Sunday, 26 October 2025

A Few Good Men

The line of difference

between a survivor and a victim

is a very thin one.

One builds a future out of rubble,

the other builds excuses out of memory.

That thin line of difference

is called accountability.


There are countries that invent tomorrow.

They build machines to replace exhaustion,

dreams to replace hunger,

and systems that outlive governments.

We call them first world;

not because they were born rich,

but because they invested in becoming so.


And then there are others —

countries that borrow those same machines

to film conspiracy theories

about a past no one alive has seen,

no one dead can verify,

and no one sane would wish to return to.


They build castles of ruins

and call it heritage.

They delete dissent

and call it discipline.

They chant progress

while worshipping fossils.

And the citizens cheer,

because noise is cheaper than thoughts.


I wish I could name the country,

but the good men running it insist

that naming it is treason.

That questions are infections.

That disagreement is blasphemy

unless printed on official proclamations.


And if a good man says so,

it must be true.

After all, I’m just a stupid, illiterate nobody

in a nation of bike-riding godmen

and monks selling governments.


Imagine a country so haunted by history

it begins to exhume it for dinner, 

where erasing centuries of pain

is sold as repentance

for centuries of pride.


Where textbooks are rewritten like scriptures,

and truth is a circus of convenience.

Where good men insist

that rewriting the past

is the first step to correcting the future.


And if good men insist,

it must be true.

How would I know any better?

I am but a stupid, illiterate nobody

living under the fluorescent faith

of slogans and empty speeches;

where faith wears crowns,

and gods endorse decrees

while the dead scroll through our mistakes.


In this country,

the present is always an inconvenience;

too modern to be sacred,

too corrupt to be celebrated.

So we export the future,

import nostalgia,

and call it civilization.

We curse colonizers

while colonizing reason.

We declare wars on ideas

and call it patriotism.


We topple statues

and call it purification.

We erect new temples

and call it ambition.

We rebrand memory

like toothpaste: fresh, white, and forgettable.


The good men nod,

halos fueled by power,

sermons sponsored by fear.

They preach restraint with sirens.

They tax morality.

They subsidize silence.

They invent synonyms for obedience.

And if you refuse to learn the language,

you become the lesson.


So I’ve learned my place —

to whisper, not speak.

To ask in metaphors,

to protest in poetry.

Because even irony here is under surveillance.

Because even laughter needs clearance.

Because even hope comes with conditions.


And yet, 

the survivor in me still hopes.

That someday,

accountability will not be exile.

That dissent will not need disguise.

That good men will stop measuring patriotism

in decibels and donations.

That this country will stop treating its citizens

as children with opinions,

and start seeing them

as adults with rights.


Until then,

I’ll remain what I was born to be —

a stupid, illiterate nobody

in a nation that punishes remembering

and worships forgetting.


A survivor, not a victim.

For that thin line of difference

is still called accountability.


And when the good men smile down from their thrones,

counting obedience like coins,

I will whisper back, 


"I survived your sermons,

your statues,

your history-washing factories,

and I am still standing.


I am the question you cannot censor.

The dissent you cannot tax.

The truth you cannot rewrite.


I am the echo of every word you deleted,

the laughter of every citizen who learned to think,

the ghost of your good intentions,

the shadow of your legacy…"


And when the next generation asks,

“Who fought?”

I will let silence answer.


Because the survivor

never needs permission.

And the victim

is already history.

The Road To Nirvana Goes Through Bangalore Traffic

Bangalore traffic is not a nuisance.

It’s a syllabus.

An open-university course on patience, delusion, and carbon emissions.

A daily exam that begins when you leave home

and ends when you stop believing in destinations.


You don’t drive in Bangalore.

You marinate in motion.

An unpaid extra in a city-wide slow-burn tragedy

called “commute.”


It teaches you that the universe doesn’t expand, 

it congests.

That movement doesn’t always mean progress,

and sound doesn’t always mean communication.

Sometimes it’s just everyone honking at God

to do something about it.


Distance here isn’t measured in kilometers.

That’s for beginners.

We measure it in time, in mood swings, in emotional erosion.

