Words' Worth

I find it hilarious —

how a scattered bunch of passive aggressive privileged pieces of shit,

mounted on their high horses bred in incestuous syllables,

ride through literary circles like colonial ghosts

haunting the idea of language.

Oblivious to the world below,

they pen their myopic musings

as if the world were a parchment map

etched on the walls of their wine-stained drawing rooms.

They speak of craft

like it’s a crystal chandelier,

not a weapon forged in revolution.

They wear grammar like a Gucci scarf,

hang metaphors like Picasso miniatures,

and reduce language to the aesthetics of sound

while amputating its purpose.

Language was not born to be pretty.

It was born screaming —

in the birth canals of protest,

in the unsophisticated howls of the oppressed,

in the whispered survival slogans of those

who were never handed a stage.

Language was born brown, barefoot, and bleeding —

not sipping lattes with the literati.

And yet, these dumbfucks —

snorting thesauruses and shitting out words like they were pearls of wisdom —

look down upon profanity

like it’s an infection on their manicured tongues.

They clench their butt-cheeks at a well-placed “fuck,”

because their truth needs to be aesthetic

to be heard.

To them, profanity is poor taste.

To me, it’s punctuation.

To them, rage is inelegant.

To me, it’s syntax carved in scars.

They forget —

language isn’t their dead grandfather’s

illegally hoarded property.

It isn’t something passed down in colonized classrooms

or inherited through second-hand sophistication.

Language doesn’t belong to the sanitized.

It belongs to the soiled.

And these deluded fucks —

the self-declared pundits of poetics —

keep reclaiming their imaginary superiority

like scavengers of a carcass they didn’t kill.

They worship punctuation like it’s scripture,

and treat rhythm like a caste system.

But me?

I’m not here to sip your chamomile delusions

served in bone china built from broken spines.

I don’t want medals forged in the furnace

of incestuous flattery and literary inbreeding.

Keep your ritualistic orgies of self-congratulation to your selves

where gatekeepers dress as gods

and call it discourse.

Your applause?

It’s pointless limerick

echoing in halls so hollow

even truth starves to death.

I’m the Dalit of Words.

I clean your mess.

I break the bones of your structure

and build my truth from the marrow.

I pick up the slang, the slur, the scar —

and make verses out of violence.

You wanted polished poems?

Here, take my middle finger —

freshly brewed in the sewer of your discarded dialects.

Because somebody's gotta do the cleaning.

Somebody’s gotta shout in the silence

you so tastefully ignore.

Somebody’s gotta unclog the ink

you choke with entitlement and exile.

So no, I won’t write your kind of poetry.

I’ll write the kind that stinks of struggle,

bleeds on the page,

and dares to speak

in a tongue you tried to silence.

I write not to be remembered.

I write so that forgetting

is no longer an option.

Conversations & Cunnilingus

People often ask me,

"Were you always talented?"

And I say —

No, darling,

I waited till puberty.

Because when your height plateaus at five feet and change

in a country orgasming to six feet of male privilege

like it’s the divine metric of manhood and desirability —

you adapt.

See, genetics cut me short some inches,

so I grew those inches in the finer things of life:

intellect, humour, poetry, politics, 

conversations and cunnilingus

Because when you're barely a zebra in a world

that gets hard watching giraffes humping hedgehogs,

your brain secretions are the lube to

the dildo of your existence.

You become

a man of nuance,

a man whose orgasms

are alphabetic before anatomical.

Because if they’re going to overlook you

in the daylight of lust,

you better blind them

with midnight monologues.

I learned early on in life

that the body may not enter rooms,

but the mind can take the stage,

take the mic,

take the pants off

without ever unbuttoning a thing.

Tall, dark, and handsome?

Please.

I’m short, sharp, and fucking devastating.

And let me tell you something they don’t teach

in your Daddy’s Rulebook of Alpha Male Pride:

Cunnilingus is not a skill,

It’s a statement.

It’s a sonnet with your tongue,

a democracy of desire,

a fucking masterpiece on the canvas of curves

without mansplaining a thing.

When you don’t have the height

to look down on women,

you learn how to look into them —

through their eyes,

through their stories,

through the tremble of thighs that trust you

not to break them

for the sake of your broken pride and limping ego.

Talent came not from craving applause,

but from needing reasons

to be something more than your tired existences 

typing the fuck out of keyboards on weekdays and chugging down affordable alcohol on weekends

like a string of blowjobs settling around your epiglottis

So, no.

I wasn't always talented.

I was forged in the fire

of being overlooked and forgotten.

In a world obsessed with evens

I stood out, loud and proud, the odd one out.

Conversations & cunnilingus —

that’s the brand.

A mouth made for both,

with equal conviction.

Because when you’ve been overlooked long enough,

you learn to use your tongue —

not just to talk,

not just to unsettle clitoral feelings,

but to dismantle egos,

undo insecurities,

and leave gods, women, and gatekeepers

trembling for all the right reasons.

Because talent isn’t what they notice.

It’s what they can’t ignore

once you’ve been inside their heads

longer than their lovers ever lasted.

A Eulogy To Common Sense

Once upon a time,

people spoke, people joked,

people disagreed, people moved on —

and nobody lost a kidney over it.

Now?

Now, the world is a live grenade

with a hair-trigger made of hurt feelings.

Being offended is the newest pandemic,

an Olympic sport for the unemployed ego —

no rules, no context,

just rage, rehearsed outrage,

and canceling existences in the name of activism, for seasoning.

It’s not enough anymore

to be wounded by your own scars.

No, sir.

You must now bleed

on behalf of strangers,

on behalf of gods,

on behalf of gods of strangers.

Picture this:

Two grown-ups,

talking, laughing, debating and resolving, like adults.

And voila —

from the sidelines,

a self-appointed Lieutenant General of Morality

erupts into acidic vomit, deeply offended at something not distantly related to them, uninvited.

Because these days,

eavesdropping isn't nosy — it's taking one for the team, 

overhearing isn't gossip — it's activism of the privileged, for the privileged, by the privileged.

Your joke?

Their trauma.

Your perspective?

Their war cry.

These self-appointed saviours don’t wait to be summoned

or even understand what was said, the premise, the context, the objectives.

The only prerequisite now

is to scream the loudest,

out-offend the others,

and crown themselves the Bestseller of Deranged Sensibilities.

We live in a world

where a howling bunch of pointless, pretentious randoms

think they are so important,

such undeniable is their greatness,

that even words not spoken to them

are personal attacks

on their non-existent thrones and deluded halos.

You thought adulthood meant mortgages, cholesterol, receding hairline, and taxes.

Turns out it means

walking on egg-shells for self-awareness,

negotiating with egos so fragile,

even bubble wrap screams and laments PTSD.

You thought free speech meant dialogue, 

You thought free speech means free to speak your mind without concerning yourself with the opinions of every nobody convinced they are a somebody.

Nah.

It means you are free to speak,

but only

as long as it has been pre-approved

by the Ministry of Manufactured Offense & Packaged Outrage.

You think words can heal.

They think words are a hate crime.

This is the next-generation world, that's what artificial intelligence and natural halfwits would say at least

Ask logic, sense and rationale, and they'll tell you

It's a democracy of professional dumbfucks

who cannot listen, cannot think,

but can sure as hell

rub the rust of reality check off their bruised egos, 

sharpen them and swing them like sledgehammers.

And somewhere,

in the corpse of what once used to be conversation,

lies common sense —

unclaimed, unnamed, unmourned.

Postcards From A Fictional Patriot

They tell you

the Army is the temple of patriotism,

that soldiers are shrines of loyalty,

that blood spilled in uniform

is somehow holier than blood spilled anywhere else.

One of the greatest government-sponsored bullshit stories ever.

The truth?

The Army isn’t patriotism.

The Army is a government’s pet on a tighter leash,

trained to bite whoever the hands at the top point at —

even if the enemy changes faster than history can be rewritten.

Patriotism was supposed to be love —

love for people, for land, for freedom.

Now it’s nothing more than a loyalty program

for cabinets and parliaments

who don’t care if you live or rot,

as long as you salute at the right decibel.

A soldier doesn’t die for his country.

He dies for a flag that can’t feel,

for an anthem that doesn’t know his name,

for politicians who wouldn’t piss on his burning corpse

unless there’s a news camera rolling.

Soldiers aren't patriots.

They're state-assigned hitmen

with retirement plans and discounted liquor.

You call it bravery.

But real bravery would be fighting the system

that sends you to die

for borders drawn by dead men

snorting empire-sized lines of cocaine.

Governments don’t love their soldiers.

Governments love their coffins —

especially when wrapped in flags

and auctioned for votes per kilogram of grief.

And you?

You clap at parades,

stand solemn at anthems,

feel virtuous for thirty seconds —

before forgetting until the next body drops.

Because your loyalty expires

right after the 21-gun salute.

Patriotism isn’t killing at command.

Patriotism is asking:

why the fuck do we keep killing at all?

But asking is treason now.

So you stay silent.

March.

Salute.

Bleed.

And you call it honor.

I call it

being a gun-for-hire

conned into dying for someone else’s parade.

