अमरता

मैं पानियों पर लिखता रहता हूँ एक नामुमकिन सा स्वप्न
इसे मुमकिन करने के लिए ना ही कोई कलम बनी है और ना ही कोई रंग 
बस कोरी यादें भर हैं
समंदर की चंचल लहरों पर उकेरने के लिए

पानियों पर ही
 लिखा जायेगा मेरा इतिहास
ना अमर होने की इच्छा है
और ना ही याद रखे जाने का कोई  मोह 
ओस की बूंदों की नियति तो
रोशनी में चमकना 
और सूरज द्वारा निगल लिए जाना ही होता है

रोशनी तब चमकती है
जब ऊष्मा उसे निगलने को होती है
जिस उष्णता ने मुझे गढ़ा है
किसी रोज वही मुझे चमकाएगी
और निगल भी डालेगी. 

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इस कविता के अनुवाद के लिए मै अपने मित्र प्रमोद को सहृदय धन्यवाद देना चाहूँगा. कविता एक वो होती है जो कवि लिखता है और अपनी भाषा में लिखता है मगर जब अनुवाद होती है तो वो अपने आप में ही एक अलग कविता बन जाती है जो कभी उसके मूल रूप से भी अधिक सुन्दर हो जाती है, और इस बार भी यही हुआ है. ये अनुवाद मुझे अपने मूल कविता से भी अधिक सुन्दर लगा.

Immortality

I write on waters, a chimerical dream

No pens to draw, no colours to be

Just plain memories to etch

On the fickle curves of the sea

My history would be on waters

No desires of immortality

No charm of remembrance

A destiny of dew drops

Sparkle in the shine, to

Be devoured by the sun

The light sparkles, while the

Heat devours

Someday the warmth that maketh me

Shine will devour me too

rattle...

I hear the rattling of the tracks as the train passes through, playing with the wind, piercing it through. It seems like piercing through me too, drawing familiar memories from the past just trying to eke out a space within me. It seems like a journey which was never to be, always beckons me, always calls out to me, holds out a hand and I see myself running after it in the hope that sometime I would be able to catch it. But it always out paces me, it travels fast than my memory, my imagination and my impersonation of the future.

During times like these I always imagine the people, on board of the train, what would they be like, what hopes and aspirations do they carry within, what makes them take this journey?Perhaps a beloved awaiting for a reunion, a mourning, a search for new vistas of meaning or perhaps to begin life anew,  to deny hunger and the spaces which it occupies around , or the need to exile oneself from the memories and the decadence one felt around the spaces one occupied or just an aimless instinct of the traveller to reunite with the beauty of the world which surrounds.

I talk a lot (part 1)

I have heard this thing time and again, people come over to me and tell me "you speak a lot" and this comes in various ways, sometimes manifested in their body language, through the movement of the eyes trying to look away and to find an escape, through the fidgeting hands and legs which seem capable of moving but have been obstructed in some ways, through the changing contours on the faces of people which keep on hovering between the spring and the fall. I have heard this as a complaint, as a compliment (yes speaking more can be compliment too sometimes of your liveliness), as an excuse to divert the issue, as a way to tell you that its time to shut up, as an authoritative gesture to assert one's self, to quiten some one, at times to impose tranquility in absurd situations which demand silence more than words since the words themselves are futile (in these moments it is the situation which speaks rather than the person). It sometimes comes in the garb of a culture, sometimes as history and also one can not leave out psychoanalysis and then politics. In discourse it also means that one has to provide spaces for other people to make their points to present their opinions and also to listen to them.

Listening is an important art which needs to be cultivated and it comes with tolerance and with acceptance of the other, but strangely the allegation or more say prescriptions of me being loqacious still abound even when I think I have been able to develop this art of listening to a great extent. I would like to keep a finger of skepticism on me too but I think the idea of writing this in itself means that I wish to understanding this phenomenon through understanding conversation i.e. listening and speaking.

