Tainted waters

This poem was inspired by this post.

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What does the mind do when it doesn't think?
What do colours do when they don't show?
Do they sulk in the shadows and fade in hue
Or do they dissolve and simply colourless go?

What of their individual shades and the soul?
When they leave, what is it that they leave?
Do they pop out of existence like old black holes?
Do they die because they lived and just cease to be?

Do they have memories like the sleeping mind?
Does a colour dream during its sojourn on my wall?
When the paint sweats and greens and reds criss-cross,
Will their moods kiss, vessels list and let droplets fall?

Will molecules entwine and bonds be joined
In the space between spaces, within and without time?
With father-given free-will think with digits
Delving into the future with a pulse, quartz clock chime?

Where do colours come from—a place called home?

Do they drip off unseen from Nordic stalactites,
And collect in century-old pools of light that the Sun
Awakens as blue and green-hued sky in the winter
Before they are swept by melting snow and start to run?

Are they conceived in the vortexes beneath sand pits
In the Sahara, in the shadows of Arbre du Tenere?
Or are they voices of the sand-bearing charred winds
Where the bristling rumours of death and thirst lay?

When the burgeoning oceans and rivers flood over
And devour the shores of my childhood's plain,
When they seep silently under the farmlands' feet,
Will they awaken colours that were long since slain?

Whence come the blue, the pink and the amaranth,
and the auburn and arsenic, the ao and aureolin?
Are they the residue of conflicts, the sweat of creation,
Or simply from whim whence the jonquil and icterine?

The wold is coloured with men who stole its roots;
The moon's argent a reminder of morn's aging sheen,
Usurped and tainted, they roam homeless, aimless,
Yet as colours they came, but as dyes have been seen.

Sans protest upon nature's command did they predate
The dawn of civilization, and with such stillness did they
Succumb to the tyranny of the eye, pushed to scatter,
And now of their origins, I know not what to say.

Surrendering & Salvaging

Before you begin: The following story is meant only to elucidate a point being made in this post; any events detailed therein do NOT correspond to real events. No content here is meant to misinform or mislead the reader.

There was once a woman, a poor woman, whose husband had left her when their first child was born, and she was forced to give up the child for adoption as she had no means of supporting it after a few years and no intention of condemning the child to a fate similar to hers. The child, now adopted by an affluent family, grows up to become a healthy young man. Then, his birth-mother, now left begging by the sidewalks of the large city, spots him on the road one afternoon and begins to follow him, asking him for alms. He does not know who the old woman is, never having been old enough to be expected to remember anything at all before his new home. The woman, suddenly overcome with a surge of pleasure at having seen her son again, tells him the truth. He does not believe her, but has his doubts allayed by his adopted parents once he gets home. The next time he sets out, he wishes not to meet the old woman again because she forsook him when she should have not - at the same time forgetting that he wouldn't have been who he was if not for the surrender.

There is a strong analogy between this story and our daily lives. The old woman, impoverished and bereaved of any means to support herself in a fast-changing world with her antediluvian tools, is the culture we often find lacking in so many people when we talk of the decadence in India: the westernization brought on by globalization and liberalization of economies to survive in a world where the rules are set only by Big Brother.

The young child given up for adoption so early in life are the youngsters born today, living today, the very same people that our previous generations tout as the face of the future. Our culture as such is imposed on us by our parents and those who nurture us, teach us and care for us as we grow up; it may not seem necessary since it is definitely not innate, but the need to belong is, and so we seek to be native and "one" with some group of people. It is strongly tied in with our identity. However, when the culture seems lacking in some prime aspect that WE need to survive today, albeit succeed, it not only surrenders us to another culture but we also proactively seek out an alternative - if a restaurant I enter does not have the soup I eagerly seek, the manager will have no reason to force me to stay, and I will have no reason to remain, either. Neither is to blame but there is a resulting dissonance.

The affluent family is the second culture - the one that is equipped with those rights and liberties to exempt ourselves from unreasonable duties, duties that could hamper us, hinder us, in our quest for success in a world that no longer moves by the hours but the fractions of a second. It has to be conceded that there are many unreasonable expectations made of a youngster that do not so much as acknowledge the nature of the changing times, leaving one to decide whether one is prepared to lead a penitentiary life or, on quite the other hand, break free of the shackles and emerge free. Penance is a sin against practicality and freedom is a sin against faith. Which road is a child to take but the one that is available immediately, the one that provides the next morsel of food? If survival necessitates a change of sides, then so be it.

