Shaken faith

When the air was filled with thick black smoke,
The breathing ceased with a sudden stroke
Of insidious death hanging in the air-
Everyone was lost at the loss with despair.
A strange smell prevailed as they'd degenerate-
The long-cherish values or deeply-held faith.
Was it purity, chastity or the innocence?
Or why would life be sold for six-seven pence?
A smile on the man's face caused him a wrinkle,
When he tried to add joy to life and sprinkle
Flavour best known to arouse feelings during a kiss,
But soon love died a farcical death with a hiss.
A tired expression now shown on the face of man
As if he lost his way or lost touch with his clan,
Or was he just regaining the breath so lost
In fighting battles that yielded the ultimate cost.
Ah, everyone seemed to run amuck, everyone unknown,
As if there was an upheavel or some apparition shown.
He was sad over the mad race they all had taken,
He knew in his heart the faith had been shaken.

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A tribute to books

'To the world of words'

I want to live in the worlds
The writer creates with words.
I crave for those rare times
I can spend with rhymes.

I love to see colours in black and white.
Real people in the darkness of night.
The small details of big scandals
The intricacies of entangled bundles.

A twist in the story i'd never imagine,
Is like making love when you still are a virgin;
And words speeding on mind's slippery track,
Sound like inebriation with the dose of smack.

It's all there, your desires, your dreams,
You always flow with the current of unknown streams
There is never an end even when words stop.
The story may end but there is no full stop.

----------------
I love the times i have spent with the books i have read. I take a little longer to finish a book, but i use this time to digest all the ingredients of the dish served by the recipe a writer has to offer. I think its not just about how a particular dish tastes, it s also about how you digest it.
---------------

when everything seems lost

Deep sighs of pain our fallen hero takes,

From dust of the defeat when he awakes;

He gathers his breath and looks around,

All he sees is human mind's dying flakes

That spread across the expanse of the field

Over which he fought but then lost his shield.

His army had fled, he was left alone, alone

He was alive, though dreams were killed.

He wondered where to go when all was gone

He wanted to know where things went wrong

His mind was filled with hollowness of doubts

his hope was though hung on his sword alone.

if he killed himself; would save from misery

if he didnt, that would decamp his treasury

of winning battles always and not losing one

then he rose on his feet and saw a rosary

around the neck of a soldier who was dead,

his hands clasped on to it when he had

breathed his last while praying to God:

If he could live, he would have been glad.

----------------

I think winning or losing should never matter in life. What should matter is staying out there in the field. I dont mean winning or losing only in the context of games and battles. I mean the battles that you fight every day of your life. Since, if you are happy at the end of the day, you are no less than a winner. If you are not, you are no greater than a loser. So whats the difference?
You run and still you do not catch the bus. You miss it. Or simply, you are not able to solve that mathematical problem your maths teacher gave. You thought hard but it did not work out. You failed to get to the solution. You applied the correct formula, but the answer was wrong. You think and think, still you do not come up with that brilliant idea that changes your life forever.
So should you sit and cry....oh lord....why cant i get the equation right...that brilliant idea that would change my life?
Cry if you want to, but cry out your fears...your doubts, and begin again. So what if you failed again...as long as you havent accepted defeat. Defeat occurs when you accept it. Unless you accept it, there is no real defeat in life.
One should never lose hope even when everything seems lost. Life in itself is a victory. A victory over the fact that death is still not overcome. You may be the worst person on earth, having met with the worst fate anybody ever faced on this planet. But remember, God - if you believe in Him - has been kind to you that he hasnt taken your life yet. This is an indication that you still deserve to live. Despite all the odds in life. Despite all the missing solutions. Solutions you haven't found yet.
What the hell, you must be thinking?
Well...remember living is a victory in itself.

--------------

convicted of life

I made new journeys on the old roads,
On old journeys I found new roads too;
In empty sentences I put some words,
With empty sentences made stories two.

