The truth was once unknowable
One could only know the false.
Now it stands cloaked, clothed, adorned
In a garb of emotion, hue, and trend
A costumed character on stage.
It shames, it names, it cancels.
Branded now, with insiders
Claiming its privilege.
It carries a price tag few can afford.
Truth used to be silent; now it speaks.
It argues. It calls out the false.
It demands an audience.
And in all of this, it becomes the lie.
Balance of Payments
There is a story of a man
Who was offered a thousand rubles
And all the land that he could walk around
Between sunrise and sunset.
Running hard and fast to acquire this land
That was seemingly generously offered
And that which he could rightfully claim
On the merit of his sheer grit and tenacity.
He did return to his starting point
Just before the sun set
(As was the condition…)
But exhausted and sapped of all life, he collapsed
Fallen on a piece of land–
Six feet from his head to his heels– a corpse.
That in the end, was the only land
He could claim as his own.
How much ground have you covered
Since the break of dawn?
What desires drive your work?
What do you hope to do
With all the excess you ‘make’?
What sins will it breed?
How much life will it consume?
And how will you fill
The hollow it carves out within you?
What cheap forms of entertainment
Will you inflate by the premiums you pay
Just to escape the nothingness within you?
And when you wake up
What will be that reality
That will stand before you–
A final account of all that you lost
For all that you imagined you would gain.
When You Build a Home
When you build a home
Is that all you build?
Or, in building it
Do you also build perseverance
And discipline, and character?
Do you finally find your faith
That thing that religion
Tried to unsuccessfully teach you
Through indoctrination…
Books and institutions that deliver knowledge
Are designed to bring forth the past to the present.
So that you may build your future
On the foundations of wisdom.
However, building a home
Teaches you lessons in real time.
You learn to create rhythms instead of systems.
You learn that love is presence
And that presence is work.
When I talk of building a home
Know that I also mean
That whatever you build is a home.
In building it, you come to fully live.
In it, you encounter your fears
In it, you realize your strength
In it, you understand
That identity is what you may gather
But your self is what you will find.
Corruption
When limits are not respected
Knowledge becomes corrupted.
When falsities are not questioned
Beliefs become corrupted.
When intention is not reviewed
Action becomes corrupted.
When words become weapons
Understanding becomes corrupted.
When love becomes selective
Emotions become corrupted.
When the vulnerable are not protected
Power becomes corrupted.
Lost
If one
Gets only half a rupee worth
For every rupee spent
What is being lost
Is a real value in favour of a notional one.
You wonder why
You’re dispensable even where you contribute
Or why your voice gets drowned in echoes
Or why change- once life altering
Has been reduced to the prostitution of trend.
You question why
You should bother with setting high personal standards
When public standards have fallen to an all time low.
Or why the qualifications required to build a life
Make cleverness more important than integrity.
You can see
That all of humanity is now subsumed
Within the logic of the economy.
Value has moved from what you possess
To what you’re able to acquire and gain.
We perversely celebrate
The destruction of human values as progress
The notional as the real
The machine as the master
And enslavement as freedom.
Book of Short Stories
We’re each a book of short stories
Events, encounters, tragedies, and joys…
Disappointments and regrets
Passion and pain…
Gathered with us
As the dust of memories.
Why do we carefully collect this dust?
Why do we sustain its presence?
Perhaps we intuitively know
That the answers we seek
Cannot be found in what happened
They’re realized in witnessing what remains.
Wisdom
There was a storm outside my window this morning.
Furious, raging, threatening and violent!
It came with force and blew its fury
It slammed, it banged…my windows wobbled.
The trees are now swaying to their natural rhythm
The storm has passed as quickly as it arrived
The trees survived. The storm couldn’t destroy them.
They’ve seen many storms over many seasons.
Learn Rebellion
Where everyone is hustling
Seek nothing from your time.
Don’t try and capitalize it.
You can never profit from your own slavery.
Choose solitude over noisy company;
Invalidation can be a valuable gift.
Let the agitated
Have and live with the last word.
Do the illogical…
And free yourself from the prison of opinions.
Lose purposely.
It’s better than celebrating mindless wins.
Reject the world that is designed to ingratiate itself to you
Seek honesty. Choose difficulty. Cherish the frictions.
Can We?
Isn’t there creativity
In creating technologies
That can create anything that humans can?
Isn’t there creativity
In developing a simulation
Of human intelligence?
Have the expectations from human creativity
Now reached heights
That cannot be humanly scaled?
Is this the last we are seeing
Of human agency and creativity
At and for human scale?
Can we now find the creativity
To articulate a definition of creativity
That is free of pride and desire and ambition?
Can we return to a way of seeing
That is free of filters and grotesque forms
That hype up beauty, wealth, knowledge and power?
Can we stop creating the Gods
That we couldn’t find?
Can we become seekers of truth again?
Can we reclaim the necessary-
Our leisure, our slowness, our honesty;
And walk away from our creations of the unnecessary?
Can we pause the accolades and celebrations
And ask if there is a higher creativity to be found
In no longer creating creativity-sucking simulations?
What You Can Do For Me
Free me if you must
From smallness
Save me from shrinking
Liberate me from fear
Educate my desires.
Inspire me to greatness
Reveal to me the finest
Move my attention
From fault to feature
Bless me with generosity and kindness.
In a haze of abstractions
Give me the vision to see the real
Make visible the invisible
Give me the courage to choose faith
When I’m tempted to choose what’s easy.
