Torn Love

I fell in love with a precious stone,
Shared his sparkle and his ground.
Leapt with him on that wave we see,
And beckoned the cosmic black.

The bank was then, still and withdrawn,
And a silent river used to be torn upstream,
I lay beside my overwhelming love,
Unmoved by the shadowy goliath.

I watched one and then another stone pass,
Writhing and tussling the silent river
I bid adieu to such friends and foe,
As I lay beside my overwhelming love.

Soon the colors of the leaves changed.
They died and fell apart, as I gauged
The storm arrived and the sea fell prey.
And the lightning struck, making me a prey.

He watched me go, to the farthest land.
Where his eyes couldn’t sense his pursuit.
It was then he shouted loud, for no avail
He stretched to shoulder my pain, much in vain.

I emerged to pierce the oblivion,
To break- free from the demon’s dance.
It was an intense struggle against fate.
And all that I had seen in the past.

The nights now spoke louder than the days.
The fort of strength shattered across.
And I watched him go to the farthest land.
My faith and soul collapsed.

I bit the dust and tumbled down every rise,
I could only hang on to the memoirs of the spring.
When he had echoed the refrain of eternal love,
When his touch shielded the fragile sill.

How did the seasons change, so quick?
while I was raising a lovely castle at the edge.
I had pinned hopes and adorned it with life.
And I had pleaded him to be a part of it.


I lost a world, I blame the gem.
But the gem was after all, only a stone
He shared a magical stride with me.
And vanished ‘ere I could disagree.

When I'm gone

The murmur of the blooming bud,
Voices no silence when I leave.
The rains don’t stop.
No kitten cries, when I leave.

The land’s warm, reserves aplenty,
No love is scarce when I leave,
Amidst a tear and a half,
They say good bye when I leave.

The stream of thoughts, a bright blue,
Will soon seep down, once I leave.
They will caress what they have got
Once I leave

Then they will detect, a poster or two
Which says – ‘ I miss you’, once I leave
They will see another and notice a void
Once I leave.

Past that, they would accelerate their life
And gear it up, after I leave.
They would linger engaged, hear no song
After I leave.

Mono-sight’s a boon, while they bond
The oaths don’t matter after I leave.
Glory of their own is enough to spice it up
After I leave.

The prospects at the far end,
The celebrated past, triggers them, after I leave
They look baffled at the distant horizon,
And wonder whether they are bereaved.

They wander about, panic struck,
Wild about the soaring pitch.
They find my absence odd
And what they did wrong, long after.

Then they pretend that they see nothing absurd,
And claim life to be a roller coaster,
They agonize their present, offend the long-gone.
And reflect what they did wrong, long after I’m gone.

They play a game and watch the moon,
And parade that night, their triumph too soon.
While their heart thumps, and misses that beat.
Wishing profusely to be with the forlorn.

The crave cant wait, nor the lonesome sky
They want me back, long after I’m gone
The story does not end until I’m found.
Long After I’m gone.

Will be back!

After my last exam, I waited for the bus outside the Mac building, which was an intense hub of activity, much unlike the rest of Canberra.Students, mostly Chinese, hung about the place, discussing the exam paper. Their presence failed to have any affect on me. I stood dreaming about the next fifteen days. I was going back home after finishing one year at uni. I wondered if life would have been any different if i was studying one of the popular courses at VTU. I concluded that the difference is more than i can comprehend.

• After shifting off campus I had realized the difference between apathy and tolerance.
• I had known the power of silence and their different types.
• I had understood what it was to walk home alone at 11:30 pm in the night after a tiring day spent at the uni library.
• I had discovered the true 'fun' of hanging out at a coffee club.
• I had discovered that culture hardly plays a role between individuals when they have the same wavelength.
• I considered the importance of networking.
• I knew what it was to safeguard your true nature in the midst of emotional turmoil, stressful environments and lonely nights.
• I learnt the importance of internet banking.
• I habituated smiling.
• I was now used to environments characterized by cold winds, pollution-free air and non judgemental people.

I guess the list continues and so does the journey. But i still long to be back home, to listen to the 'lamest' of kannada songs on FM, meet friends and have extended conversations.

Emotions: Feelings to die for

A few millennia ago, due to certain ‘mistakes’ on the part of mother nature, sea-bound whales chanced upon land. The rest, as they say, is history.

A quick survey of the phenomena concerned with the surroundings and the development of nature around that time leads us to a chilling question – did the animals kill themselves emotionally? Did the animals, with their well developed brains evolve too fast emotionally for their own good? Did the plants and trees, with their lack of decision-influencing brains have an ‘emotional’ edge over the animals and insects?