One never written, the other never told;
I’d started living with the characters,
Little did I know their lives were on hold,
For I never put them into word structures.

All these years I had been busy living,
Did nothing when there were things to do,
The sleepless nights I spent shivering,
I enjoyed them most when I caught flu.

Every day the dreams took me on a new high,
Every time I was stealing moments from time,
One night I spent without a wink of the eye
To commit that atypical innocent crime.

But the prison of life awaited me and I was caught
I was convicted of having too much of life
In just a couple of years that were so fraught
With whirlpool of joys and with idiocy so rife.

I bathed in sun and got baked in rain,
Every emotion I experienced in one go.
In silence I said things, loved in vain,
But I still climb this precipitous vale of life,
And from it one day these stories will echo.

the next end

I've seen this place and this shore,
All its secrets are not secrets anymore,
All these cultures now smell the same,
Of breaths of hatred and smoke of shame:
Blood-stained streets moved me to tears,
Begging hands robbed me of fears.
A mysterious fire left a house in ashes;
Orphaned children waded thro' marshes.
And I once saw a child about to die,
I once saw a bird not able to fly,
I once saw a young girl walking alone,
Who knew nothing of vultures all around;
A man's life was badly amputated
With the knife of the 'religion' he himself created,
And a child got books for his master to read
"Slam book', a note in his hand read,
But he could not read.

And there was beauty I always craved for,
The pleasures I always lived for...
I always hurt my legs in this mad race
While trying to catch a glimse of a beautiful face.
I tried to listen to both music and noise,
Never shed tears on not winning a prize,
I learned new things I never wanted to do,
And the life laughed at me but I never knew.

I have seen this place and this shore,
All its secrets are not secrets anymore.
I have set out to find this life's new door,
The next end is what my search is for.

In the wait

In the wait

Nobody waits for anybody here:
Waiting serves no service where
The world is like one big subway.
For you there none would stay,
None would stop for you and wait,
If for some reason you are late.
If ever you miss your last chance here
Don’t expect anybody waiting there,
For you never were, and are not
That important a man you thought.
Forget it if you thought you were
That won’t a single emotion stir.
Gone are the times when
Waiting was serving and
Neither are those people alive anymore,
Awaiting your arrival on the shore.

In Search of Heaven

This is a small story in verse. Six friends come to a new city for a month long internship in their respective media fields -- two in a newspaper, two in a news channel and two in production houses. In the process, they earned memories to last a lifetime. They learned to live together. They learned to share each other's joys and sorrows.

Set in the Indian capital, New Delhi, it's their story. Just a month long, though.

It was January the seventh,
We searched for our heaven,
In the house that looked like hell
We searched for our heaven; all wasn't well.
Moving into four by eighteen,
We wondered what life had in waiting;
Just as we entered the room,
First thing we did was pick up the broom
And clean up the mess
And make the house wear a new dress.
The house that looked like a dirty river,
Did not even have a mirror;
Yet each day our reflections would rain
In that broken mirror; we found an answer to our pain.
We found a place to relax and eat,
Where we'd in the evening, after the work, meet.
We made it our home for the next forty days,
Despite going to work in our different ways.
Night or day, to us mattered none,
Drinks or no drinks we were having fun.
When one would leave, another returned,
With every day at work memories we earned.
Memories that we now spend sharing and caring
About each other's world, always cheering.
With one's first sad days or other's first printed line,
We were together, togetherness sublime,
We voiced the words for third's recorded sound,
And with fourth's editing the flow of the story we found.
At fifth's expedition all of us marvelled,
We wished all had together so travelled.
As night would come, tired, we would rise,
About each other's stories as if to apprise.
One day at Plaza, one at book fair,
One at Saket, one at Old Books here and there,
One at Chandni Chowk, at Jantar Mantar one day,
And one night hanging on to a flyover's bay.
The days rolled by, in small, small stories,
We wondered so little about there glories,
Now we wonder about the moments spent together,
Those sleepless nights and heatless weather.


To all the friends across the world!