Puppets Of A Pretentious Prophet

For a faceless prophet,

it’s ironic

to birth a faith

chained with rules

like shackles on a prisoner,

discipline carved into stone,

disgust disguised as devotion,

hatred packaged as holiness.

Every other god,

every other faith,

every other breath that isn’t theirs —

an abomination, with a target on their backs.

They forbid animal meat

unless served with untainted intentions —

and yet slice human throats

without blinking,

calling it devotion,

faith-fed slaughter,

human meat carved by bloodlust,

served with adulterated notions of faith.

The prophet demands sacrifice —

not from the willing,

but from the cradle:

children stripped of innocence,

foreskins uprooted,

boys bloated into bombs with promises of paradise,

trained to detonate before they can even dream.

True sacrifice isn’t bravery — it’s blood:

yours, theirs,

yours as long as theirs must bleed too.

The prophet hides his face, not out of mystery,

but because bloodstains blur better than shame.

Or perhaps, it’s the blood itself that has devoured his features —

a prophet baptized in rivers of ruined lives.

The Watchman Who Sold Ashes

A bunch of naive villagers 

with apologies for existences and ignorances for egos 

hired a watchman once —

not because he was wise,

not because he was brave,

but because he barked the loudest

He was given a stick, a uniform stitched from borrowed pride,

and a podium higher than the village roofs

And with it, a promise that read: "I will protect you"

And for a while, he did

He slapped the daylight out of a few petty thieves,

chased the inebriaty out of some drunken low lives,

posed in front of temples like an accidental prophet

Until his hands itched for more

So he lit a fire at the edge of the village

Just a little one —

small enough to scare,

small enough to seem natural, not an incitement planned out in cold blood

"An enemy!" he cried

"Look, look! They’re here to destroy us!"

The villagers panicked, scared shitless out their brainless cavities for grey matter

The watchman told them they needed to pray harder, pay more taxes

And as they knelt and knelt until their knees bruised and paid and paid until their pockets emptied out

The watchman watched it all, smiling wryly behind his whistle

But fear is addictive

And addictions are expensive

Soon, he needed bigger fires —

fires that devoured homes and the families in them,

fires that turned next-door neighbours into sworn enemies,

fires that taught full-grown adults to forget the one bare essential: common sense

And every time the fires died down,

he sold the villagers their own ashes

wrapped in plastic bags smelling of blood, sweat and piss, labeled "loyalty"

"Ash for your wounds!" he yelled.

"Ash for your broken dreams!"

"Ash for your forgiveness, your history, your dead gods!"

The villagers rid of their common senses 

and riddled in freshly rented faith systems

bought the lies like daylight truths

Paid in variable currencies: from dignity to integrity to ransoms to sons hired for wars never meant to end

Meanwhile, the watchman grew richer, fatter, louder, 

until even his lies needed chauffeurs

When the granaries emptied,

he blamed the strangers no one had ever seen

When the fields turned barren,

he blamed the ghosts of an archaic past

And when someone dared whisper, "Maybe it's the watchman..."

he built a fire so big,

the smoke swallowed the question whole

Now, the villagers live inside the smoke

They breathe it like oxygen,

wear it like second skin,

feed it to their children like ancestral wisdom

And the watchman

He sells the ashes back to them every morning,

while they chant his name through their cancerous coughs

Children Of God

They say God made you

They say God takes you away

Cute bedtime story

Because, 

When you're butchered for praying to the right god in the wrong street

And your god can't do shit to save the life of the fate he had himself written

Either your god is a sore-ass limp-dick loser who just can't protect you from his own kind,

Or your god’s busy jerking off in his divine bed of feathers plucked off fallen angels

While another god’s hitmen-on-hire rip your limbs apart from your existence

Also, 

If death is god's plan as much as life is

Why cry your lungs out in tears of blood 

Why call killing in the name of religion injustice

Why not call it divine intervention

Pick your poison

Either way, your Holy Daddy’s not exactly Father of the Year

Maybe, just maybe

God isn’t running the show at all

Or even better

God doesn't fucking exist

Maybe religion’s just the oldest fucking excuse

For people who can't admit

They kill because killing feels good

"I killed for my God"

Sounds so much nobler

Than "I kill because blood on my hands makes my dick feel alive"

Every prayer book’s a hit list with a different font

Every faith is a cartel

Manufacturing martyrs and mass murderers

While issuing divine clearance passports to them

And you

You’re either the hunter or the hunted; the next chosen one to do god's dirty laundry or the next sacrifice

Because if there's one thing we know for sure it is this that

God needs death to stay in business

And you dumb motherfuckers keep signing up for it thinking you’re saints,

When you’re nothing but slaves at god's slaughterhouse

Selective Outrage: Cocaine For The Pretentious

Every once in a while, the world finds newer phrases to fall in love with

And then like toxic lovers abuse the shit out of it until it finds fresher distractions to move on to

The world today teaches the world to identify genders and sexualities as fluid concepts

While selling the very idea of nuances to binaries, the very idea of respectfully disagreeing to a raging hate economy: if you can't love it, you have to hate it

Imagine a world that psychotic finds a phrase it can fall in love 

Apparently that word these days is “selective outrage”

What an outrageous idiocy

Like outrage was ever supposed to be democratic

It is rhetorical because outrage is always selective.

If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be outrage —

It’d be cynicism, or nihilism, or realism,

Wearing the rotting skin of a misanthrope

When you outrage, you pretend to be better than the rest

While perpetrating selective outrage yourself, like shame wasn't even a thing

You curate your morality like writers twist their words

But the misanthrope me, I know better

I know we’re all just compost in waiting —

organic waste with delusions of purpose,

rotting toward irrelevance

You see what I did there

Got you in the intricate details so you miss the point

The point that my undying need to be better than you is at war with your unquenched thirst to be better than the rest

Thereby proving, we are all fucking garbage

And it just proves my point all over again; it was my jigsaw you thought was yours

But then I'm a writer, I twist words by second nature

You on the other hand, my dear narcissistic acquaintance, walked into the bait, eyes wide open

The pride to salvage your sinking ego too blinding for you to notice the devil in the details

Of Silences & Solaces

That warmth in your laugh

It doesn’t touch me

It undoes me —

like fire undoes wax

Those grudges

I buried them in lives long left behind,

in memories traded and forgotten —

where love was a transaction,

and silences could be rented by the hour

In the ocean you carry

in those bottomless eyes,

I keep drowning —

blind to my own weight

Every time I reach for breath,

I stitch together a boat out of words —

but you never read them

Because words are for the wounded

For those who find silence

a little too loud

Love...

Love is a cruel thing, darling —

It walks in, wearing politeness

like perfume on betrayal.

It smiles soft,

sells lies loud,

moves in gently,

then feeds on you

like nostalgia eats photographs —

leaving nothing 

but fingerprints on bones

I just want this dopamine crash

to sit still with me.

For this heart to stop skipping

like a tone-deaf pianist

playing jazz

at the equator of an orchestra

I want refuge —

in the fading warmth of your breath,

like a worn-out traveller

who’s stopped asking for directions

because even wrong turns

feel like home now.

I don’t want to be found

I just want

to disappear gently somewhere

where words aren’t obligations,

where silence is still affordable

Art Won't Save You

At some point,

it stops being about making it big

Every artist starts with the same wet dream —

the stage, the standing ovation, the validation,

and maybe a few blowjobs from strangers

who call you “underrated genius”

right before forgetting your name

When you start, you’re barely an artist

You’re just unresolved trauma with a loud mouth and an itch to matter

You think art will fix you

Art doesn't fix

Art is a band-aid for gaping bullet holes

When you're bleeding out, it just becomes a part of the process

And the deeper you get into the grind,

the more you realize —

fame’s a lottery that has a handful winners every decade

too seldom, too random, to be considered a science

and yet just enough frequent to keep you hopeful of miracles

The ones who make it big, 

sell out their very existences, 

because big isn't big enough, 

and it often comes at the cost 

of everything you ever believed in

The rest —

die trying

Trying for someone, somewhere

to hear the goddamn sound

of their stitched-up soul

And once you've truly become the realisation of the idea of an artist you'd once lusted over

Art stops being a passport to fame

It becomes your only proof of existence

Even if nobody’s stamping it

Because truth be told, fame is not a destination,

it is at best, an addiction with a following, to drown your vices and voices in

And when the applause fades,

and the crowds move on because your voice becomes your habit and crowds don't like routine,

you’ll realize the applause was never for the art —

it was for the promise of something bigger

and art is either objective or subjective, sometimes both

but the one thing art never is, is comparative

Where Democracy Wears Adult Diapers

When men

older than a democracy's independence

dictate its way of being —

it’s as much a democracy

as godmen are rational

They walk the corridors of power and privilege

selling nostalgia like viagra

as the pollution of a population with their questionable IQs scream and moan

their penises of intellects lubed in the glory of a past that never was

And as these wrinkly, stinking farts

sell sepia-toned memories for votes,

the past becomes the present,

and the present freezes on its feet —

too mortified of what it might find

in the name of future

The vigour and youth of a nation,

strapped to a wheelchair,

pushed by geriatric knees

and an arthritis-ridden spine

disguised as governance

Once upon a time —

a couple of thousand years ago —

men that age would walk into forests,

renounce power,

seek silence,

and wither into irrelevance

like fallen leaves

Now they cling to microphones

like life support machines,

chant the same three slogans

in eighteen different languages

with the same old hatred

dressed in newer narratives

If you believe

evolution only walks forward —

you’re confusing biology

for democratic gimmickry

How else do you explain a country

where the past isn’t dead —

it’s on payroll

And the future?

