When someone we love dies, everything changes. The normalcies of routine possibly give an outward sense of balance, but the turmoil inside resembles wreckage. We sink, wish to remain sunk, everything around us seems trivial - almost as if we can see through the artifice of the world, unable to tell everyone how they were missing out on the most important things in life, as they fought over the the insignificant, the trivial. And as is our wont as good people - we remember the good and the...

A lot of what we are, the comfort of living, the beauty of how we view the world, is when we know we are cared for, and the ones closest to us are people we have implicit faith in.   To know that love is a thought away, that nothing will take away the presence of the person we care for  the most, is to know that the primary foundations on which our esteem, worth and respect lie on, is immutable and unmoving. And in a broad sense, it gives us permission to fly - or not - with the full...

So much of our life is a reaction. As if it is determined by someone else’s priorities and emotions and needs, and we become byproducts of their ambitions and needs.   It could be anybody - a father for whom we become the fulfillment of failed dreams, a lover whose hauntings of failed relationships find shelter in our quiet nooks, a brother who leans on us when he needs validation or unquestioning support. The list goes on.   And we act as obedient support systems - loyal, available, eager to...

We are often given chances in life to go beyond ourselves. These could be random happenstances, things which only we notice, and which we may choose to ignore - or not.    If we pay attention and choose to clutch at those moments and do something tiny, unwittingly we invite, if not the appreciation at least a nod, from the universe. Maybe nothing changes, maybe nobody notices, but here’s the thing - we change, in tiny degrees but enough to shift something inside us.   The quietness in this is...

There is nothing worse than politics dividing family.   I have seen people develop distaste for their dearest and closest because of being on opposite sides of the political divide.   Something which is (mere) belief, takes on an expanded definition to include a commentary on character, and acts as an unsubstantiated and unsavoury revelation. And with astonishment we exclaim “What! You support —-?” As if it was the ultimate excretion and misdemeanour.   In the city I stay in, everybody is a...

We live multiple lives. Each one of us have variations, but everyday our paths fork out. And we move from the secure to the stormy; from standing naked to being armoured; from garnering the blessings of the universe to ploughing through the detritus of the denizery.   Often we are able to navigate this transition in the simplest way possible - we remain the same in every world, raw and uncluttered, ready to take the blows for being us. But more often then not, we tweak our selves to the...

They say, in actuality, there are only two kinds of people in the world - fighters and survivors. I have often thought about this grim prognosis of life, and without attributing anything dire to it, I really think it is close to truth.   In seeking acceptances, we often have to struggle with the true us and the version the world wants to see. Because we are first a subset of a larger expectation before we start to even begin to be our own person.   The corollary to this is often the complete...

I went to Varanasi a few weeks back, and spent time wandering the lanes, in temples, on the ghats, sitting beside the river.   I was a non-sequitur: a non-believer in a holy city, amidst people who had the name of god continuously on their lips. And I saw holiness and ordinariness mesh in seamless ways. Almost like a message that a spiritual search did not entail you to be anything other than what you are - messy, complex, confused. Because that is where every journey begins.   Varanasi is...

Whenever I see couples getting hitched, I say a silent prayer of thankfulness.   Because every day the couple has a ringside view of each other, of things which they say and do. They crack a small joke, they fulfil small wishes, they stop someone from stumbling, they secretly make someone’s favourite dish,they listen with their bodies, they stand beside the window and see the morning sun drop on the floor.   We all need someone in our lives who can see us for what we are, way beyond what the...

We are such carriers of burdens. We have nothing to lose, but we carry the weight of such unnecessities. In the end, irrespective of what the Pharaohs believed, we have to leave everything behind. Which then probably is the only time we truly travel light.   But here we are - seducing, desiring, acquiring - and if not for things, we are busy burdening ourselves with myriad feelings, emotions which we should have experienced and moved on from, felt and unfelt, tasted, remembered and then...

So much of the good we have, things we are proud of, our looks, our most innate traits, are in truth merely gifts. They are an inheritance in our blood, nature’s largesse for us to build on.   But what we become is a factor of what we do with what we are given.   We can hold these gifts as talisman, to seek the good beyond them, to figure out our dharma, the very core of why we are in this world. Or we can just let them define us in shallow ways, as we work behind the facade, building our...

So much of what we are is because of abandonment. Often as reality, often as feeling. We talk but we don’t get through. Our silences are many, none find a resolution. Our words come out with warm intent, but when conjoined sound harsh. We love to death the very person we find the most fault with.   But in this morass of disintegrating hope, we are firm on continuums. We are not ready to give up. Because we know things change, people change. And no season is permanent.   And such do...

This is a repeat of one of my more popular poems, replayed with the hope of getting a new audience, who might have missed it.   "We walk under boughs heavy with fragrance, petals touching our cheeks with infinitesimal tenderness, and think back to how meaningless was what we’d said.   In a universe of a million possibilities, we could be a certainty, but we suffered our uncertain inequities.    We should have found tenderness like kittens venturing into the world - with fright and wonder and...