Well, owing to the obvious absurdity on the scale regarding the questions above, perhaps not. But of late, socio biologists have come up with a new claim – animals unconsciously time their demise. This revolting statement manifests itself to many spheres of conclusions, some seemingly far fetched. Take for instance the salmon, which swims upstream and up waterfalls. A totally suicidal mission in the interest of a bizarre homing and nesting habit. A mistake in evolution. Or, consider the sad story of lemmings. Lemmings are known to actually commit suicide. Each 4 years there is a cyclic demographical boom of the lemmings (small arctic rodents) followed by a desperate massive migration during which many die throwing themselves into the rivers, lakes and seas. It has been regarded as a collective suicide, conscious or involuntary, caused by over-population.

The attention which I wish to draw is to be focussed on the emotion behind such decisions taken by animals. Even psychologists of today have agreed that emotionally weak people are medically the toughest nuts to crack, if an otherwise easily and totally curable disease afflicts them. Plants, which as such suffer few diseases when compared to animals, seem to get over them in the course of an evolution interval or two. Rarely does a particular species of plants suffer from the same disease years on end. They totally adapt to the environment, and quickly.

This draws us to another question – the role played by emotions in mentally advanced species of organisms in the ability to adapt to new environments. Here though, the answer is obvious. The better the brain better is the chance of survival over diverse environments. But the answer pertains to only a long term quo. According to noted socio biologist Edward O. Wilson, 85% of all organisms with a reasonably advanced brain structure showed signs of mental depression when something they liked, or were used to, were taken away from them. Which means, in a way, the more mentally (and hence emotionally) developed an organism is, the chances of its survival in a new territory or environment is diminished. Not just that, even a small change in the DNA structure in the genealogy of such organisms has wide spread changes in its emotions, as is explained by the case of lemmings.

Before we conclude, let us examine a few more cases of over-development of the emotional instinct has made the fauna seem like fools before the ‘brainless’ flora around us.

• In a natural reserve in Zimbabwe, chased from their pride, luck seemed to have encountered a pair of old hungry male lions. They cornered a warthog, but the animal escaped in the last moment in a den. One of the lions, pushed by the hunger, tried to follow it, but he got trapped in the narrow hole. His partner tried to help him, pulling him out with the paw, but when the trapped lion started roaring of pain, he stopped. The trapped lion died asphyxiated, and the next day, his partner hardly managed to pull out his corpse. Sooner, the second lion was found dead next to the body of the other. He had refused to go hunting, and died of hunger.·
• This case occurred in Ostiglia (in Italy): Franz, a German shepherd dog, was lying on the railways line, near the railway station. Workers always chased away with stones the dog, but soon after the dog returned, and one day, the dog met with the Verona-Bologna train, and was run over. Franz had lost his master, condemned two weeks before to one year in jail. Since she had disappeared, the animal refused food, haunting through the city, like a suffering soul missing a beloved one
• Some birds, with a more complex behaviour, can suicide, like parrots. In a pair of pet love birds, the male got an injury that killed him in one hour. The female, witnessing the sufferance of her partner till he died, imitated all his movements, like she would have suffered the same way like him. She kept on imitating this even after her partner died, and this had a harming effect on her inner organs. Her vitality dropped, and she died soon.
  

Drawing congruities with human behavior in the same light is too obvious, and unnecessary. As we are at the threshold of a vast era of new-age discoveries and inventions, much attention has been diverted away from the essence of man, and the human soul. For, examining within the deep insides of our spirit has wrongly become synonymous to emotional weakness. The not-so-mystic ‘mystic’ yogis of India have long held it that salvation can only be achieved with disillusionment of worldly entities, and emotions.

One step and then another

Claiming the universe to be mine,
I was born one day.

I hugged the land,
Some squandered thoughts, beliefs.

I belonged to the sun and the moon,
Yet, I yearned for more light.

Sane vanity I perceived.
I knew the picture was skewed.

Royal channels of faith,
I found scattered among the distressed

Appeal and Charm grew on me.
I shunned the stray.

I saw different worlds in an eye.
I saw different faces in the mirror

Breathes grew shorter, faster.
Solace ripened and wasted away.

Time healed the injured, the hurt.
They ran again.

They wanted to sleep
They wanted to rise.

It is an endless journey, I noticed.
It’s all about building the nerve.

It’s all about hugging the land,
Some squandered thoughts, beliefs.

It’s all about claiming the universe.
Like, it was, the day I was born.