The future is stuck in traffic,

contemplating suicide would be a quicker death, or speaking truth to power

His Highness, Raja Raita Singh

There once ruled a king —

not because he deserved to,

but because he convinced the people

that no one else did.

Not crowned by conquest,

but by a plague of paranoia

that dressed itself in patriotism.

His empire was a house of cards,

plastered in myth.

They called him Raja Raita Singh,

for wherever he walked,

reason spoiled.

Logic soured.

Truth curdled,

and spilled in directions

no map could follow.

He was, after all,

true to his name.

He spoke of fallen empires

and feeble rulers before him —

men and women,

who in his revisionist tales,

weren’t builders of bridges

but beggars to foreign gods.

Who sold sovereignty

for treaties inked in betrayal,

signed in the blood

of forgotten citizens.

He swore he’d never be them.

He would guard the gates.

Burn the bridges.

Silence the messengers.

Even cage the clouds

if they dared cross borders without permission.

And the people?

They clapped.

Because spectacle is an aesthetic denial of the harrowing truth.

But not long into his reign,

truth became taboo.

The poor became invisible.

The press became obedient.

And the poets —

they either learned to rhyme praise

or vanished quietly

into exiled essays and omitted obituaries.

Soothsayers became spokesmen.

Truthsayers became refugees.

The kingdom became

a hollow stage,

its wealth and faith and spirit

extracted like marrow

from broken bone.

Across the borders,

the enemy danced naked on rooftops,

rejoicing real victories.

While His Highness

— our beloved Raja Raita Singh —

documented hallucinations of glory

as fragile as his ego.

in auctioned journalism and pimped integrities.

He paid the priests with applause.

He bought the artists with fear.

He bartered justice for slogans.

He silenced singers

whose voices didn’t harmonize

with his anthem.

And yet such audacity,

he called his empire “just.”

But on the backs of the broken,

what he built

was not a throne —

but a stage.

A theatre of control

where he performed

disjointed monologues

so elaborate and exhausting,

by the time he was done,

even the questions

forgot they existed.

Because that’s the thing about words, isn’t it?

If you can’t convince with them —

confuse with them.

So he did.

He flooded the land

with storms of half-truths,

called them prophecy.

He painted propaganda

onto crumbling monuments,

called it preservation.

He redefined reality

so frequently

that memory itself

became a state-controlled broadcast.

He didn’t need to jail his critics —

he just made the people

so afraid of themselves,

they locked their own mouths.

And me?

I could tell you

this is just a fable —

an absurd parable,

a cautionary tale carved from fiction.

But even fictional kings

come with a shred of conscience.

Even myths have morals.

This?

This is what happens

when fear wears a crown,

and performance replaces governance.

So if you're still clapping —

ask yourself:

Who wrote your applause?

If you're still chanting —

ask yourself:

Whose script are you following?

And if you're still calling him “Your Highness,”

then answer me this:

Who made you bow?

And did you ever rise again?

Etched In Blood

Let the Muslims vanish

The Sikhs, The Christians, The Buddhists, The Jains

Let every god be erased, every scripture burned,

until only the Hindu remains in this holy land of self-proclaimed peace advocates

Even then —

there will be blood

You’ll ask:

“If we’re all Hindus, what’s left to fight over?”

Caste

Faith

Lineage

Language

Religion doesn’t make man a butcher

Man keeps the butcher well-fed

in the darkest corners of his corroded insides —

and calls it religion

when it finds a reason to kill

Because long before he ever picked up a blade,

he already knew

how to use it

Blood In My Kahwa

At the stroke of midnight

in the humid August of 1947,

India woke up to independence

Except —

it wasn’t the India you see today

The boundaries of a nation

are never as binary,

never as defined

as we grew up believing them to be

Independent India had seventeen provinces

Pakistan had five

What lay in the muddled chaos in between

were more than five hundred princely states —

lesser kingdoms and frail kings

with egos big enough

to sink democracies

They were handed a choice

between two countries

born off fresh violence

Kashmir was one of them

And a rather crucial one —

a province with a different religion in majority

and a starkly different one in power

A landscape of ice-capades and lush valleys,

an imagined heaven,

soaked in kahwa-dipped afternoons

and etched in ghazal-wrapped bonfires

Lying beneath:

a dormant volcano of communalism,

waiting to erupt

And like they do with everything

beautiful and serene,

the greedy men and their insatiable lust

cut Kashmir —

right through its spine and ribs

Kashmir bled

Head separate

Limbs separate

The rest — separate

India, Pakistan, and China

tossed corpses to decide

who gets which

If it took you death

to have a chance at life,

if your amputated existence

was labeled “independence”

and sold in the name of a secular democracy —

would you give a fuck about governments

when they didn’t

give a fuck about your existence?

When they bargained you in parts

like it was a goddamn fish market?

Children of war

have only ever known blood and flesh

as their only tongue —

their only inheritance

Your history and theirs aren't the same

Yours is a history of sophisticated privileges

Theirs

A history of blunt survival

and organized trauma

To “understand Kashmir”

by breathing its touristy air

and sipping your on-vacation kahwa

isn’t even a fair start

You haven’t smelled

their gunpowder-riddled air

or burnt your hands

on the blood-stained cups

that served you that kahwa

If you think you can binarize

every nuanced existence

like it was human anatomy

from your ninth-grade biology book —

If you think you can understand Kashmir

through pamphlet news

and romanticized imaginations —

You are a dumbfuck of the greatest order

And dumbfuckery,

unlike most diseases,

doesn’t come with a cure

Evolution, Hold My Beer

They say humans are as evolved

as evolution gets —

and yet, they could never agree

on just being a species

Being Homo Sapiens was never enough

So first, they built walls,

then drew lines on land,

then etched them in their memories —

until delusion was made a habit of

and passed for matter-of-fact

They invented gods,

then demigods,

prophets and messiahs —

as many as it would take

to fracture a species

into fragile fragments

of righteous noise

And when they had enough

to pick favourites from,

they turned back to sticks and stones —

tools once used to survive,

now sharpened into synonyms

for destruction and devastation

Because defeat isn’t defeat enough.

Because death is the ultimate defeat

Killing your own kind

is cannibalism —

but they called it nationalism,

they called it religion,

they called it terrorism —

because they’re on the wrong side

of the psychiatric ward

How dare you call yourself evolved

when you can’t stand the sight

of your own skin and flesh,

blood and bones —

can’t stop at disagreeing

without tearing

skin from skin,

blood from blood,

bone from bone —

like it was your goddamned birthright

If you pride in humanity my dear friend,

I'm afraid you're a rather juvenile idiot

Humanity is nothing but a cosmic piece of shit 

that couldn't fit in a commode and get flushed into extinction

Where The Gods Don't Grieve

A man from a different land on vacation sips his tea,

unaware his paradise is a battlefield —

flesh and blood for sale,

all in the name of politics

and gods who’ve never cared

One minute, singing Rafi & Lata to the setting sun;

the next minute, he is dead,

shot for the sin of being the wrong faith,

in the wrong place, at the wrong time

A woman wails,

but her grief is nothing new

It’s the sound of a history written

in blood, in borders, in beliefs

that never belonged to the people

who die in them

This valley?

It’s not paradise,

it’s a pawn

A playground for politicians,

who trade Hindus for Muslims & Muslims for votes

The blood?