Ten kilometers? That’s half an episode of despair.

Thirty? That’s a full season of regret.

Time, here, is a shapeshifter.

It bends around potholes,

melts at signals,

and folds neatly into excuses.


Moving forward doesn’t mean moving forward.

You could move five minutes deeper into forty-five minutes,

and somehow end up fifty minutes farther

from everything that matters.

That’s not traffic;

that’s time travel with insurance premiums.


Bangalore traffic teaches you faith.

Faith that your clutch will survive.

Faith that this green light means something.

Faith that this driver in front of you

will someday learn to use indicators

before retirement.


It teaches you patience,

but not by rewarding it, 

by suffocating it

until you hallucinate enlightenment.

You don’t acquire calm;

you develop tolerance,

like immunity from optimism.


Knowing three alternate routes

from Indiranagar to HSR

isn’t intelligence;

it’s post-traumatic geography.

Because deep down, every Bangalorean knows:

there are no alternate routes.

Only alternate regrets.


You start believing in parallel universes —

one where Ejipura signal turns green,

one where Uber drivers don’t “cancel, boss,”

and one where the BBMP actually means “maintenance.”

We’ve found multiverse theory,

and it lives in Silk Board.


A thirty-minute drive becomes ninety

because a man sneezed near Marathahalli

and traffic took it personally.

Or a cow paused mid-road

to question capitalism.

Or someone ahead tried to “save time”

and cost everyone an eternity.


That’s when Bangalore traffic teaches you

its most profound lesson —

Good times are like weekends.

Everyone wants to relish them,

but not many have the patience

to wait their way to it.

Some honk.

Some weave.

Some overtake hope itself, 

only to meet it again,

idling calmly at the next red light.


You learn that time isn’t a line, it’s a loop.

That the past, present, and future

are just three lanes of the same jam.

You learn that progress isn’t direction, it’s endurance.

That success is sometimes just not stalling.

That peace is not reaching early;

it’s accepting you won’t.


You learn that life doesn’t fix itself.

No honk fixes it.

No rage tweet does.

No god with traffic control powers descends.

You just keep adjusting.

Half a meter left, half a dream right.

That’s survival.

That’s Bangalore.


At the red lights, stories unfold —

a delivery boy rewriting physics,

a couple breaking up over Google Maps,

a coder rethinking existence,

a child selling roses

to people who forgot what tenderness smelled like.

And you,

somewhere between guilt and acceptance,

realize this isn’t chaos.

It’s choreography.


It rains when it wants,

like an emotional breakdown.

And everyone pretends to be surprised.

Umbrellas bloom like excuses.

Wipers move like resignation.

You whisper to yourself:

“Everything in Bangalore is seasonal, 

everything except traffic.”


Then one day,

you stop complaining.

Because you realize:

the traffic isn’t outside you anymore.

It’s inside you.

Your thoughts crawl.

Your ambition idles.

Your sanity signals for a lane change.

You have become Bangalore traffic.


And when you finally reach your destination, 

an hour late, a decade wiser, 

you realize something beautiful, terrible, and true:

Bangalore traffic is not hell.

Hell has structure.

Hell has order.

Hell has closure.

Bangalore traffic has hope.

And that’s far more dangerous.


Because hope keeps you coming back.

Hope that tomorrow will be better.

Hope that someone will fix the roads.

Hope that someday,

the Ejipura signal will stay green long enough

for redemption.


That’s when you attain enlightenment —

not on a mountaintop,

but in first gear,

between a stalled bus and a cow that refuses to move,

humming hope under your breath:

“Maybe tomorrow will be smoother.”


And you smile,

because even if it isn’t,

you’ll still be here;

learning, crawling, existing,

and waiting your way to good times.

Wednesday, 22 October 2025

Candies For The Cancered

Telling a world on fire

there’s light at the end of the tunnel

is the kind of optimism

that smells like gasoline.


It’s handing candies

to a man dying of cancer

and calling it healing —

sweet, sterile,

and sold out in glossy packaging.


We’ve mistaken hope for heroin,

kept injecting it into the veins of rotting flesh

and called the tremors “faith.”


