Pity the nation...

“Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave
and eats a bread it does not harvest.

Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,
boasts not except among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid
between the sword and the block.

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking

Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting,
only to welcome another with trumpeting again.

Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years
and whose strongmen are yet in the cradle.

Pity the nation divided into fragments,
each fragment deeming itself a nation.”

- Kahlil Gibran, The Garden  Of The Prophet

Almost 30

'But time...how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.'

- Julian Barnes, The Sense Of An Ending

The Inches

Sitting here, mere inches separating us
Inches that will always separate us
My atoms ache for your atoms
I keep staring at your tiny fingers
Typing away furiously, and
I'm just about ready to swallow my keyboard
I beg the universe
And you turn to me
Your voice strained
From all the coughing
You ask me for a lozenge
I want to give so much more
But for now a lozenge it is
You extend your hand and then,
Just like that, for a brief moment
The inches disappear
The candy takes my heart
and everything else with it
You turn, the inches separate us again
I'm back to sitting here
Loving you like hell.
And this sorry poem, like my love,
Does not go anywhere.

from Words For Departure

I have remembered you.
You were not the town visited once,
Nor the road falling behind running feet.

You were as awkward as flesh
And lighter than frost or ashes.

You were the rind,
And the white-juiced apple,
The song, and the words waiting for music.

*
You have learned the beginning;
Go from mine to the other.

Be together; eat, dance, despair,
Sleep, be threatened, endure.
You will know the way of that.

But at the end, be insolent;
Be absurd--strike the thing short off;
Be mad--only do not let talk
Wear the bloom from silence.

And go away without fire or lantern
Let there be some uncertainty about your departure.

--Louise Bogan

Magic

‘You, my love, are pure magic.’ he said. ‘You have brought magic in my life, accepted me and shown me how it’s done. You are my Hagrid, Albus and Hermione rolled into one.’

Kitchen

'To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily
result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I had become
hardened. Was that what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities?
I didn't like it , but it made it easier to go on.'

- Banana Yoshimoto

The Irony

“Malaviya Nagar?’ I asked the cabbie. After years I had returned to the city. This city that has seen so much, centuries of conflict, has hardened the faces of its men and the voices of its women. ‘The women of Delhi are easy to figure out’, a man of Delhi had told me once, blowing smoke into the chilly December night. ‘All you need to tell her is that she is not just her body; she is also her thoughts, her desires, her opinions, her voices, her spaces and, of course, her clothes.’ I remember my mother in faded baggy jeans on the scooter. She used to take me everywhere, strapped to her chest. My grandmother lazing around in the summer heat, her hand fan’s quiet breeze grazing my hair. I don’t remember much of my father. My sister was born here. She cried a lot. Maybe because it was hard to hear her in the din of India Gate in the evening. We lived right across, of course. ‘500’, the cabbie replied with a grin, ‘and on the way I’ll show you the place where the big rape happened.’ After centuries I had returned to the city. So much was new. So much the same.