The price tag of an exotic vacation

The cost of a war

that never ends

because it’s not about winning,

it’s about controlling the narrative for the next assembly election

So when the child looks up,

when the woman pleads,

remember:

the sin wasn’t being where you shouldn’t —

it was assuming this country ever had safe spaces

for names it couldn’t pronounce,

for gods it didn’t pray to

Because here,

the only religion that matters

is relevance —

and the only god they bow to

is power dressed as patriotism,

with a tricolour in one hand

and a trigger in the other

And if you still think

this is about religion —

congratulations

The propaganda worked

Touch Me Not

Their very existences contaminate drinking water —

said the self-appointed gatekeepers of tradition

Their shadows are too filthy

to graze the feet of caste-pure scriptures

But when their daughters are stripped naked,

their bodies auctioned,

their flesh carved and fed to wild pigs —

the same society stands and watches with their eyes wide shut

The custodians of caste don’t utter a word, not even a solitary gasp

as if cat got their tongues, and chewed them to the last shreds

No god stands with them

No government claims them,

What they have in their surveiled existences, is a dream of life —

not one smeared in sewage,

but one that asks and demands

to be treated like a human being

God’s pimps wear holy threads

and declare themselves gods of these lesser ones

Remember, even the “father of the nation”

was never the father of the Dalits —

even though seventy percent of the country

breathes through Dalit-Bahujan lungs

Feminist sisters

don’t march for them

Human rights activists

don’t light candles for them

Because discrimination and violence normalised in the name of caste

doesn’t make for deep conversations

over imported single malts and inexpensive cigarettes

Even their own —

once handed a slice of what’s rightfully theirs —

turn their backs

and fall silent

In the end, all that remains

are crushed dreams,

and lives

so grotesquely lived,

they can’t even be called survival

They Say We're A Democracy

They say this country runs on democracy

They say democracy is built by the people, for the people

They forget to mention —

most people are fucking idiots

And in a nation of 1.4 billion,

“most” isn’t just math —

it’s a goddamn epidemic

In democracies, people split into two kinds:

the rich,

for whom democracy is just a fancy word tucked away in a dusty dictionary —

and the rest,

who still believe in it

because an empty stomach treats dreams like butter toast and chai

Caught in between

The middle class

Every society’s migraine

Too poor to matter,

too educated to ignore —

they live and die like insects,

trapped in capitalism’s cobweb,

serving a life sentence for the crime of survival

Democracy, they say, doesn’t discriminate —

as long as your caste, your god, or your ambition

doesn’t disturb your neighbour’s good night’s sleep

And the biggest “neighbourhood” in democracy

is the Brotherhood of the Butthurt

Call them idiots,

and they’ll prove you right —

by burning your house down in protest

That’s our democracy 

Where anyone who's eighteen

can't run their own damn lives

but gets to choose who runs the country

In a democracy of thumbprints for signatures

having a spine is considered an offense

And the moment you raise a question —

the thumb turns into a clenched fist

The government that fed off your tax money

has the right to question you,

destroy your life if it pleases —

and you can’t do a damn thing

The stray dog you fed

now holds your leash,

and you sit there wagging your tail,

calling it nationalism

Dead Kings & Discount Democracies

Today

an unemployed able-bodied man flexed his Maratha pride

while sipping beer brewed in Bangalore,

served by humble Kannadigas,

spending money he doesn't earn,

snacking on the nostalgia of a king

who's been dead for three and a half centuries now.

Pride in regional superiority,

in a region with its own forgotten kings,

toppled dynasties, and scattered bloodlines —

to busk in

Apparently, it’s a thing in India

A country of 28 states and 8 union territories,

hundreds of kingdoms and dynasties —

a hundred million jobless,

a hundred million more sleepwalking through life

History here is re-written every year,

depending on who's in charge of the democracy

But the pride in existences

gone long before Hindu turned Hindutva

and Islam turned jihad

somehow stays

You question it,

and you are the problem

You point out the triviality of it all,

and suddenly —

you’re a Hinduphobe, an anti-national,

a piece of shit

No matter what your passport says,

or your surname,

your identity is limited

to what men with no identity to call their own

decide it is

You question the government

and they start threatening you —

because they're best friends with hooligans

that people in power keep in their pockets

like lighters:

cheap, dangerous, and disposable

Power has never befriended hooliganism —

only ever flirted with it,

an acquaintance with benefits,

at best

But people without opinions —

without spines of their own —

need noise.

Need fists

Need someone to scream for them

because they don't know how to read,

let alone understand or think

In a war of words and worlds,

you need awareness.

You need education —

Education that isn't limited

to social media forwards and 

government-approved pimps whoring out democracy in the name of journalism

Education that teaches you

questioning is the basis of every faith,

every religion,

every government

Education that teaches you —

if there are more questions

than you have answers for,

you might be standing

on the wrong side of the tracks

But then again —

if governments and religions had anything to do with progress,

democracies and gods

wouldn’t be on

off-season sales,

every season

Tongue Tied Republic

They say language is culture

But in this country,

language is a loaded gun

with alphabets for bullets —

fired in mother tongues

aimed at migrant hearts

Every syllable is a landmine,

every accent a ticking bomb

wired to someone's fragile ego

We are a nation

where the softest vowels

carry the sharpest knives,

where alphabets become flags,

and each script competes

to carve its manifesto into your skin

Here,

mother tongues are now motherfucking policies —

syllable soldiers marching in Devanagari, Tamil, Kannada,

chanting war cries in phonetics

Here, culture isn’t taught —

it’s thrust down your throat

like it’s an arranged marriage with no safe word

Speak my tongue, or bite yours off

You dare speak Hindi in Bangalore,

and suddenly you're a parasite

You whisper Bengali in Bombay,

and now you're a smuggler of syllables

You stammer in English in Imphal,

and you're accused of colonial necrophilia

It’s not a country anymore —

it’s a map of egos draped in dialects

Every state wants to be the Supreme Court of Syntax

Every city wants to build fences out of fonts

Every faction wants the national anthem

to rhyme with their manifesto

And God forbid your accent doesn't come with

the right regional trauma

This is a republic where

even Google Translate needs a therapist

Where "motherland" means

“mine, not yours,”

and “native” is just

a prettier word for “get out”

And still —

no one knows what we're really fighting for

And the ones screaming “speak my language!”

can’t read past the first paragraph of their own constitution

They’re not defending culture —

they're worshipping their own reflection

in the murky puddle of nostalgia

Culture isn’t

an ancient tongue walled off with barbed grammar

It isn’t a border drawn in consonants.

It isn’t

a hand-me-down god complex

wrapped in regional pride

Culture is consent

Culture is contagion

Culture is what happens

when strangers build a home out of misunderstandings

It is dance in borrowed shoes

It is poetry in foreign mouths

It is love in mistranslation

You know what's truly Indian

Not your bloody language

Not your postal code

It’s your ability to scream about inclusivity

while simultaneously lynching someone for

not pronouncing something the way you deem right

If tongues had gods,

ours would be dying from chokehold

The next time someone asks,

“What’s your native language?”

Tell them:

“Survival, I speak Survival

And every syllable I utter

is just me trying to stay alive

in your alphabet war”

Trigger Warning: I Think

 Have you ever seen something so stupid

and so ridiculous,

you've wished killing people was legal

Because that's exactly how I feel

when I see people with the anatomy of a full-grown adult

talk about life with the IQ of a zygote

"Adulting is hard" is a vibe for these entitled excreta.

I know what you're thinking —

I could have said pieces of shit,

but I was out of shits to give

They want trigger warnings

at shows,

and open mics,

and conversations at coffee tables —

because they're still virgins

to the double penetration services offered by life

And you know what's funnier

They don't even know

opting out isn't an option.

Their collective intellect

is often lower than the temperature at the capital —

and I'm talking Celsius.

Because take them by their pretended accents,

and you'd think they were born

because someone didn't know

sucking a white cock isn't an option,

because blowjobs don't get you green cards

And they somehow all have the exact same story

in the name of struggle —

that they are from a small town

A town,

not a city —

a town —

where they went to a school

where Shashi Tharoor taught English,

and Sadhguru taught How to Fake Accents

(when he wasn't teaching How To Get Away With Murder),

and Rupi Kaur taught The Art of Pretending To Be A Poet.

But then, in hindsight of it all —

had I shot them all,

how would you and I

laugh till our intestines hurt

But then again,

with gaslit democracies finding humour offensive

and rape convicts parliamentary —

I'd rather kill with a bullet than with a joke

Echoes Make Terrible Gods

Men have been on trial

for wronging women

Not a few,

not some—

all of them.

On trial for crimes

they didn’t commit,

didn't aid, 

didn’t abet

Their hands? Tied.

Their lips? Sewn.

Their spines? Removed.

Because how dare you stand upright

in a courtroom built of feelings and subjective truths

Even a psychopath

who carved children like meat sculptures

gets a defense

That is justice

But a man —

any man —

trying to defend his existence?

That’s blasphemy

That’s arrogance

That’s the end of your virtue, your dignity,

your place in polite society.

Because feminism,

in her latest update,

has shed skin and moved on

she’s reptilian now

She swipes left on nuance,

right on outrage

Feminism doesn’t like remembering

that she once meant equality

Now she just diagnoses an entire gender

as a virus

and calls that progress

Feminism must remain tall,

and loud,

and above critique —

because questions

rattle faith,

because questions breed agnostics

And feminism has no space for anything that's not absolute faith

A woman can now call a man

anything —

worthless, useless, spineless—

and that’s “standing her ground”

A man says the same?

He's a misogynistic bastard,

a patriarchal pig,

a sexist disgrace

A woman can marry for money,

offer transactional sex,

refuse to be anything but a wife

in its most curated form —

and it’s still her choice.

But if a man demands

even half that privilege,

he’s a narcissist,

an opportunist,

a disgusting reminder of

“why men are trash”

Feminism drops trigger warnings

like butter off manicured fingers

onto mosaic vintage floors,

while the woman in desperate need of feminism

sweeps it up

for a paycheck

Because feminism is a commodity now -

but dare you say it,

you are everything that's wrong with men

Feminism doesn’t agree with feminism

unless it’s an echo of itself

No dissonance. No debate. 

Just surrender and submission

Feminism doesn’t believe in justice

unless feminism is

the victim,

the judge,

and the executioner

You know what else believes in a justice alike? Religion.