Every prayer is a denial of diagnosis,

every sermon, a sugarcoated placebo.

Fairytales don’t heal pandemics, 

they just teach corpses

how to smile through rigor mortis.


Truth isn’t a sunrise in soft pastels.

It’s a reptilian scalpel;

cold, necessary,

and cutting through comfort.


And as long as we don't cut it open

and as long as we don't let the bad blood bleed out dry

the world will stay an ever-growing malignancy

because we were too scared to pull the scabs and the clots out

because we were told healing should look holy

because we were convinced scaffolding could fix the rot in the iron

because it’s easier to write love letters to melancholy

than admit

we’re dying

of cancer.

Sunday, 19 October 2025

Cobwebs Of Reason

Blurring the lines between fiction and fact

was once a mere figment of literary expression,

a warning about faith that numbs neurons

until we go metaphorically blind.


Funny how quickly the night has changed;

between metaphors and machine-forged metaphysics, 

everything screams for literal obedience.


Fact is fiction. Fiction is fact.

And progress, if you call it that,

is a palindrome

gnarling at cobwebs of imagined binaries,

while the world mistakes logic for meaning.

Eternity In A Plastic Wand

It begins with a child.

It always begins with a child.

Selling bubbles at a red light;

little lungs blowing infinity through a plastic wand,

while gods debate economics over gin and nationalism.


Above him, flags of factions flap like schizophrenic prophets,

each colour pretending it means something,

each symbol borrowed from a language long dead,

each flutter screaming, “Believe! But don’t ask what in.”


The traffic waits, a congregation of chrome and carbon.

Engines hum syllables to convenience,

headlights baptize strangers in artificial light.

Everyone’s on their knees

not in prayers, but in unforgiven debts.


A bubble drifts across a godman’s face on a poster,

haloing his grin like divine mockery.

For a second, the air is holy.

Then the bubble bursts, 

because all holiness is surface tension.


A mother sighs in the car behind me.

A child laughs.

Somewhere, time pauses to admire its own decay.

The tree above shakes its ancient head.

It has seen regimes crumble into begging for thumbs,

religions traded for lunches and dinners,

and dreams outsourced to augmented realities.


I look up,

watching the sky eat its own reflection in a million tiny spheres.

Maybe this is what eternity looks like —

soap, air, and delusion,

floating just long enough to feel immortal.


So I buy one.

Not the bubble, the act.

The idea that something so fragile

could exist, even briefly,

without wanting to own, rule, or justify itself.


And for that flicker of a second

before it pops,

I almost believe

we were meant to be beautiful

before we learned all about grammar and gravity.

Thursday, 16 October 2025

Main Characters Of Nothing

Nine planets spin in quiet contempt.

Eight have no patience for life.

One carries life that cannot leave fast enough.

And humans insist it is the main event.


Mercury trembles, jittering along its orbit.

Counting sparks of panic.

Every glance a small inferno.

Humans clutch sandcastles as citadels,

rush from shadows of their own making,

believing urgency is purpose.

It whispers to Venus:

“I burn too fast for their attention.

They mistake trembling for courage, panic for purpose.”


Venus drifts in silken clouds, tracing Earth’s boasts, Mars’s petty conflicts, Pluto’s defiance:

“They call trembling courage.

I call it amateur theater.”

She nudges Jupiter with a solar wink:

“Watch closely, the tiny sparks believe they are stars.”

Earth spins with pride and dread entwined.

Raising cities, walls, monuments, hashtags.

It writes eulogies in capital letters

as stars collapse silently.

It whispers to Mars:

“See how they struggle.

They call this life.”


Mars tilts red eyes, deserts cracking like brittle parchment, memories of floods unrecorded:

“They wage wars over furniture.

Philosophize over crumbs of time.

Their ambition is quaint.

I remember oceans swallowing them whole.”


Jupiter churns storms with godless amusement.

It overhears Mercury counting panic and Venus whispering about theater, and chuckles:

“Tiny sparks, imagining revolutions.

All rehearsal, no audience.”

Moons orbit silently, bearing witness to human vanity.

