Sleeper Class: Bangalore-Delhi and Back

Outcrop of rocks-
peacocks.

Herons line
industrial slime.

green parakeets
green groves
of green mangoes.

Midget fort
dilapidated, camouflaged
on a midget rock .

Decapitated trees
in pyramids.

A stone in pious orange
under a scraggly tree
-middle of nowhere.

Brilliant bougainvillea
blazing
in vast arid land.

Fat tyre tracks meandering
all over barren land-
playing? hunting?

The gait of a goatherd.
slow, swinging, free.

pale green on pale gold
and chocolate land-
sugar fields.

Orange clouds,
lit from below
in violet sky.

First showers -
neon greens shade
grey and gnarled.

How to dare, to care?

Bent men, harsh sun,
small hammer,
breaking mountains.

Boulders on a barren land -
a flock of seated goats.

Indicting Nice

I live amongst nice people - people of gentle tones and pleasant smiles, helpful hand to ease small pains. People born into nice, or cleaving one's way to the creamy top to become nice.  Nice people accepting their deserved or earned privileges as also the depravity of the rest -independently. They practice being nice with other nice people, and soon believe they are the world.

 I am surrounded by people in cloaks of nicety and insulated by it. For, how else are nice people nice, without being blind - to the rape of this earth, or its daughters?? To the pervasive hunger and the wretched starvation? How are nice people nice without being deaf to the drones of wars, and destruction of rights - to live, eat, hope or dream? How are nice people nice without burying their hearts in deep rocky caverns that cannot be wrenched out to fly open skies and hear the weeping and the bleeding from all that nice people do?

Nice people are nice by giving up the belly laugh of the crazed insomniac, thrashing of the awake, inconsolable tears of a heart that feels and cannot absolve personal blame in the fate of the rest; nice people are nice when they clip wings of freedom and neither soar high, nor defy death to dive into unseen depths of unknown oceans; nice people are nice by living of moderate mind and heart, pre-occupied with the consumables of happiness which developing demands and are comforted by goods rather than goodness; nice people afraid to open doors and peek - at the awe inspiring wonder of universe and our own insignificance, or the broiling humanity of injustice and penury, to stare with eyes wide open at both the awe-inspiring and the gut wrenching; nice people afraid to suffer or soar.

I am learning to be un-nice.