Jaisi ho waisi hi aajao, singaar ko rehne do

Lines that move me to tears, everytime ....

Tagore, Gulzar, Shreya, Shaan .... 45 minutes of pure sweetness.

Even the intro by Gulzar is so poetic ...

The Red Dot

My journey to speaking at a TEDx event has been an exhilarating, edifying and exciting one. It has been a great honour and privilege to be invited to speak at TEDx Canberra. It finally happened on September 8th. It was beyong amazing!

Drought

The dry earth coughs up dust storms

While cattle scratch at the brownness,

Their tongues having forgotten

The sweetness of green grass.

But the sky is closed up like

a heart that has borne much pain,

And the clouds hold back the rain

As though in just retribution.

Would it be that the mewling of

slaughtered beasts and the gasps

of dying fish rose up from the earth

in pangs of collective wailing?

It could be that the heavens have

a thousand ears and a million eyes?

Maybe Nature communes with itself

In a language we have stopped hearing.

~~~

Wrote a poem after a long time. Australia is experiencing drought for 6 years. Cattle are dying and farmers are committing suicide.

Advice to a Prophet BY RICHARD WILBUR

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,    Mad-eyed from stating the obvious, Not proclaiming our fall but begging us In God’s name to have self-pity, Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,    The long numbers that rocket the mind; Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,    Unable to fear what is too strange. Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.    How should we dream of this place without us?— The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,    A stone look on the stone’s face? Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive    Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,    How the view alters. We could believe, If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip    Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy, The lark avoid the reaches of our eye, The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn As Xanthus once, its gliding trout Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without    The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return, These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?    Ask us, prophet, how we shall call Our natures forth when that live tongue is all Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean    Horse of our courage, in which beheld The singing locust of the soul unshelled, And all we mean or wish to mean. Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose    Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding    Whether there shall be lofty or long standing    When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

HAPPY 2018

I watched the movie ‘The Danish Girl’ the other day and I afterwards I was thinking about the difficulties a transgender person goes through even to this day. How frustrating it must be to identify oneself as some one else whilst being trapped in an increasingly alien body. How disorienting to lose connection with one’s identity and not being able to take on another. How painful to suppress this burgeoning identity and try to live a life of conformity.

When it occurred to me that that’s what we all do. R. Buckminister Fuller said, “All children are born geniuses, and we spend the first six years of their lives degeniusing them.”

Google says, the word ‘genius’ has its roots in the late Middle English word gignere ‘beget’: from Latin, ‘attendant spirit present from one's birth, innate ability or inclination’.

We have genius in us from birth, but very soon society goes about stamping it out trying to turn us into socially conforming people. And we spend the rest of our lives frustrated and despairing, seeking something we have lost connection with, not knowing what, sedating ourselves with possessions, experiences, validation. And tragically, most of us dying with our songs unsung, with our genius buried deep inside.

So, this New Year, I wish for everyone to reconnect with our attendant spirit, our daemon, our innate genius, and let it out to stretch its wings and soar.

TO BECOME THE PERSON WE WERE MEANT TO BE!

HAVE A GENIUS 2018!

~~~