It’s one of the ironies of life that relationships which have persisted for years, often have hesitation built into their fibre. You know everything of each other, but are still not sure of your place in their lives. The important thing which keeps haunting you is - what do both of you mean to each other.   You say the things which you have been saying for years, she reacts the way she has been reacting for years, and both of you dislike the way you have conducted the conversation. But you...

As I gear up for the Ed Sheeran show, I’ve been trying to fathom the excitement in me! I’ve seen some terrific shows - Kylie Minogue, Kate Perry, Michael Jackson (omg - goosebumps!), Norah Jones, Michael Learns to Rock, and the innumerable gigs of favourite Indian singers and jazz bands - and somehow when I see tour rosters of my favourite artistes, I keep wondering if i can match my travelling plans to catch them perform.   And there are so many. The ones I would love to catch - Billie...

Ranjit Hoskote, the famous art critic,  poet ,writer wrote an amazing piece on Gaza and the humanitarian tragedy unfolding there. It was a piece which broke my heart, truly, as it brought out in sharp relief the incredible carnage taking place with impunity and for days on end.   But then he interlinked Gaza with Kashmir.   And that was something which he did casually, as if he was duty-bound to do so, as a fact.  And I was grieved that someone so sensitive and aware, could also be so...

I have often been cruel. Knowingly, unconsciously. With people closest to me, and invariably  because I take them for granted. So it is a mini tragedy, when I sit down and have a conversation - and I’m short, I’m angry, I’m sarcastic.   Take my mum - she is frail now, though her voice still has passion, but is veering towards gentle tones now. And I can ‘win’ any battle by the sheer dint of volume. Pyrrhic victory, if there ever was one, as she goes silent, and I keep reading the newspaper as...

This is a repeat of one of my more popular poems, replayed with the hope of getting a new audience, who might have missed it.   "We would talk of the day to make the outside world our own, and lay joint claim to our individual memories."   A home is of so many definitions. The place we grow in, the place we get our first intimations of the living world, the place we are desperate to get to at the end of a day - but also the place we are desperate to leave as we grow.   Often a shelter, often...

This awareness, this stopping to see something insignificant, the overwhelming desire not to look at my mobile for long moments - I sometimes think it’s aging which is doing this to me. The fact that I have seen a bit of life, of tragedy and joy, of the big events of life and some, and no longer wish for the large and the loud.   Now what stops me are things which seem to happen in passing. A snatch of music, the stitching of a happy conversation, a stray comment followed with a comfortable...

I doubt if there’s anybody who tends to words with such infinite tenderness. For her, they are rounded pebbles on a seashore, sea waves washing over naked feet, the gentle curve of the sea at the horizon.   She holds words the way I hold her.   But strangely when I think of her, it is always with a silent smile, like a truth which leaves us speechless, the way the sun slips out as a guest does when tired of a party.   I sometimes feel there’s too little of her in this world, someone who feels...

We as persons are so much of the people who inhabit our lives. Not only by way of how they are connected to us and change the trajectory of our lives, but what they mean to us by way of how our souls evolve. But beyond it all is their influence on our minds and hearts to define to us what we are.   Sometimes we are unsure of our own abilities to achieve, to fulfil, to create. And though we might be brimming  with every talent, we might be an uncertain wreck inside, unable to comprehend the...

We are never as strong as we feel we are. What’s ostensible, what’s shown, matters little. As we walk, with our eyes wide open, sometimes in wonder, often in fear, we need someone beside us to interpret the world.   A conversation is the blood flow of a love story.   To be generous enough to listen without interpretation, to hear without interruption, is a gift we give our loved ones. Because we already trust them. And everything we share with them is only an expansion of the shared world....

Deep inside, we all seek grounding.   In the complex hullabaloo of desires, facades and one-upmanship, within sudden dollops of searing clarity, we search for the timbre of our being and realise the glitzy syncretic synthetic fabric it is made of. And the disquiet emerges.   If the rot in our beings is not all-pervasive, the disquiet is a beginning to our conscience wanting redemption. We want to return to a point where we’d not lost our innocence though the ways of the world might have...

As 2023 turns its back with a sigh, we walk into a brand new year.   Hope - with all its bewitching deceptions - will make us wish for our best selves, to slough off the undesirable and ugly, and emerge fresh and wet, with unfazed optimism to conquer the world. But soon enough, we will know that, as always, all we need to do is to conquer ourselves.   And I sit down and make a list of what I want to leave behind in the old year and another list of what I want of the new year. And then I...

One of the incredible things which are little talked about, but one which I notice ever so often around me, is how the loss of love often frees a person in magical ways.   I tell myself - it can’t be love if it’s absence gives the feeling of liberation. But I also know how life’s bounty comes in contrarian ways. There is life within love, but there could well be revelry beyond.   I know of at least two ladies, who have had solid and steady and happy married lives, but after the demise of...