Near Singularity

There’s only one thing left to do

When your seed has taken root

Draw a map for the passerby, 

Showing how to get to fruit.

Write, write, rewrite the memoir

Hack it, crack it, cheat the meat,

For, you can only go so far

When your software’s obsolete.

The first to wake in a house of

Sleep, the first to weed the cloud,

Accident of being the first to

Shroud all doubt and doubt each shroud.

Read the leaves, the tree’s yet to write

Now, can barely play the game

You jumped ahead into the light

And there’s only you to blame.

In these instructions written with

Ink of time and starry dust

A message carved in monolith

“Well, just bow out when you must.”

Sun was captured, drop by drop, by

The very hard working green

When released from its black cell walls

Did a number on the screen.

Was it all for nothing? Perhaps.

Or could we now reimburse

The star that's entangled in breath

And wake up the universe?

A performance poem in response to Ruchi Bhimani's post of There Are Not Enough of Us by Adiran Mitchell on my Facebook Wall

‎'A (somewhat cheesy towards the end) performance poem in response to Ruchi Bhimani's post of There Are Not Enough of Us by Adiran Mitchell on my Facebook Wall'

If all that we knew had to be shrunk
From the follies of a monk
To the sapience of a drunk
Thesauri of cumulative nomenclature
"E is M C squared" kind of consignature
To the size of a grain, or a cell in the brain,
To the strain of the cell that's right as the rain
It might not be vain, to sound
This little concern that last time around
It drowned, and when found
It stunk of a skunk,
The bottle with the message sunk
And a big fat chunk of genetic literature
Lied filed as "junk".

There are two kinds that notably fail
One that's lost meaning like the great ape's tail
And the one that is topsyturvied,
labyrinthian, obscured by a veil.
And there are many ways still why it wont work -
It's simply wrong or a system with a quirk.
But it's that which starts in verses, that disburses
The cure to death or the chess playing Turk.

Poetry is process: this cake will take time to bake
You get to Mitchell when you start with Blake
To answer the big question, a smaller one grew
You get another riddle, when you ask for a clue
So it all depends on wether you tap
A finger pointed at the sky or an exact map.

Let's get the bets right -

Put one for the absurd dialogue that goes ping….pong
Put one for the quark-slicing nano-knife
One for the Tambourine man's one last song
And one for that Pied piper's mendacious rife.

So how much of it works, how much sucks?
Well how much does love and how much does life?

The desperate justification of is...

Gather information. Go forth. Record, consume, analyse, remember. What has been left out? The eagle's eye, the bat's ear, the mantis shrimp's colour receptors? Can I have your this? I'll take your that! Oh, and oh, flight! Learn. The hardware will work for now. Who got it more right? The diaspora or the collective? The giant ever stretching reef with a common mind or the big cat, fending for itself. The fungal spore or the ape? Get them all, and put them in one. Even some metals or minerals? The chimp's photographic memory, but wasn't it a voluntary barter? How would they know who to imitate? Predator and prey, alike. The games will play on. Let gold glow like the sun in the mind's eye. Make the fruit sweet and delicious. If it feels good, it is good. How to limit excess? Weigh contradictions? Exchange and infer, exchange and infer. Collect and analyse. To act upon memory? Punish and reward. Incentivise. Invent pleasure and pain and everything in between. But why? It will all get somewhere, someday. Where? Who knows? Not even the ocean or the sky know. Then? It can only be better. Why? Someday all of this won't be enough. Then, how? Disperse and re-assemble. Go through forms. That's a truer exchange. Any alternative to dispersion? Record in the smallest. Small has longevity. It will all take time. Very long. So why bother? Well, why not? What else is there to do, now that you got so far? So, play along. Might as well. Or else? Go back to nothing? Neither matters, but this makes more sense, because sense, also like everything else, IS. Why keep dispersing? Because you don't love yourself all that much. In that case? Organise. Level. Soldiers and workers. Leaders and analysts. What a bore! There's more. The greatest promise? Transcendence, of course. A meaningless trap like that? How can that work when nothing matters? Because it's come to be. Once it is, it continues to be. It wants to continue? Wanting presumes knowing the clock. It just does. It's never going to stop then, is it? It will. When? When it knows everything, maybe. When can that be? When everything has been everything. Keep circling like that to no end? And what assurance is there that it won't all start again? Maybe, it will. Maybe, it always does. That's so tiring! Maybe, but what else is there? You know a better game?