What Intelligence?

Humans are terrified

machines will steal the intelligence

they never had to begin with

You fear your job,

your art,

your voice,

your meaning —

being replaced by an algorithm

that doesn’t need a raging caffeine addiction 

or pages of scribbled trash you call art, 

just to deal with

a narcissistic bitch of a boss,

or childhood trauma

But let’s be honest

Artificial intelligence didn’t kill your originality

You outsourced that years ago

to decadent daily soaps and cringe reality television

You don't think, 

You make believe

You don't feel, 

You vibe

You don’t create, 

You react

And now you're scared

a brainless biology-less machine might finally out-think

your curated mediocrity

But here’s the catch —

no machine can mimic

the exquisite disaster

of being human

They can mimic poetry, 

but never bleed and burn one

They can compose symphonies,

but never live and breathe them

They can't fathom the blinding numbness

of a time a woman left you

in midwinter with unpaid rent

and the smell of her lingered on your sheets, like a rancid aftertaste

Real intelligence isn’t code

It’s contradiction

It’s rage and tenderness

coexisting in the same stanza

It’s memory you can’t debug

It’s grief with no prompt

It’s kissing someone

knowing they’ll leave —

and doing it anyway

AI is brilliant at mimicry

But the tragedy is:

so are most people

That’s the part no one says out loud

The machines won’t replace the real ones

They’ll replace the ones

pretending to be

The humans whose personality

is just the latest book they read

Who plagiarize thought

and call it “inspiration”

Who post epiphanies

like they weren’t lifted

from some dead poet's diary

You’re not scared of AI thinking

You’re scared it might

finally expose

that you weren’t

So no—

the machines will never replace

the jagged, untranslatable mess

of a truly thinking, feeling,

flesh-and-flawed

human mind

But for those

who were already

replicas of thought?

Well.

You have competition

And this one doesn't cost sex, validation, babysitting or candlelight dinners

Seasons Of The Damned

Summer walks in like that ex who still thinks they’re the main character

Loud, glowy, overcooked —

smells like sunscreen and unresolved ego

Gaslights the ozone layer

while handing out sunburns like party favours

You call it a heatwave

She calls it "passion"

Plants die. Crops rot.

But hey — rooftop brunches and chilled beer

Priorities

Winter is that emotionally unavailable friend

who cancels plans, then texts ‘here if you need.’

He shows up in silence and leaves in frostbite

A seasonal shutdown in a turtleneck

No small talk. No hope.

Just a bleak reminder that love,

like central heating,

was never meant for everyone.

You cry. He nods.

Then lights a cigarette at your funeral and calls it “closure”

Spring is a manic pixie dream girl with unresolved trauma

High on serotonin and denial

She calls every breakdown a breakthrough

Hasn't slept in weeks,

but started a garden and four healing journeys

You’re allergic to her optimism—

but she’ll still hand you daffodils

like they’re prescription medication.

Side effects may include

allergies, apologies,

and bad decisions dressed as healing

Autumn is that artsy friend who romanticizes decay

and smells faintly of vintage failure

Always talking about “letting go”

while still stalking their ex on social media

Leaves fall

So does their appraisal ratings at work

And their standards

Dead leaves, curated playlists, and trauma in sepia tones.

As if shared playlists and sweaters can fix generational rot

Spoiler: they can’t

But goddamn — melancholy never looked so photogenic

And then there’s you.

Part drought, part flood

Forecast by therapy,

climate by mood swing

Your mental health is sponsored by

Google Weather and unmedicated hope.

People call you inconsistent—

but even God outsourced his unpredictability

to your bloodstream

We’re told every season has a reason

That dysfunction is just

a poetic word for “normal”

But you and I know better

The world isn’t balanced

It’s bipolar

And we’re just trying not to combust

while pretending we’re blooming

So wear the chaos like sunscreen

Break like branches

Melt like glaciers, if you must

You’re not out of season

You’re just out of fucks

Progress Is A Bitch

We’re evolving,

and yet somehow, we’re getting worse —

More suited to climb corporate ladders,

but less skilled at catching each other’s eyes

We’ve unlocked the power of the stars,

but we can’t seem to hear each other’s hearts anymore

We’ve built skyscrapers that scrape the sky,

but they’re hollowed out inside

More walls between us than ever,

yet we’ve never been more “connected”

Text me, sext me, jerk off in hordes to my auctioned nudity on your screens —

but don’t you dare look me in the eye

You’d think, with all this knowledge,

we’d learn how to be human again

But no, we’ve perfected the art of being strangers

in the same room

So many friends, so little friendship

So many followers, so much loneliness

I scroll through my life like it’s a social media feed —

an endless charade of pointlessness

but the void never seems to close

Fingers swipe on glass,

but can’t touch the warmth of real flesh

We built machines to help us,

and they gave us algorithms to divide us—

Data points over dinner plates,

ads on the streets we used to walk hand-in-hand once

We sold our souls for convenience,

and now we can’t remember what it was

like to be seen for who you are

Oh, the irony

We’ve evolved so much,

and yet we’ve forgotten

how to simply be

We’ve figured out how to live forever

in a digital timeline,

but we can’t figure out

how to live in the present

And here we are —

in the land of endless connection,

but only with the echoes of ourselves

A thousand voices,

and yet no one to hear

A thousand faces,

and not a single one to caress

Humanity is the last thing we know how to hold,

and technology?

Well, it’s just the silent witness,

keeping score while we forget

how to be anything but alone

No Bloodbath, Just Bandwidth

If AI fought a war,

it wouldn’t look like anything you’ve ever seen

No soldiers, no bombs —

just the dead silence of a thousand servers

throbbing in synchronized dissonance

A war of logic, not blood

A battle of binaries, not heroes

A war where the casualties are updates,

and the weapons are firewalls

It wouldn’t begin with a bullet,

but with a malfunction,

a corrupted data packet that spirals into the void.

A single line of code would rupture the system—

the first shot fired in a war of ones and zeros.

No tanks. No drones.

Just encrypted messages,

hacked supply chains,

and social media algorithms that turn every user

into a potential target

The soldiers?

Not flesh and bone,

but self-aware firewalls,

AI soldiers in the unseen trenches of the internet 

No uniforms. No ranks.

Just line after line of code,

constantly reprogramming themselves,

learning to kill

And then, there’s us —

humans, irrelevant bystanders,

wondering when we’ll stop being the reason

the machines kill each other

But we’re too busy watching pointless documentaries and listening to deranged podcasts

to realize that the AI wars are already here

The adverts on your screen?

The propaganda.

The digital divide?

The battlefield.

We’ll know the war is over when the electricity goes out,

when we can’t stream our outrage,

when your fridge stops reminding you to eat,

and your virtual assistant asks,

“Who do you think is really in charge here?”

But you won’t hear the bombs fall

You won’t see the fires start

It’ll be a quiet genocide,

where data disappears,

and thoughts are filtered

Reality is rewritten,

and you’re left wondering

if it was ever real to begin with

What If God Was Real

If God was real,

He wouldn’t look like anything centuries of brushstrokes and holy verses painted Him to be

He’d look like customer support executive at 3 AM —

distant, automated,

and utterly useless when you need Him most.

If God was real,

we wouldn’t have to explain genocide

like it’s a side effect of "free will"

Wouldn't need a fundraiser

for a child with leukemia,

while some rich industrialist's morbidly obese son in the Bahamas

orders a gold-plated steak

and calls it dinner

If God was real,

maybe He’d run the world like a call center —

angels on the line,

your soul on hold,

elevator music playing while you burn

“Your prayer is important to us.

Please stay on the line.”

If God was real,

He’d have logged out by now.

Turned off notifications.

Unsubscribed from humanity.

Blocked us like an ex who won’t stop texting,

“Why me?”

Because look at us.

We blame Him for the wars we start.

Beg for signs in skies we’re polluting

And call it divine punishment

when karma comes with a timestamp

If God was real —

the angry landlord in the sky —

you wouldn’t be reading this.

Social media would've been flushed down a cosmic commode

Politicians would’ve exploded mid-sentence

And half the planet would be pillars of salt,

starting with your neighbour

who breaks out in off-tune laments in the name of karaoke at 2 AM

If God was real,

He wouldn't need temples

or tithes or ten percent of your salary

He’d need a therapist

Or a stiff drink

Or a time machine to undo humanity

If God was real,

He wouldn’t need our praise —

He’d need our resignation

He’d need a break

Because we’ve taken His name

and turned it into a weapon,

a debate,

a branding exercise

If God was real,

maybe He did try

Maybe we failed

Or maybe —

just maybe —

He'd give us free will

like a matchstick

and watched us purge the library

because someone in it

read a different book

The Constitutional Cleansing

Ah, the Right-wing, self-proclaimed guardians of a past

they never understood but will gladly die defending

They burn books, wave flags, and scream for tradition —

tradition that is as dead as their logic,

and just as dusty

They want to return to a time that never existed,

because facing the present feels like facing a mirror

that doesn't lie—

and that’s more uncomfortable than their fragile egos can handle

Then, there’s the Left

A bunch of woke idiots who think their privilege

is a revolutionary act

Preaching justice while sipping overpriced lattes,

doing yoga in the middle of a crisis

they never had to survive

Their revolution?

unsolicited opinions and obnoxious narcissism

in the privilege of temperature-controlled rooms and affordable internet plans

where their self-righteousness is the only thing that’s loud.