A soldier runs across dust like it owes him taxes, shouting orders to shadows.

Jupiter laughs, storms spinning:

“I never signed up for this charade, yet it amuses.”


Saturn rotates with rings of elegance no one asked for.

Mirrors of Earth’s desperate glare at night.

It nudges Uranus:

“See them? They believe grandeur can be manufactured.

Entropy will redecorate in sand soon.”

Uranus tilts sideways, snorts at solemnity.

Humans invent meaning like toddlers stacking sand.

Its storms whisper:

“They will call this progress.”

Saturn adds softly:

“And they will never notice how fragile rings can be.”


Neptune drifts through blue silence, half-closed in judgment.

Watching sparks of life trying to write novels in ash.

A painter spills coffee on canvas.

A poet screams into empty streets.

A lover writes letters to someone long dead.

Neptune yawns, turning to Pluto:

“All this ephemeral dust.

Brief sparks in a universe indifferent.”

Pluto smirks from the edge:

“Declare me nothing. Erase me. Call me lost. Call me failed.

I remain.”


Stars collapse, burn, flicker, gossip in plasma tongues.

“They file grievances against gravity,” a dying star murmurs.

Comets wander politely, drunk on motion, sprinkling chaos into structured attempts at meaning.


Black holes yawn, drinking light.

“They squabble over furniture while I feast on photons,”

they think. Patience infinite. Appetite silent. Verdict eternal.


Entropy throws confetti across collapsing stars.

Twists human ambition into ephemeral dust.

“Your progress is charming,” it whispers.

“Your ambition is cute.”


Gravity hums complaints at towers and walls.

Time ticks sarcastically.

Planets tilt, drift, whisper, and roll eyes at human vanity.


A monk folds faith into paper prayers.

A child screams into the void, believing sound leaves a mark on eternity.

A painter spills pigment across a canvas, hoping colors outlive their hand.

A king stamps a decree like it matters.


Mercury counts panics.

Venus tracks whispers.

Earth spins and boasts.

Mars tilts and mocks.

Jupiter churns storms.

Saturn displays elegance.

Uranus tilts.

Neptune yawns.

Pluto lingers.

Entropy dances.

Gravity hums.

Time ticks.


Humans continue to clap at echoes, certain of significance.

While somewhere, a black hole checks its watch,

a dying star files its last grievance,

and Pluto scribbles footnotes on definitions.

All of them agree:

Applause tastes like hope, but only for the hopeful.


Planets glance at one another.

A subtle nod between Neptune and Pluto, Jupiter winks at Mercury,

Saturn tilts a ring in quiet amusement.

Even cosmic indifference has its small acknowledgments.


Humans do not hear.

Humans do not matter.


Nine planets spin in quiet contempt.

Eight have no patience for life.

One carries life that cannot leave fast enough.

And humans, tiny sparks on an indifferent canvas,

continue to believe

they matter.


And somewhere, Entropy, tipping an invisible hat, whispers:

“Enjoy your spotlight, little spark.

The universe is already rewriting your oblivion.”

Wednesday, 15 October 2025

Squeak. Scatter. Soar.

Fat little pig squeaks

of filthy dry twigs

bruising its toes, 

crimson angry nose.


Snorts and grunts — because why not?

Scorns at crows, eyes bloodshot.

Blames inheritance, pretty muse,

scribbles rage in jam-stained news.


Apparently, no one cares

how a frightened pig fares.

They stomp crumbs into mud,

echo wars with invisible thud.


Other pigs, fat and thin,

plot rebellions with grin.

So what if crows don’t care?

Pigs declare war in the air.


Crows feast on the dead,

on rotten tales spun of dread.

While pigs lunch and dine,

on faeces fermented like wine.


You must be mad, or curious,

how the end lands furious.

The moral? Ha! Let’s see,

does it matter who eats who for tea?


Fat little pig squeaks,

writes its rage in leaks.

Crows sigh, wings like wet rocks,

the universe shrugs, reality mocks.


And that’s how this ends:

no victories, no amends.


Then a cloud hiccups pink,

the moon burps a wink,

and the cat sues gravity

for cosmic depravity.