The old woman did not want to condemn, the young man did not want to come to naught, the affluent family did nothing to be held culpable for, but there innumerable grudges, favors waiting to be returned and a gratitude expression system that seems to be going haywire. Where are we in all of this? Rather, how are we in all of this?

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="240" caption="What does it mean to be Indian?"][/caption]

If and when you want to endorse a revolution in your country, your state, your city or your village, then ask yourself this: how is it fair to expect all those born on this land to embrace their natively endowed gifts when the gifts themselves, inadvertently, forsake their receiver in the long run?

What is to be righted is the culture itself - even though it may not have wronged at all in expecting obedience in an age such as this, it must change in order to survive, or it must make peace with its senility and forgive defectors. A non-resident Indian (NRI) cannot be expected to listen to your calls; he will ask you how you expect him to be a hero when the rewards of heroism were dwarfed completely by the penalties for foolishness. That is, undeniably, an unfair expectation I myself have had innumerable times.

On Nativity And Belonging

I undertook a wild trip of Chennai today – I know it sounds grandiloquent when I say that, but I took a trip that was definitely wild on my own terms. My first discovery was that not only had I seen just half the city, but was also under the false impression that there was nothing more to it. My blatantly wrong assumption was quashed fully when I went past Chennai Central (as we know the Central Railway Station) and arrived in that part of the city called, simply, the North. The peoples in other parts of the city – the parts familiar to me – were all immigrants, and had been naturalized over the course of three centuries to make up everything that was cosmopolitan about the state capital. The natives were in the North, unconsciously preserving as well as relishing all that was and is Tamil – the language, the food, the sunrise, the sunset and everything in between.

As we (me and my magnanimous friend, known only as V) drove hither and thither, him pointing out to me all that had changed in the last four years, forgetting that I had known quite nothing of Chennai so much as two years ago, while I told him of all the quaint remnants of the British occupation that I had noticed and researched. V was the quintessential free spirit, the praxis of freedom, while I preferred the sequestered and sound-proofed confines of a room with a view. We each had known Chennai as two distinctly different entities for the last few years: I had known it for the city it was, the residue of its history and no more, while he knew it was a living, breathing being. He would tell me about his experiences with the people he had met, their sufferings they had recounted to him, and the struggles they faced on a daily basis that, in his mind, seemed to define the state of being Tamil. You only had to listen to him speak, and you knew it was true.

That V could find so much nativity in him would sometimes put me to shame. Let alone being a free spirit, I have never even appreciated the outdoors; call it selfish, call it what you will, but my interests have always been with facts, with the physics and the mathematics of this world, and anything under their purview would soon come to be under my purview. All that I have ever known about this city, this beautiful city, is, sadly, only a result of such observations; then again, I have only observed, I have never surrendered my expectations to the promises of the city and seen. What I write today about the Marina beach may seem original because I have been there – but I know, even if you can’t discern it, that there is nothing that prevents me from substituting the word ‘Marina’ with the name of some other beach in some other continent and still be left with a sensible description. There is no qualitative content that I am capable of contributing with, and that is what leaves me ashamed.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The Marina"][/caption]

At the same time, my logical faculties – faithful as they always are – tell me that all is not lost, that there is still something left in me to give to the city, something it might unfortunately lack, something it might circumstantially need. It is true that this world has always vacillated from states of imperfection to perfection, and it is also true that it can never peacefully exist in the same state. I may not know the pulse of the city, but that only means I am endowed with the unfortunate capability to know and, moreover, understand what is perfect and what is not. In other words, I am the logical faculty of the city. Note that I speak only in singular and first-person terms: I am only contextualizing my role in terms of my emotions. Even in all this shame and defacement, there is an urgent need in me to contribute to an entity I have always only indirectly known, an entity, when not an area on the map, that is the port I set my bearings toward when I am lost in the stormy seas of identity and individuality. I am not trying to get rid of my guilt – I know that only because as soon as the guilt is gone, I will still be its humble servant.