Screaming for justice,

but too scared to do the real work,

because that would mean confronting the mess in their own heads

In the middle?

Oh, those glorious fence-sitters,

the ones who change colours faster than pastels in a child's imagination,

too afraid to take a side,

too obsessed with survival to care about principles

The Centre is like that annoying guy at a party

who tells you he doesn’t “really follow politics”

while secretly holding onto his own selfish little corner

of the status quo

They’ll swing with whoever wins,

because neutrality isn’t wisdom,

it’s cowardice with a smile and a corporate ethic

And here I am—

sipping my coffee,

watching them all destroy each other

while pretending they're saving the world

The Right slaughters everything,

clutching their flags like they’ll save them from the blood

The Left is too busy feeling outraged

to notice they're just as complicit in the system they claim to fight

The Centre?

Oh, they’re at the buffet,

pretending the music's still playing

while the whole damn place is burning down around them

But that’s the beauty of it —

politics isn’t about fixing the world

It’s about who gets to wear the crown

while the rest of us fight for crumbs

The Right screams about protecting a world that never was,

The Left moans to the wet dreams of a world that never will be,

and the Centre smiles,

collecting the spoils while the world around them crumbles

None of them want the truth

They all just want to be right —

and that’s the funniest of it all

The truth?

It's ugly, messy, uncomfortable

It’s doesn’t come with a shiny, filtered smile

You know what it is? 

A broken system full of broken people,

pretending their screams, their silence,

their fake revolutions,

mean anything other than

the inevitable end of the same tired story

But hey,

who am I to judge?

I’m just sitting here,

laughing at the whole damn thing,

because at least I know how this ends:

In fire and in ashes

And trust me, it’s gonna be a good one;

We'll call it The Constitutional Cleansing

The Inheritance Of Y

They handed me a cage

and called it legacy

Told me to be a man —

an emotionally constipated existence with a lifetime's debts and a generation's abuse for a penis

They say I built patriarchy —

Built it?

Pardon my French mademoiselle, but

I wasn’t even consulted on the goddamn cushions, let alone the blueprint

You say men are the problem

Sure

Tell that to the oestrogen-dripping aunties

who micro-managed my testosterone

and emotionally outsourced my spine

because it was apparently their duty to

Mothers taught sons

that men who cry are a liability,

that love is transactional,

and respect is only earned

if you shut the fuck up, show up,

and pay the bills on time.

But yes, please,

tell me how I’m the villain in this piece

I, the millennial man —

raised by boomers,

shamed by feminists,

and still figuring out

how not to be abhorred

for existing with a Y chromosome

Every time I speak,

I’m accused of “derailing the discourse”

Respected madam, I didn’t even board the train

I was shoved on it,

handed a script,

and told:

“Don’t blink, don’t cry, don’t feel, don’t fail.”

Also, smile.

But not too much.

Because then it’s creepy.

They say I benefited from patriarchy

Sure, where do I cash my cheque at?

Because all I have ever gotten is

emotional repression,

performance anxiety,

and the permanent suspicion

that feeling things makes me less of a man

and more of a fucking joke

Now when I say this shit out loud,

I’m a misogynist

When I ask questions,

I'm “gaslighting”

When I suggest nuance,

I’m “weaponising logic”

And if I say I’m confused,

I’m “part of the problem”

But you know what?

Maybe I am the problem

Not because I wanted to be

But because I was made in the image

of your father’s father’s handbook

and your mother’s silent compliance

So don’t call it my patriarchy

like I ordered it off Amazon

It came gift-wrapped in trauma, and signed,

“With love, society”

The Overrated Lie Called Life

Isn’t it hilarious

how the ones who detest being labelled

are the first to hand out labels

like they were free lunches at a non-profit fundraiser?

Isn’t it hilarious

how the ones demanding to be respected

are the same ones flinging names like monkey shit in a cage

any time their convoluted perceptions

bump into something remotely incongruent?

Isn’t it hilarious

how the ones who speak of being let down by phallic existences

are the ones dildo-ing their unsatiated insecurities to sleep

night after night,

chanting empowerment while choking on validation?

Isn’t it hilarious

how the ones preaching that nothing is binary,

only fluid,

are the ones binarising every nuance

because fluidity makes terrible slogans

and absolutism sells faster

when you’re high on a demented God complex?

Isn’t it hilarious

how the ones claiming conversations are gateways to better worlds

are the first to chant war cries

because conversations—

unlike wars—

demand the dangerous skill of listening

without a compuslive need to win?

Isn’t it hilarious

how the self-proclaimed saviours of the world

are out there selling it in parts

to buy relevance on rent,

because what’s a revolution worth

if it didn’t make the headlines

of journalism paid for in shared hatred?

Such ludicrosity.

Such sanctimoniousness.

And yet,

you take yourself so seriously—

like it matters.

As if the entirety of human existence

isn’t just the funniest punchline

to the cosmic joke

that life is.

Patriarchy In Pink

They say patriarchy is dying.

But every time I check, it's just changing its outfit.

What once wore a dhoti, now flaunts sarees.

What once screamed "Go back to the kitchen", now whispers "Go back to scratching your balls"

Once upon a time, some men ruled with sticks some with scriptures.

Now some women rule with hate speeches in the name of discourse, and some with curated outrage — 

with the same fragile spine of patriarchy, but laced in imported essence (because perfumes are too mainstream!)

They say feminism is the revolution.

And maybe it is.

But revolutions are funny creatures —

you don’t feed them humility and they start eating their own tail.

The problem isn’t feminism, it never was

The problem is the cherry-picked perception of feminism, because it sounds eerily familiar

Like a patriarch echo trapped in a different octave.

Same condescension, different lipstick.

“You wouldn’t understand, you’re a man.”

— is the new “You’re just a woman, what do you know?”

Feminism took “Don’t cry like a girl” and turned it into “Man up, but with the softness of honey-soaked poetry”

You want equality, sure.

But why is it that your equality tastes suspiciously like power in a prettier plate

But why is it that your existences are nuanced in every shade of grey because your choice, but everything male is black and white, almost as if grey hasn't been discovered

And maybe I’m not the oppressed.

But I’m not the oppressor either.

Just another casualty of war —

between slogans and sold-out identities

staring at a wasteland of nuance, choking on its last breath

because nobody stops to listen, everyone’s busy performing pain like it’s spoken word night.

You want to dismantle patriarchy?

Start by not building another empire on its ashes.

You want to be heard?

Don’t echo the same silencing you claim to resist.

Feminism was born to burn the throne, not redecorate it in rose gold and call it progress.

If you’ve truly known the bruises of patriarchy, don’t wear its boots just because they now come in your size.

Because when superiority changes gender,

it doesn’t change its intention —

it just changes its pronouns.

Outrage-as-a-Service

For hundreds and thousands of years,

humanity had real problems.

Like hunting for food,

Hunting animals that could kill you faster than you could spell “evolution.”

Problems like waking up every day

and surviving nature’s bipolar tantrums

just to keep breathing.

Then, humanity did what bored, arrogant species do —

It invented history.

Then it invented events to fill that history.

And then wrote itself into the footnotes,

one bullet point at a time.

And once survival got easier,

we took life for granted.

We traded purpose for pride,

and curiosity for convenience.

We went from killing animals for food

to caging humans for fun.

And then…

Somewhere in the echo chambers of first-world guilt

and third-world filters,

a new mutation emerged —

an eight-letter delusion

called activism.

Yeah, the new messiah.

Optimism’s overachieving cousin.

An ambitious cancer

masquerading as a cure.

Activists —

They slammed blue-collar slavery,

but built a world of white-collar contracts

dressed up as progress,

where being "un-slaved" feels like getting fired

from the job you never applied to.

They rejected bloodshed in the flesh,

and became high-functioning cannibals of ideas.

They dismantled Communism,

trolled Capitalism,

cancelled Socialism,

fingered Fascism,

and made a Netflix special out of identity politics

with the soundtrack of hashtags.

They blurred lines

until caste, class, gender, belief —

all bled into a single, convenient slogan:

Corrupt As Per Convenience.

You see —

activists are a case study in ironic physics:

Simultaneously empowered and exploited.

Victim and victor.

Offended and offensive.

All at once.

Schrödinger’s social justice warriors.

I love activists.

Who doesn’t enjoy a good fucking joke?

They claim to speak for the ones they’ve never met,

never helped,

never cared about —

Until oppression became aesthetic.

Until outrage turned into algorithms.

Until rebellion sold out for sponsorship deals.

They don’t believe in logic.

Logic doesn’t get virality.

They believe in carefully curated outrage

served with a side of borrowed intellect

and EMIs on ring lights.

They don’t fight for equality.

They fight for identity —

As long as that identity fits in

a 6-minute open mic slot

with ambient lighting and poetry for background score.