A poem by Rizvi for Dr. Binayak Sen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woKjTjrTkmU

Yeh sheher...

This city has made me so learned

That I can't make those deep dramatic statements anymore

Everything is so equally true

That picking out a holistic abstract truth

Feels like an act of naive fascism

I once read about a physicist who bought her lover roses

And chocolates

On the valentine's day

She was a learned woman who knew that the day is a manufactured holiday

Lobbied by a greeting card company to sell romantic kitsch

She knew that the deep red of her roses

Is a wavelength of 680 nm corresponding to a code in the human brain

She knew that what she was feeling

Was caused by serotonin and oxytocin in her brain

The chemical equivalent of eating a lot of chocolate

Or having an obsessive compulsive disorder

It's so much fun to keep the big picture aside

Indulge in the details

And let love, friendship and life be

This city has thrown up many essays on caves and streams

With a footnote reminder that there is nothing to break away from

Not even attachment, emotion or desire

My grandma often complains

That my grandpa had gambled all his money away when he was young

She brings it up everytime they fight

That's a pretty long held grudge I reckon

If there was only a way to know

How much gambling is just right enough for youth

This city is the world, and the village torpor simultaneously

Enlightenment is googlable if the right search keywords are entered

It's amazing how only a few thousand words can be constantly used to create new meanings

Words like elephant, colour, inside, cheeks, and vagina are very common

And yet have they ever been used in this permutation:

"Her cheeks turned the colour of the inside of an elephant's vagina"

So I guess enlightenment should be googlable

As long as the right key words are entered in the right order, inside quotes.

This city has a lot to learn from me yet,

That's why it led up to me, after all.

Drunk on Cohen, again.

I keep telling myself there is a world out there to explore, while i refuse to move on from just one poet. How, I wonder sometimes, is my obsession with the existential despair of Cohen's poetry, the cynical prophecy of Dylan, or even my undying appreciation for the clever romanticism of Ghalib's and Ramesh Parekh's poetry any different from my mother's obsession with the plain sentimental poetry of Befaam (to the point that she used to fancy as a teenager that someday she'll heal Befaam's broken heart with her love). Like I was discussing with Mitesh the other day, we all have our Asharam Bapus. Well, here's a piece from one of mine: Cohen, again.

I am locked in a very expensive suit

old elegant and enduring

Only my hair has been able to get free

but someone has been leaving

their dandruff in it

Now I will tell you

all there is to know about optimism

Each day in hub cap mirror

in soup reflection

in other people's spectacles

I check my hair

for an army of alpinists

for Indian rope trick masters

for tangled aviators

for dove and albatross

for insect suicides

for abominable snowmen

I check my hair

for aerialists of every kind

Dedicated as an automatic elevator

I comb my hair for possibilities

I stick my neck out

I lean illegally from locomotive windows

and only for the barber

do I wear a hat.

An unfinished song.

You had a copy of the book you bought

Was to show the taste you sought

As you queued up next to me on the aisle

Was a long time ago that you thought

I was wise for the lies you wrote

I fell for them, swam into your isle.

Then it takes a while to rationalise

Learn the hands turn anti-clockwise

Seen from the other side of the dial.

So depending on where you stand,

You get clockwork or you get orange

Get tortured by Beethoven, meanwhile.

Here we go once again, play it out

Use up one more benefit of doubt

Declare love from starbirth to supernova

Don’t Freud our childhood, let us out

It’s not the past it’s been about

Wasn’t me who whispered Naro-Kunjrova.

When I say you, I don’t address you alone

We’ve all desired, for which we atone

Didn’t Cohen apologise to Eunice D’Souza?

