The Story of History

The Story of History Beyond those beaten days’ depleted daylight Beyond the bathos of a pandemic bondage With the resurrected sashay’s charmed night Down in the dumps at the pretentious proscenium A shy orchestration sans bark and bite Afloat in the air of inarticulate mind games Intuitive rains, first ever, like the touch of Midas Informed dense minds and filled their dented bowls Birthing the quartet of Vedas and similar works There was this epic, longest ever , they say Bales and bales of tales in miscible moral wraps With a natal nugget, on tall righteous props The Mahabharata with the Gita, like Mata, Pita And its transcendental twin revered more For a daily hosanna..the Ramayana with a deep lore Banish-evil-battle-cries, confronting blasted minds Search lights, self’s unfoldment and its kind Her children made but never did dig history But loved digging up its bedraggled mystery To find bone dry drains, history’s torn veins Below multi layered mud and muddled bricks Twisted and labored logic on tensile testaments Sites that suffered blights thru unknowable nights To find the four battens , the debacle, to follow Someone on the way labeled it Harappa . All the while Light ruled, but rigours too brewed Calling often for a reordering of ways so crude Then there were slices of truce.. The Buddha..Shankara.. Of collapsed black holes the horizon was full Faded for once their gravitational pulls Exploding back as eternal stars .. Kalidasa, Aryabhata… Alongside kings ruled and kingdoms rolled ‘ Ruler’-coaster-rides on thrones and thorns followed Till bandit chieftains erased the all important lines To the dance of dust from an advancing west Battling to drop anchors on motherly chest. Bare-faced brigands. Among their odious offspring Some stood out to shine with a stupendous ring Either putting up statecraft’s show pieces Or scripting epitaphs in eponymous edifices Till dissipated and deterred they too heard The trenchant call of folks come from far to trade That would spell , in time, your damnation In manacles of measured manipulations. Against its prolonged , protracted reticulation Rose legit gripes from gregarious formations That would coalesce under the one and only Gandhi Into their momentous waking into life and freedom Split up, as it were, into two bickering fragments To play fitfully, for ever, their petulant fiddles Averse to complement under demagogic detours Falsely comfy under the convenience of inheritance -2- Six decades of self rule on, your children feel conned Not for failed hopes, but for the disharmony that haunts. An one- sport -nation fixated with a fixing -fame-game Movie-obsessed , and with its TV Blank beyond trivia and brand names. Money and food are no problem for many But, for too many, they are; vehicles are plenty But roads aren’t ; laws are varied and abundant Some redundant , but every pervert who counts Interprets them different and funnily implements. Health care wears a five star halo sans humaneness. It never frees a dying adult or kid from its kinky tubes Nor permit the company of kin to them for one last time Ignores the terminally and unmovably sick stuck at home. Agriculture does well, but farmers don’t ,.. and kill themselves Petty retailers are swell making a killing, selling farm produce. Stupidity grows muscles to muzzle humanity Hunks grow on vitamins, video games and vanity Freed millions press after pelf and power, plays hell With the weak and the women , their perennial fair game Profiteering, covert, overt, and across the board The sick, the student, the seeker after any service Any victim or one with a gripe being its victims That’s by the very cream , no less, all the same Media scream with scam and spam all the time Even the ones,( that’s about all), with their own aims The combined do’s of brash bravado and venality A rash on governance and a blot on name. Effete ethics and moribund morals, seniors mumble.. ‘Equality before law’ means ’ Advantage to the outlaw’ Freedom for the grabs means restraints to many Succour often hard-to -reach and reaching-too-late Louts and lousy offices dot street corners and roads Governance press after targets too disparate To cohere or collaborate towards a wholesome goal, Leaving holes for private or pet agendas to infiltrate. Front-end-folks or prickly pears? Menace, malice, avarice, lies, police… Unrestrained delight in deliberate discourtesies. Why -dad-anyway-Why- not- call-him-uncle-attitudes… What does not tempt is in for contempt, Being irreverent to the important, and indifferent To the different, is the norm and the trend. Democracy could well slip into demonocracy Like when “Two wolves and a goat vote to decide dinner”** In the absence of the Will to lift it to meritocracy? PS: This poem ( 100 lines, 777 words, as it turned about to be ) is about INDIA, my country. *”Mata, Pita ‘ mean Mother, Father ** Based on a quote seen somewhere. S.Jagathsimhan Nair, 26 May 2013, For Cyndi MacMillan’s contest.