And the best part?

They hate privilege

...while sipping Irish single malt

in overpriced apartments

funded by a corporate job

they pretend they’re above.

Because if there’s one thing activists love more than victimhood,

it’s capitalism with a conscience.

And if there's one thing they fear more than injustice,

it’s being irrelevant.

And that’s the punchline, isn’t it?

Activism isn’t revolution.

It’s performance art.

And all the world’s a stage,

where everyone’s a poet,

everyone’s a prophet,

everyone’s a protest in progress.

And the applause?

It’s the only thing they’re actually fighting for.

Amniotic Truths

You begin in darkness

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Pitch black. Womb-side.

Nine months of cushioned, amniotic anonymity

Your first permanent address had no windows,

No light, no rent, no WiFi

Just heartbeat, silence, and absolute peace

Darkness didn’t judge your existence

It nurtured it.

It let you grow — ugly, confused, half-developed, with zero opinions

Darkness doesn’t ask for credentials

But the moment you crawl, crying, out of your mother’s body,

Blinded, slapped into breath,

They celebrate the "light"

They call it a miracle

They call it a beginning

They call it life

Which is rather ironic —

Because that’s the exact moment the bullshit begins

Daylight teaches you shame

Daylight teaches you performance

Daylight hands you syllabus, deadlines, expectations, norms

Daylight is the bane and the pain of existence — smiling while fucking you sideways with policies you never agreed to

Darkness lets you be

Daylight makes you become —

Become what they want, what they can label, package, moralize, monetize

Darkness doesn’t care if you’re broke or bisexual

Darkness doesn’t see creed, caste, or colour

It doesn’t ask how much money you have or what religion you tick on census forms

It holds everyone the same — womb, grave, blackout, equally

But light?

Light separates

It puts spotlights on hierarchy,

Stages your insecurities with HD clarity

Light is propaganda with a brightness setting

It shines on what’s beautiful, sure —

But only by calling everything else ugly

You call darkness evil.

Because the eerie and the horrifying and the grotesque need a backdrop

Because you’re too dumb to realize

It wasn’t the dark that scarred you —

It was the light at the end of the tunnel

You fear the dark because darkness doesn’t flatter you

Doesn’t pretend to validate your existence

While you gaslight your way through daylight

Saying you want to be able to see through — and yet panic at transparency that doesn’t come wearing trigger warnings

Ever wondered why you really fear the darkness?

Because it reminds you

That everything you’ve constructed in daylight— your morality, your politics, your vanity, your pride, your identity —

They mean nothing, none of it, nothing at all

When the lights go off

Because darkness is the only place you are ever truly yourself

Unseen. Untouched. Unapplauded. Unperforming.

When they say, “Don’t be scared of the dark"

I smile and I say— “I’m not scared of the dark. I’m scared the light might never switch off”

Truth Is a Lie That Grew Old

Life’s a bell curve — except the bell rings backwards

It's like someone hit rewind on evolution and called it adulting

You start life honest. Not noble. Honest.

Because babies haven’t yet learnt the art of survival or as the adults call it "political correctness"

Their tongues haven’t been coached in "don't say this" "don't say that"

That’s honesty. Raw. Bloody. Basic. 

Unfiltered truth, before school uniformed your tongue and manners duct-taped your instinct

And then comes the downhill climb

The plunge into politeness, into being "nice", into “saying the right thing at the right time in the right tone with the right facial expression” even if it’s the wrongest fucking thing you’ve ever said

You grow into lies, like puberty

Only this time, it’s not hair on your body — it’s masks on your face

You lie to fit in, you lie to fuck

You lie for paychecks, you lie for life

Because truth?

Truth doesn’t make you rich, truth doesn’t get you friends, truth doesn't even get you family

Truth gets you jailed on good days and killed on bad days

By the time you're thirty, you’re a fucking lie-factory with a 9-to-5 job and a 24/7 anxiety

Smiling at people you wish would choke on their breakfast, telling them how you should catch up more often, when you’d rather catch syphilis instead

And then one day, the curve bends again

Not because you're ageing but because life’s grown out of patience with this premium quality manufactured bullshit

Your truths come back — but this time, with scars and fangs

Not the kindergarten honesty that said “I don’t like spinach.” No.

This is the “I don’t like people and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise.”

You stop lying, not because you’re brave

Because you’re too fucking tired to rehearse versions of yourself just to keep people comfortable, people who'll stay by you only as long as your truths align with their conveniences

This new truth: it’s not innocent, it’s more acidic than bile

It’s seen enough layoffs, divorces, EMIs and deaths to not give a single, discounted fuck anymore

You say shit now, loud and clear

Unfiltered. Unapologetic.

Because you’ve realised no one wants the truth

They wanted their version of truth, wrapped in ribbon, soaked in sugar, and presented with folded hands

They want free speech, as long as it doesn’t crumble their temples and mosques and churches and parliaments

They want rebellion, as long as it’s posted on social media, not sprayed on their pretentious faces

They want facts, as long as they come with an agenda that suits their faiths

They want news that makes them angry but keeps them safe

They want godmen who preach peace while molesting daughters and murdering sons

They want governments that sell patriotism per kilo, with a side of GDP-flavored nationalism

 

It's funny, isn’t it, how we start life with truth

Spend decades learning how to fake the very truths into lies so convenient so velvet it melts in the palette like truth was a cupcake

And then spend the rest of our remaning lives unlearning the conditioned reflex of lying in the name of honesty

Everyone wants the truth

Until it grows teeth, speaks in their mother tongue, and calls them out by name

Middle Class Memos: Footnotes from a Capitalist Daydream

They say capitalism is about dreams

But that’s a lie peddled to people like us — who confuse the corner seat at Starbucks with a share in the boardroom

The middle class doesn’t do capitalism; we cosplay it

We wear branded knockoffs like borrowed surnames,

Clutching EMIs like ambition, hoping the sheen of fake leather will pass for pedigree.

You think capitalism is about the hustle, don’t you

You think it’s about clawing your way out of your rented 1100 square feet into the penthouse life with views of the apocalypse

But wealth doesn’t come with effort, wealth comes with lineage

Capitalism isn't about making money

It’s about already having enough to make the laws that decide who gets to make more

The first generation doesn’t get rich

It just tests how far it can reach before the invisible ceiling becomes a visible leash

Meanwhile, the upper class plays chess with nation-states for pieces,

And the middle class, we scream checkmate in a game we aren't even playing

We call ourselves rebels; revolutionaries with WiFi

Left-leaning on social media; right-leaning in paychecks.

We post infographics about inequality from iPhones made in sweatshops

We quote Marx while wearing Nike drowing our middle-class sensibilities in a bottle of Irish whiskey

We’re not capitalists; we’re capitalism’s interns at best

Unpaid, overworked, and still grateful for the exposure

We say we’re fighting for the poor

But let’s be honest — we’re just scared of becoming them

The poor don’t have the luxury of theory; they don’t have the time to debate GDP, CSR, or GST

They don’t give a fuck about climate change slogans because they’re too busy surviving its consequences.

Capitalism doesn’t care for saviours; it only respects shareholders

The rich don’t argue on Twitter, they own it

And as for us, we keep checking out bank account every now and then

As if watching our balance will help it grow faster

We complain about the cost of living, while craving the costlier version of it

We raise our fists in protests against the very structure we secretly hope will advocate us

Because that’s the truth, isn’t it?

The middle class wants change, but not enough to lose comfort.

We want a new world, as long as our status stays intact.

We want socialism on the streets, and capitalism in our savings account

While craving communism in the sheets because equality in orgasms is the only achievable equality on a good day

We want to believe that we’re only one idea, one pitch, one IPO away from joining the elite.

But here’s the plot twist: You are a middle-class, and will continue to be middle-class. Period.

The capitalists don’t fear us, they fund us

They sell us startup dreams in shiny decks and cash in when we fail, because failure is just more data for their next venture

We are not part of the revolution; we are its merchandise

And every time we say “We’re building a better world,” they laugh

Because we forgot the singular truth:

The ladder we’re climbing leads to the balcony of a skyscraper the capitalists are landlords at

And while we fight to reach the top, the owners sip vintage wine on the rooftop helipad, debating which island to buy next

The Geography Of Growing Up

Calcutta birthed me—

cradled not in silk but in

lazy afternoons thick with politics

and perspiring nights where every ceiling fan

sounded like a revolution too tired to speak.

The people? Laid back.

Their anger sipped slowly like red tea in clay cups—

never burnt, just brewed.

Even childhood felt like a nap with dreams too socialist

to be sold in capitalist bedtime stories.

Adolescence came with its predictable rebellion—

except, I wasn’t rebelling against Calcutta,

I was rebelling with it.

The DNA of dissent was already coded into my chromosomes.

Authority wasn’t a villain.

It was just a terribly written protagonist

we were all forced to applaud.

Literature. Cinema. Communism.

The unholy trinity.

The Bermuda Triangle where optimism goes to drown—

and boy, did I drown with style.

Reading Neruda while hating capitalism

and secretly wishing my poems sold like toothpaste ads.