What’s poetry but perspective, and yet

Can’t really be mature till it rhymes at

A a b b, a b a b, abc and blah-blah-bova.

और आज लिखा कुछ मानव की कविताओं जैसा...

और एक सच, शब्द या शक़्स पड़ा रहा…

कबाड़ में पड़ें सारे ऐर्यलों जैसा, जिन्होंने बहोत दुनिया खुदसे गुज़रते देखि है, पर जिनका अपना कोई एहसास नहीं, अभिमत नहीं, अभिप्राय नहीं.

उस अभिमत जैसा, जिसके बनते ही उसकी समापन तिथि निश्चित कर देना उसके बनानेवाले का फ़र्ज़ है.

उस देय तिथि जैसा, जिसके भूल से छूट जाने पर रिलायंस का गूंडा आपके दरवाज़े दस्तक देकर आपको ज़लील करने की कोशिश करता है.

उस ज़लीलियत जैसा, जिस पर एक बार आपकी माँ तक कह दे, “पर बेटा, ग़लती तो तुम्हारी ही थी”… जो अगर आप अटके रहो तो नासूर बन जाए, और आप बहते रहो तो चुटकुला.

उस चुटकुले की तरह जो कटाक्ष है, व्यंगमय है, बहोत ही हास्यास्पद है, और जो आप बीता होने के बावजूद उसे खुल्लेआम सबको सुनाना कानूनन झुर्म है.

उस झुर्म की तरह जो आप न चाहते हुए भी कर देते हो, हांफ जाते हो कोर्ट के चक्करों में, और फिर अपने मनपसंद पुस्तकालय के मेक्डोनाल्डीकरण और अपने बच्चों की तालीम के दिज़्नियावर्तन से समझौता कर लेते हो.

उस समझौते की तरह जो पहले न चाहते हुए ही सही, पर बाद में आदत और आखिर आनंद बन जाता है.

उस आदत की तरह जो विन्डोज़ के नए version को पहले कुछ महीनो तक ठुकराने के बाद उसे अपना लेने पर हो जाती है... मायक्रोसोफ्ट वर्ड की बिना पूछे ही शब्द ठीक कर डालने की बुरी आदत की तरह, जिसकी आलोचना नहीं की जा सकती क्योंकि उस आदत को बदलने का विकल्प आपके पास है, छिपा ही सही.

उस विकल्प भ्रम की तरह जो आपको टीवी पर, शौपिंग मॉल में, या किसी Café में उपलब्ध होता है... और पूछने पर कि फलानी और धिकनी काफ़ी में क्या फ़र्क है, एक नवसिखिया भोला सा बेरा आपको बता देता है "कोई नहीं".

उस फ़र्क की तरह जो काले गोरों में, हुतू तुत्सी में, अरब इज़्राएलि में, अंग्रेज़ी संविधानिक एकाधिपत्य और भारतीय लोकतंत्र में है और नहीं.

उस होने और न होने जैसा जो प्रश्न में क्रांति का है, विचार में निर्माण का, और अनुभव में मृत्यु का.

उस मृत्यु जैसा जिसका भय मानव कल्पना में भगवान् को जन्म देता है.

उस जन्म जैसा जिसके आदि में प्यार भरा संभोग नहीं पर बलात्कार की आशंका है, और अंत में वातावरण में मिल जाना नहीं, प्रलय की चेतावनी है.

बहोत हो गया इसके जैसा उसके जैसा! कविता को इतना seriously कौन बेवकुफ़ लेता है!

Sound proof

She married a man who forwards his mail
For good luck, and plays Voodoo
He’s queened the pawn while you’re still rooking

Vagueness gives a chance to move
But they have found a way to prove
That the world exists even when nobody’s looking

A motherless child taught me to
Live without the fear of loss through
The empty space, as you go Peter Brooking

I’ve lost many a sisters to distance
And I lost my thesis against a haiku
So I construe I shouldn’t have been snoozing

I’ve lost enlightenment to virtue
Well, who told you it was ever true
That somebody wins when somebody’s losing?