought with my friend on the stupidest thing on earth! There were goodbyes where I made a closed-eyed-wide-grinned face. Greetings had been initiated with fingers on my nose. Pictures taken with gifted horns! And all this while, knowing that I had supposedly crossed that "age."
Imagine me being an engineering student. Imagine me going to an office. Imagine me running my own firm. And while some wonder at the absurdity of these imaginations, I imagine if I could sing a nursery rhyme that well.
You bet I will stick to it! Even when it will be time for me to cover my greys, I will be watching the Cartoon Network, (as well as CNBC, Discovery and HBO) getting a bite of the Dairy Milk and whatever not they expected me to do when I was young. Though being young had been just a word for me at the time when I was actually young. I would not like to compensate that throughout my life.
I don't wanna grow up. I swear. And I promise that if you spend a day with me, you would surely end up saying "I felt a lot younger!"
© Shamasis Bhattacharya (Twentyone Innovations)
