Madness

I often think I am probably MAD ! EM ......A.....D

I am mad because i don't behave the other people behave.

I am not normal. I do things which at my age people don't do.

The other day a young lady put it very bluntly : at your age you should read newspaper, watch the news and serials, you should wear Lungi at home and out side a pyjama and half kurta, you should trot not gallop,

You should eat easily digestible green banana and soft small fish, go to bed early and in the morning wait for your cuppa, and devote your time mostly reading religious books and chant " Harinam"!

UNFORTUNATELY none of those appeal to me , so I am mad.

Surprisingly our society gives a kind of definition of normalcy. Certain behaviours are considered to be normal others are not. You push your conception about FREEDOM too far , and you end up being labelled as abnormal or mad. Once the label is given to you it goes on working indefinitely.

You can restrain yourself with your idea of freedom.Or you can push your sense of freedom with restrain. You are truly free when you respect another individuals freedom.

If I fall in love with someone and it is reciprocated it is an expression of freedom and howsoever abnormal it looks ( ??? ) to some individual in our society I think it is a kind of behaviour which must not be derogated.

In the field of creativity extreme passions are a prerequisite and this extreme passions among the poets, artists,singers , composers and so on bring excellence in their respective fields. Extreme passion brings altered consciousness which is considered to be sometimes a form of Lunacy.In normal day to day life they are misfits and cannot be accepted . So ultimately these great lunatics get so disillusioned with

many relationships they have that they either end their lives tragically or end up in the asylum.

I am mad, I am lunatic, I am abnormal but I love this universe madly

and you are in the centre of this universe.

Memory

Buried under the chasm of your mind

all those regrettable !

where would you run

from the memory of

sunset dusk ?

And some vermilion sunrise

your animal closeups,

or that reflection

of your surprising agony

of nearness,face to face ?

where do you think

you would hide your tears !

We all shall return with the procession

of crpse and their memories

their groans and their grunts

to the disfigured graves,

wouldn't we?

Magic

In my childhood I loved to watch the magician's tricks.

You know, you sit there and the magician cuts a young lady

right in front of your eyes and then after a while the lady reappears

from the back of the auditorium. He takes someones watch and

with a hammer break the watch into pieces much to the owners

distress. The watch reappears from someplace else. Or right in front of our eyes he burns a bank note and amazingly that reappears from some ones inside pocket. We used to sit there and found great pleasure and excitement being constantly " Fooled".Yes Fooled!!! I think we like to be fooled, proved to be stupid or dumbo.

As we grew up we gradually understood the tricks of those magicians but newer Magics started to bewilder us. Like in child hood , when we asked ourselves " How did he do it"? we see newer magics in our life we keep wondering, How does he do it? In our college days when one chemical converted another ingredient white or blue we were amazed. When the pickpocket gave us a feather touch of our moneybag we were amazed and felt so stupid. When my girl friend promised to love me throughout her life and then hopped on to some one's bed next night we were amazed and stupefied.

But there is another form of magic which is being performed everywhere

in the earth and the universe. We witness this performance every minute , every day.Some great invisible magician is performing his act through the nature , the weather, the sunrise the colour of the sunset, the rain the magnificent, the dangerous, the devastating , the breathtaking beauty in the animal and plant world by some magical spell. Can one explain the events in the phenomenal and noumenal world and predict the relationship between the cause and effect. Al the branches of knowledge , all the shastras, all spiritualist tried to find the how and why s. But still the uncertainty remains just like the magic show of the magician of my childhood.

The greatest magic show of this magician is " Your ignorance about yourself" and " He loves us to keep wondering . WHAT A SHOW !!!!

You Burn

The ancient incense burns
The fragrance lost navigation,
My beloved moves away
in helpless rage,like thee Beas *
Her heart in Ouroborous *

Applauding rain hammers
on the window pane.
I am buried in my writing desk
while the night lamp whimpers !
The world sleeps while
she on the insomniac bed
clutches her restless thighs and wait for her destiny.

Malhar* brings tears
we both are washed away.
Citizens wake up
and sit down to scribble
the inconsequential song
while the nocturnal owls hoot
declaring a war ! * Beas..Bipasha , a river in punjab and himachal
ouroborous ...the meeting of end with the beginning
Malhar ... aclassical raga