What can be the reasons for this? I would foreclose any psychoanalysis at this point since I have not been able to understand this phenomenon either through understanding of my conscious or unconscious patterns or through a history of my childhood. There might be something hidden there but I dont know if that does play an important role since our self is always in the process of formation and to pin point its determination from some events in history only would be a bit of a mistake. But still I would like to leave some leads if some body really wish to explore it from that dimension or if and when I myself find more reasons to do so. This event has to do with my stammering when I was a child, it was quite difficult to utter words and ages would pass when a sentence would be constructed. This stage remained I think till when I was five or something, infact there is an instance which is linked to this too. I think I was 4 or 5 I dont remember exactly, that was the time when new buildings were being constructed around my residence. There used to be big trenches and tanks which were dug up to store water for the construction. This used to be a playing field for us young children and we used to go their with our paper boats to float around. It was one of these days that I and my friend Pankaj were floating paper boats providing it sails to different directions, it was he who made boats and I joined in the fun since I never knew how to make them and even still dont know. But I used to be active in floating it and during one of these plays one of the boats actually went quite far away from our small hands and Pankaj tried to catch it and bring it back, he outstretched a bit far to actually fall in the tank which was deep. I did not know what to do, I could not catch hold of him and get him out so I went running to call my neighbour didi who was there, but it took pains to me to explain what had happened. But still we could manage to get him out. I still remember that event but I dont know still if it affected my speech, though we managed to save him and I got my sweets in reward but still the stammer after years remains. It precedes my speech and my beginning to the point that I can not override a person when that person is talking or intervene in between since it takes time to start and thus I have to patiently wait for my turn to speak but when I speak I also acknowledge that I talk a lot. How much it has to do with that instance I cant say but I would only take it as one reason of many reasons.

On a near death experience

The blood splattered all across the floor, struggling for the last gasp of breath
Hung in where it was the most unusual
will it come to me too with clasped jaws, where even a shriek would not escape me
While I might be stinking atthe margins or be at the centre of it all

Was it I who did it or it came through me?
While I still shudder at the sight, the pen gives way through shaking
I know it was an elegy of something which had died while someone was living

दिवाली के रंग

कुछ रंग  ढूढने निकला था घर से
हाथ में कुछ फुलझरियां  थी और पटाखे भी
मगर वो चाँद धूमिल होता दिखा
तारों की याद में

हर दिवाली मुझे एहसास दे जाती है रंगों का
कुछ पसरे रंग, कुछ बोलते रंग
कुछ मुस्कुराहटो में बिखरे उदासियों के रंग

कही टीम टिमाती रोशनिया, कही अँधेरा घने कोहरे सा
कही एक मुस्कान, कही एक लाचार सी हँसी
हर कोई लगा था रंगों को समेटने में
कुछ  खरीद कर, कुछ उसे भूला कर

भूला हुआ रंग भी तो समेटा जाता है
कभी यादो में तो कभी सपनो में

कही

चुप चाप इस गुम सुम रात में

कही से एक बूँद टपकता है

और कही एक शोर सो जाता है

कही एक नज़र खो जाती है

कही एक याद उभर आती है

On Nostalgia

It has been a nostalgic two months here in Rome, nostalgic for the same reason as all nostalgias are. For what do nostalgias claim, they claim the familiar, they claim images and memories from the past so as to dwell in the past and in this dwelling they somehow tend to bend the present towards the past. It is the tendency of making the present, which is not the past but still is the continuation of the past where nostalgias live in and here is what makes nostalgias different from memory. For memory can happily co-exist with the present, though at times rebelling against the presence of the present too. But nostalgias are also created, they manifest some lack within the present in which the human beings try to transpose their present over the past and in this process they somehow create the past too. But what has happened with me, is it a creation of the past or just the past itself which is trying to assert itself in times when the self finds itself alone with no transcendence in the realm of the other. Well, I would like to think that nostalgias live with both kinds of past, a transposed past and the real past since the transposed past itself is not mythic but comes out of a memory which is itself interpreted. It is here that we dwell in the realms of the interpretations of memory, since memory itself cannot exist outside the domain of interpretations, while we can remember events of the past but when it comes with the relationship of that event, it always happens in a context. A context i.e. our present and it is this character of relationship of the past with memory that nostalgia finds itself carefully secured.

But then one would have to understand what is it that nostalgia demands, does it as some say demand the same kind of past or even the interpretation of it or does it actually demand its recreation in the present or does it actually demand a different present itself. Actually it can be both since as one can say that nostalgia takes birth out of certain debilities that the being finds in the present, so it might actually be an attempt to overcome those lackings within us, rather than that past. But so is human being constructed and I would believe truly so, that we dwell in the realms of emotions as well as those of reasons and both come in together rather than as separate beings.

Transcendence

I still dont know what to call this poem of mine, the very first one when I started writing and thought I could put my mind to words and start creating something, but as always it has been a struggle and more so when I look back today from where I started. But still for the moment I would like to call it transcendence....

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Standing together we sail on the sails along the creative imagination of time

and move beyond the chimeras of hopes and horizons

so relish in the confines of time, the past is ever present but ever to be forgotten

you reached beyond the time to the suns and I to the time unknown

see the absurdity of reason it still calls us, wants to engulf us

the countless bounds of time still call me with their enamouring heads

the saga  of age still calls us, denounces us for being an outsider

the beauty is still heart warming, the nature is still enchanting

the people are still the same, the smiles are still the same…….

But the pain remains……the glow remains……the hope remains