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.
Keep a Song in Your Heart
When the day seems hardened
by mechanical work, deadlines
and tough choices…
When you’re forced
to give your all to the present
with no time to revisit old memories…
When pauses leave you
feeling guilty and you fail
to see in them a gift of reconnection…
When your day is made more efficient
with the shortest route suggestions on Uber
and AI thinking, reading, and summarizing for you…
Remember a song.
Remember its lyrics and revel in its melody
Forget deadlines and efficiency. Live.
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.
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.
Framed
What are you testing through life?
Whether what passes as truth
Is indeed true?
What if what you seek as knowledge
Only remains a theory… a pleasing perspective?
What would it take for your search to wane?
A health scare? Financial troubles?
Loss? Boredom? Purposelessness?
What if these are not as trivial and as fleeting
As an inspired perspective often makes them out to be?
What if despite being false and unreal
They are more powerful than your own weak faith?
What if this grand quest for truth
Is nothing but a false hope framed by the very
Premise by which you have framed the world?
Is truth something we find?
Or, is truth a realization we arrive to?
Let your frames- worthy as they may be- crash and shatter!
See what remains.
The uncreated and the undestroyed must be true.
To Go Beyond One Must Return
It comes as no surprise that we now crave
Slowness, real connection, fulfilment and meaning
Even as we work the grind for all the artifice we’ve created–
Modern myths of success, networks as social capital
And speed and efficiency as competencies and calibre.
Somewhere along the way we corrupted our logic
We misconstrued freedom as unchecked liberty.
Power as that which usurps authority by ‘rules’.
Leadership as that which pushes and shoves.
And discourse that is shaped by dogma and dishonesty.
We’ve now reached the end of civilization as we know it.
A future awaits the directions we must take today.
We are fated for a destiny we have carved for ourselves.
We must ask ourselves: what are we upholding?
What are we sustaining? What are we creating and why?
Not because we have the power to change the course of events
But because in deliberation we are empowered to sustain the good.
We pause. We wait. We listen. We slow down.
We allow ourselves to be recreated;
To be redeemed and reformed.
The collapse we are anticipating- will it bring us relief?
Or regret? Or will we feel a sense of retribution?
Will we be affected or liberated?
What lessons will we learn
From the transgressions and hubris of humanity?
In order to learn the new, we may have to unlearn the old.
We may have to unplug from the virtual reality of the world
And relearn how to exist- simply, faithfully and irrevocably.
We may have to learn that reality exists, and it needs to be read
Not via thought, but in and through meditation.
Wickedness is not Necessary, Just Convenient
As humans, we are challenged everyday.
We live in a world where it’s easier to learn
Lessons of disrespect, domination and control
Than those of kindness, love and compassion.
Power today has little authority
And is vested with the obnoxious.
We’ve begun to believe
That humans are despicable
An inconvenient cost factor in a world
Where everything is evaluated
In terms of profit and loss
And as such, must be managed and controlled.
Our intelligence has narrowed
And so have our hearts.
We refuse to feel lest we be perceived
As being weak and fallible.
We merely function in the world today
We have forgotten the art of living.
The world is no longer free
Humanity has delusionally fragmented itself
And needs unsustainable wealth, power and control
To save the few at the cost of all.
We’re enslaved by our beliefs and conveniences
And by the false promises we’re sold.
We’re no longer a globe of wonder and myth
We’ve reshaped the world into infrastructure
That serves agendas of domination.
We’ve sold our dreams to this nightmare of reality
Where fictions have their basis in fact.
Numbers, I’m told, do not lie.
Step Out. Leave the Story.
The memories
Of the desires I carried
Are still vivid in my mind.
But memory is a ghost
That can no longer
Engage the present.
It just lives on
Like the relic of an entity
That once was.
One can remember it
Perhaps even taste
Its bittersweetness.
But in order
To live and love today
I must be free of my yesterdays.
I must ask
Do I still want now
What I had longed for then?
And I must have the courage
To step out of a story
That narrates my life to me.
I must close the book
I must reclaim my authorship
And write what remains unwritten.
We Refuse To Live With Reality
And what after you became
Who you had dreamed of being?
Did the dream become your reality?
Or did it insist that you must remain asleep?
One has to awaken to Reality.
It doesn’t move along the road
Of your dreams and desires
It was. It is . It will be. It doesn’t become.
So all that grand standing…
All that effort to change… to achieve…to acquire…
All that energy consumed by your ambition…
What happened to it all?
Did it convert to meaning?
Did it give you the reins to your joy?
Did your commanding stature work in the face of sorrow?
Did you experience contentment and bliss?
Did your work free you from delusion?
Did it liberate you from your thoughts?
Did you find love in youth and beauty?
Did you find true friends in fame and power?
We strive to become
Because we don’t know how to be.
That which is simple is made complicated
Because we refuse to live with Reality.
