Epitaph

Your endless pursuits

Confined to the glass walls

The water so cold

Your red colour called gold.

Your piscean gulps

Mistaken for sounds

While we taught you tricks

Your fins wave in protest.

Your feed so rationed

Your sleep monitored

Lights kept you awake

And fresh water drowned you. 

All the same

Another journey

Another day

Another experience

Another scene

Is it another

I wonder

It is all the same

Deja vu 

Late check-in

The long train of dusty vehicles

Inching along the dustier trail

Leaving a new tail of dirt cloud

As every Columbus tries a new route.

The dust doesn't bother me

Neither the dirt

Nor the brown clouds

As I scan the horizon for the destination

The metal bird waits for me

It puffs and groans on the Tarmac

The bridge is connected

Still eating sand I scan the horizon

My captain has managed to get ahead

Leaving the curses behind

We surge ahead 

My hopes with the waiting bird

Th vehicle stops

I make a dash forward

Through seas of happiness and sorrow

I reach my carrier

Squeezed into my seat the  bird finally flies

I look down at the dust bowl

And see the never ending lines

Now illuminating the darkness below.

Lord not loud

The pachyderms looking bored

Swishing the palm leaves listlessly

Swatting flies or 

Trying to wake the mahout, I wonder

The drummers frustrations 

Find a crescendo on the Drums 

The trumpeters

Mock the drummers

The cymbal crashers 

Punctuate the drum beats

The dark taut bodies

Sweat streaming down in rivulets

The tempo picks up

The players make faces 

Taunting each other

Percussionists taunting the flutists

My ears can no longer hear

I look back at the wise  pachyderms

The Lord sits benign on their vast foreheads
Now I know why they  become rogues.

Directions

The first time I experienced the use of GPS services was while being  driven by a friend to a four hundred and fifty year old place in the university town outside Amsterdam. It was a cold, wet and dark evening and the warm voice from the device, though in Dutch, was reassuring. The voice took us out of the dimly lit maze of narrow cobble stone alleys into the wide and bright motorways.I was quite  fascinated by GPS device in the car.

A couple of years later when I changed my car, the salesman tried his best to sell me the latest AV system which had built-in GPS. I was not keen on two counts. First -  the city was in a wonderful state of evolution. Major roadworks were on, even the driveways in apartment blocks were not excluded from this frenzy of construction activities. The GPS device to be useful would have had to be a real-time system. Overnight diversions and road-blocks were order of the day (night too!). I am sure if I used a GPS, I would be making turns into  non-existent roads. Second - the car that I was buying had enough of new features that I had to learn and I was not keen to add this to the learning curve. So whenever, which was quite often,  I had to drive kilometers to take an exit or to make a U-turn in order to undo the wrong turn or direction I took, I would think of the missing GPS device in my car. 

This year I got a GPS device as a birthday gift from  my daughter. I am yet to fathom the reason why she chose this gift. Was this to ensure that I reach her to her destination in time in future or she finds me directionless! But now I have a companion in the car. Someone who keeps giving me directions which I choose to ignore most of the time. It has become a habit in the mornings to switch on the device and make it navigate to my office. It does give the feeling that I am being 'driven' to the office, but I score small victories by ignoring the instructions and making detours.

The internal GPS that we have are what we all are born with. The upgrades to this GPS software happens all through our life. Many a times we choose to  ignore the  feedback from our GPS. But  when we lose direction in life the poor device gets  the blame.

print media

A fire was kindled when I first read about the Kindle. But then my region was not 'covered' and the impulsive buying did not happen. Now when every manufacturer has given us doses of tablets and pads to use , Kindle has again fired .This time in colour. But if I am 'kindling' books why do I need colour. I still like my books black on white.

So , for my generation , which pioneered the computer revolution and (but) still talks of the good-old days of KBs and FDDs and mag tapes - what fire gets kindled ?

I tried the audio books . Did not find the experience very enjoyable. Could not dog-ear the cassette tapes and ended up going back and forth to find the last read paragraph or page. Concentration was another issue. My first attempt in this mode of 'reading' was listening to Covey's '7 Habits' in the car. The cassette was a takeaway from a training and it took me many weeks to finally complete the 'reading'. Then came the audio-CDs . Again the old issue of 'cannot dog-ear'.

From the audio books , I moved to e-books. This certainly was better and was almost as good as the good old humble books. The only downside being the reading locations . I cannot read the e-book on my laptop from my favourite reading corner for obvious reasons.  I have tried to coax the text-to-speech tool to read the e-books for me. However a new issue came up with this - 'john' or 'jane' who reads it are highly unemotional. They read with such monotonous styles that they can make Rip van Winkles out of insomniacs .

While I wait fired up for my kindle - I think of the grand libraries that I have spent hours in  and the lovely book shops where I have browsed happily for long. What will happen to them . Will they become museums . I look around to see that book shops are disappearing or evolving to a wider experience store. The area taken up by book shelves in the book shops are reducing. More space is taken up by toys, coffee mugs  and various other related and unrelated accessories.

 Digital books have evolved and certainly become much more acceptable. I read more newspapers online than I subscribe to.  That kindles the thought again.

regurgitating

I have watched bovine creatures
on moonlit nights
lying on their  straw mattresses
regurgitating to glory                
I have always wondered
what do they think
as they move their jaws
east to west and west to east
the occasional shake of head
to dislodge the irritating fly
or to erase a disturbing memory.
After a days grazing , the tired limbs rest
while the hurriedly eaten grass gets re-processed.
After decades of wandering I rest mine
 and memories come back for reliving.
They taste different from when consumed.
The painful thorn I consumed now
tickles my tongue
and the greenest leaf I pursued
and consumed
now feels insipid.