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Friday 19 June 2009

Our poor man

The death bound did avoid the puddle, a journo wrote he saw
Just before the slithering men of rules consumed another raw

Wonder if he was human enough for by Jove he jumped aside
It's learnt no one gave a monkey’s for that leap loud and wide

Rumor was his only sin was calling the warder son of a whore
They also said that day the bum was clearly drunk to the core

The warder was a cultured man, so he chose an elegant word
And ‘you bastard’ was the last on Earth our hangin man heard

Was his twitching body a sign of life or was he just prison cred
For fellow convicts did ask the hangman if easy went the dead

They talked of him on smuggled pot while dreaming of the bar
Said he did not deserve the fate, you know how prisoners are

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Monday 1 June 2009

A walk in the dark

Happiness and truth are, as widely believed, contradictory. When a person seeks happiness, despite the probability that it might conflict with the truth, he makes a choice. 
It’s the nature of the beast within to build walls around this state and convince itself that nothing else exists. This intemperance, even when sought at one’s own cost, seems to be becoming increasingly tolerable.
This may well be to a great extent responsible for the resurgence of jingoism in its most potent form. The specifics do not matter to the propagators who are guilty of this self-gratifying and utterly reckless interpretation of the past and the present. There has always been a difference in perceptions on either side in case of a conflict, but this chasm is deepening thanks to the ease with which the modern day ‘experts’ are able to reach out to an audience equally willing to lend them an ear.
Individuals who, as they claim to understand it, in pursuit of something deeper end up imbibing a dangerous, almost psychopathic, understanding of either of these states. This distorted sense of freedom not only makes individuals ready to snap up things without though but also gives rise to a strange dependency on each other.
How much should then be read into words crying profanation, especailly when seen against this sort of self-indulgence.
The media, television in particular, in its twisted attempts of a bait and switch, has become a heaven for this emerging breed of know-it-alls. Half-baked opinions have become the order of the day. But, having said this, the importance of opinions can not be undermined. It remains the discretion of the organization in question who to take it from and this is where television channels, in their myopic view which seldom veers beyond TRPs, often lose the plot.
I have no particular fondness for print either, but let’s keep that aside for some other time for the intention of writing this is not to talk about the fast declining quality of journalism, which is probably now an accepted phenomenon.
Somewhere between the preacher n the follower exists sanity. And although many continue to reject the debris of impending disasters strewn around them, it’s becoming hard stage, for the optimist, to wade through.
Therefore, in most cases the call for a blood feud owing to victimization of some kind holds little water and is reduced to merely, and alarmingly so, a hedonistic exercise by those propagating them.The impact of the words of ‘experts’ of all kinds in pursuit of their sixty seconds of fame cannot be neglected, especially when the number of ‘mental wreaks’ willing to lap it up is greater than ever today.
So, what is this quest? Is this the quest of truth when facts are picked from the past to score a point just because someone can? More often than not such callus indulgences result in a gross miscalculation of the situation at hand and so potent is this stupor of deriving fulfillment with the inconsistent use of facts that often the perpetrators don’t even realize the gravity of it. Only the victims do, and they are termed, quite extraordinarily, the ordinary people.
Interestingly, as I write this, LeT Chief Hafiz Saeed has been freed by the Lahore High Court. Pakistanis believe he, as the Head of Jamaat-ud-Dava, has done a lot for the ordinary people. Indians say he’s a self-centered criminal responsible for the killing of many ordinary people. Perhaps they are both right.


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