The Glass wall

I felt it. It was strong,bold and certain of its existence. It glowed in the dark, making everything around it insignificant. It could move. It could obstruct.It could camourflage beautifully.
It was the glass wall.
It had been growing for a while, I noticed before it assertained itself in my path of life.
I had heard about it before. My pals had warned me, that it would be on a lookout for its victims every now and then. But, I failed to react in time. (I guess that's what happens with most people. They live their life as if it's protected in spite of the constant threat of an intrusion.)
After a while, I began to treat it like a disease. Something i needed to get rid of quickly to stop it from affecting other faculties.
I drained resources, tried various strategies, penalized the agents.
In this process of combat, just one concept triumphed. I call it, the ' the unbiased foreigner' concept. The philosophy I applied was based on five steps-

• Initiate a belief, that the glass wall does exist but can be handled.
• Identify patterns in its establishment and graph the growth. Pin point highs and lows.
• Clarify to the individual involved ( often to oneself) extreme consequences of rapid movements in the graphed chart and draw lines of protection against the glass wall.
• View the agents involved with a pinch of salt.
• And finally handle the situation as an unbiased foriegner.

Note : these steps can be understood and applied only when one realizes that the glass wall between two individuals has emerged and needs to be taken care of ;)

The Weird Springtime

What feelings do the first signs of spring inspire in you? Spring for most of us means the end of cold dreary days, the coming of warmth and sunshine, joy, birdsong, pretty flowers blooming, love in the air and so on. I can just picture romantic nature poets like Wordsworth or Shelley sitting under an oak tree, feeling the caress of a gentle breeze and smelling the heady odour of damp earth and pollen. They have captured nature at its best in their poems – its bounty, the playfulness of squirrels and lovebirds. But all that they saw was from a human’s perspective (which is natural of course). And what they and the rest of us fail to appreciate is, what nature as a whole actually sets out to do each spring. Summer is the only time of the year nature has got to propagate itself – to ‘Go forth and multiply’ as is famously preached by the Roman Catholic Church. So what the season really represents is each species’ struggle for survival.

Spring is not the carefree season of joy – for there is no time to waste. Every precious moment under the sun must be spent in searching for food, fighting for mates and nesting sites, feeding the young, protecting them from predators and storing food for the next harsh winter. All the fun and frolic is like the fearful excitement of a war zone: Will I survive to see tomorrow? Will I have the next meal? Will I find a mate in spite of my neighbour being a promiscuous show-off? Will I keep the raccoon from butchering my babies? (Are synonymous with: Will I survive to see tomorrow? Will I have the next meal? Will we lose the war and have our enemies kill our children and rape our women? ... which are quite often the questions that come to a soldier’s mind at wartime.)

One might wonder what prompted me to take such a morbid view of the whole thing. Well it was an article I read, since I am quite fascinated with birds, about the sparrow and the eastern bluebird. It said and I quote:

“Competition for nesting cavities between Eastern Bluebirds (Sialia sialis) and introduced species such as European Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) and House Sparrows (Passer domesticus) is mentioned often as a cause of the well- documented decline in bluebird numbers in the eastern United States… implicate aggressive competition with House Sparrows as the cause. Besides direct observation, correlational evidence including records of House Sparrow occupation of nesting boxes and incorporation of bluebird bodies into House Sparrow nests associates traumatic death of bluebirds with competition from House Sparrows…that each day visited the bluebird nest and relentlessly pecked at the young bluebirds and any defensive adult till they succumbed to the contusions on the head and/or breast…”

I’m sure you agree with me that it sounds ghastly. I always thought of birds as small, beautiful creatures – at least the insect eating, nectar sucking ones. Not vicious, cruel and territorial beasts! I guess when Herbert Spencer used the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, he wasn’t kidding! Surviving out there, in the wild, is not a joke; you and I won’t last a day in the jungle.

Apart from food and territory there is the battle for mates. Mallard, one would possibly know, is a beautiful duck; the males have a glossy emerald-green head. But they have strangely aggressive mating habits:

“Mallards have rates of male-male sexual activity that are unusually high for birds. In some cases, as many as 19% of pairs in a Mallard population are male-male homosexual^. When they pair off with mating partners, often one or several drakes will end up "left out". This group will sometimes target an isolated female duck — chasing, pestering and pecking at her until she weakens (a phenomenon referred to by researchers as rape flight), at which point each male will take turns copulating with the female. Male Mallards will also occasionally chase other males in the same way. (In one documented case, a male Mallard copulated with another male he was chasing after it had been killed when it flew into a glass window.)”

All of this probably makes me feel extremely glad that I’m human. And I also begin to understand what makes us humans different from other animals. Although there is an amusing movie called ‘The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human’ in which aliens try to comprehend what drives humans to irrational behaviour when in love, I think we’ve achieved through evolution, a much longer reproductive period (not restricted to spring) and the ability to care for and nurture our children, physically, mentally and spiritually.