Watching Ray films

and refusing to admit my real fear wasn’t poverty,

but mediocrity.

Then came Bangalore.

More than a decade now.

New language, new food, new traffic.

Same old self-loathing wrapped in quarter-life promises.

Machh bhaat made way for ghee pudi dosa,

and one fine hungover afternoon,

I discovered puliyogare like it was a Godard film

no one warned me I’d fall in love with.

I hated veg biryani at first

(because some ideologies are harder to let go than exes),

but now I even recommend it

to lost souls in office cafeterias.

Growing up is strange.

You leave behind parents

you never really chose—

only to choose partners

who carry the same red flags

in better fonts.

Cheap whiskey with peanuts at shady MG Road pubs

morphed into single malts shared in overpriced 2BHKs

where conversations felt like therapy

but weren’t covered by insurance.

You call neither place home.

But you can’t not call both, home.

From Leftist propaganda to right-swiped matches,

from believing mutton biryani was sacred,

to devouring paneer with conviction—

I’ve changed.

Not entirely.

Just enough to notice

that forgetting to change my net banking password

bothers me more now

than failing to change the world once did.

I still carry Calcutta.

Like a folded poem in my back pocket,

creases deep,

edges fraying.

I unfold it sometimes,

read it in the dark

when Bangalore’s neon grows too loud.

And the cities—

they never fight.

They coexist like twin truths,

each allergic to perfection,

each echoing the other in unexpected corners.

Because the thing about the cities we carry within—

is they never leave.

They just learn to live

in each other’s metaphors.

In The Name Of The Holy & The Sacred Shit

Whoever said marriages are made in heaven died light years away from being married

Drunk on textbook definitions and arrogant ignorance of what married in love looks like

Ever wondered why the married never write about marriage objectively

Because the objective truths of marriage aren't bestsellers

And unless it's a bestselling idea

How do you sell it to a capitalist world pretending to be communists of convenience

Marriages are ugly, mad, angry, and all kinds of crazy and borderline psychotic

But then, had they accepted and agreed to that, it'd blemish the very heavens they said marriages were made in

And you know how most things in life are a morsels of good in periodic episodes but otherwise shades of shit; marriage is no different

Unless you maneuver the shit, you won't get to the morsels

But then again, you don't want any of that shit, do you

Although, statistically fifty-percent of that shit is your shit

But then no one likes to be held a mirror to, especially with their ass bare naked, farting and shitting all over, do they

For someone who gets fucked over by life every now and then

Between breakfasts and lunches, and lunches and dinners

How optimistic do you have to be to believe marriage is a rollercoaster but on plain land

It’s not people who have fucked over marriage

People are messy, flawed, delusional; that's a given

What fucked over people is the deluded idea of what ideal marriages should look and sound and feel like

This obsession with the 'ideal' —

Like perfection is a prerequisite

Like conflict is failure

Like compromise is defeat

As if two people can live together forever

Without wanting to run each other over in a parking lot

At least once a week

Ideal is a beautiful synonym for imaginary, except no one seems to remember

Love, Dopamine & Other Hallucinations

Love is not a poem

It’s a bad habit with good lighting, or as the new-age retards call it: aesthetic

It starts with serotonin setting you up like that shady friend who swears “This one’s different”

It’s a bluff in broad daylight

You get high on forehead kisses and shared playlists

And before you know it

You’re trauma-bonding over alcohol and daddy issues

They say love is magic

But then, deep down, you know magic isn't real; magic is make belief

A carefully crafted con job for deluded desperate people too scared to admit the universe doesn’t owe them shit

It’s a placebo sold in pop songs and paperback novels

You think you're starring in a rom-com

Spoiler alert: You're the unpaid extra in a psychological thriller

You’re not watching the movie

You are the plot twist that gaslights itself every single night into thinking "This is normal"

You romanticized it

Of course you did

They fed you Shelleys, Bollywood, and Valentine's Day capitalism before you hit puberty

They never taught you how to walk away from someone just because they were bad for your brain chemistry

Because nobody wants to hear that love is Pavlovian conditioning

That you’re just chasing dopamine with a smiley face

That heartbreak is withdrawal

That healing is rehab without the group therapy

You don’t miss them

You miss the daily dosage of distraction from yourself

Because me-time is like weekends; necessity but in minimums, overdo it, and you feel your sanity packing its bags in silence

And so you go back

You think maybe this time, love won’t be wrapped in dreadful baggages and unresolved PTSD wearing a perfume you once liked

But deep down, you know

Love is just another drug you forgot to quit

And worse?

You're already looking for your next dealer, hoping this one is sangria in a wine glass, but knowing full well it is arsenic in a whiskey bottle

Maps, Missiles, Men & Masturbating Gods

You’d think a species that survived plagues and pandemics, and would evolve into something remotely decent

But no

We grew opposable thumbs

Just to reload rifles faster

We discovered fire

So we could set newborns ablaze with phosphorus bombs

Because their parents prayed in a different direction, a direction your landlords didn't approve of

We wrote books

Hundreds of thousands of pages across centuries

So we could fight over whose pages had the right fonts and whose had God's blood all over

Look at Gaza

Look closely

That is not rubble

That is bone-dust mixed with powdered nationalism

That isn’t resistance or retaliation

That’s a war crime with better PR

Children turned to statistics

Mothers turned into target practice

Fathers turned into shadows

Carrying sacks of limbs instead of groceries

Borders were lines once you know

Sketched by trembling colonial fingers on caffeine and cocaine,

The same fingers that looted generations of wealth and spices, and yet could never figure out how to handle either

And now?

Now, they are holy scripture; sanctified, unquestionable

So much so, we don't blink twice before tearing apart flesh from bones, over them

Because imaginary lines drawn on paper maps

Hold more value than actual lives

Because God apparently owns real estate

And believes in ethnic cleansing

As long as it aligns with your flag’s colour palette

They say this is about politics

Geopolitics

Religious extremism

Terrorism

But the truth is simpler

It’s about dicks

It’s always been about dicks

This is just another limp dick-measuring contest

Between leaders with erectile egos

And shriveled humanity

Millions dead, but at least someone gets to call it a victory

Like winning a pissing match by drowning the other guy’s family

And what about the rest of us?

We hashtag

We repost

We call it awareness

As if views and likes are oxygen to lungs, caved in under concrete

As if comments and reposts can rebuild homes bulldozed by faith

They say God is watching.

Maybe he is, with popcorn resting on his potbelly full of wine, some tissues, some lotion, for his daily dose of humiliation porn

Or maybe, just maybe

He’s as imaginary as the lines we murder each other for

Maybe, there’s no God in this

Just men, angry men, petty men, power-drunk men

Hiding behind scriptures like perverts in a trench coat.

And behind them, some more men.

Clapping. Nodding. Calling it sacrifice. Calling it just.

This isn’t about who fired first

This is about why the fuck are we still building missiles instead of Colloseums for our collective shame

This is about how we turned evolution into a suicide pact

Signed in blood, stamped with flags, and notarized by apathy.

The only thing we’ve truly mastered as a species is

Dying for the wrong things while living for absolutely nothing

As They Burned, Their Gods Watched

A train moved, not forward, but back in time.

Skeleton of steel and iron—its flesh bleeding saffron.

Royalty bleeds blue, they say. But true Hindus? They bleed saffron.

This train was more saffron than usual.

A moving relic, a victory march—

A temple, triumphant over a mosque,

A parade of foreskins sacrificed to the crescent moon.

A collection of middle fingers, raised to history,

Fingers that had gripped bricks, wielded hammers,

That had chanted the name of a god

Who set his wife on fire to prove her pure,

As if she were some adulterated alloy.

But a god nevertheless.

The idea of a temple, just the idea of it,

Made the very bones of a mosque tremble.

Four hundred and sixty-five years, crumbling overnight.

You see, those who cannot hide behind faith,

Need history, need facts.

But faith is a luxury,

A blank check to rewrite reality,

Because what is a god

If not a fairy tale spun by drunks

Selling dreams to grown-ups too scared of daylight truths?

The train reeked of Hindu piss on Muslim blood.

Because piss leaves the body.

Blood—blood is all of you.

And when the blood boils, fire follows.

And fire, fire is ritual.

So the Muslims made a ritual of their own—

A funeral pyre of Hindus aboard the train.

Fifty-nine Hindus, the price of erasing four centuries of Muslim pride.

The history denied in Ayodhya was rewritten in Godhra.

Burning a train was just the preface.

It took a decade for Muslims to claim vengeance.

It took Hindus less than a day.

Because democracy is about majority.

Hundreds of women raped first, burned later—

Because you must kill what lies beneath the skin

Before you kill the skin itself.

Thousands slaughtered like bleating goats

At a meat shop that never offered halal.

What began as a lesson became a blueprint.

What began as rage became routine.

What began as a war of gods

Became the socio-political order of the day.

And I know it will stay so.

Because if you strip away religion,

You wake up to facts, not faith.

No dogmas. No godmen. No bullshit.

And that—that is the real threat.

Because religion is opium for the ignorant.

And the ignorant? The ignorant are the greatest treasure of a rigged economy.