The bride in the bright red dress

Slowly but surely
The bride in the bright red dress
Between the two big lanterns
Opened her eyes
And looked
The rain had stopped
Even though you can hear
Lagging drops fall from the leaves
The sky was clear
It was not a scorching hot summer’s noon any more
The evening moon has just crept in
Like a tiny smile on her face
She looked again
The stars
The breeze
The flowers
the clouds kissing the sunsets
The ripples on the breast of the lake
All seemed so familiar
But as if white washed
Given a new color
A new flavor
To make her a young bride again
New hope
New breath
New way to greet the world
With no tears but hope.

She wonders
Why am I doing this?
For whom am I doing this?
Where does it lead?
Why for this intimate stranger
Should I smile?
Dress up
Take care of myself
Why should I
Change my life’s course
Because never he will be mine
I was better off in my cocoon.

Then she looked
The stranger was not an entity any more
But her own breath
In her each gait he touched her
In her each smile he kissed her
In her each word he whisperered to her
I am yours.
He was there
Always
A part of her
An integral part of her
An eternal spirit
Of the bride
Between two red lanterns.

Dancing inside a cell

You are so beautiful to me
I know
Many will not agree with me
Your nose
Your eyes
Your lips
And the body’s contour
Are so common,
So ordinary
Still
Out of thousands
When I see you
I know it is you,
My dearest.

In you, I see
The thousand avatars of roses
Of maple and oak leaves
Ants, elephants and tarantulas
Strawberries and sweethearts
Mangoes, oranges, durians and beautiful women
Desperado and diwanas
I see the signature of the cosmic dance
The marvels,
The limits
The scope of possibilities
The exuberance of flow of life
That makes each of us unique
Just like you.

Parallel Universes

As I walked
Universes passed along me
Cars on autobahn zipped with a speed of 150 km per hour
Besides the chickens strolling on the dirt road besides the cow pasture
People in 747 jumbo jet cruising at an altitude of 40 000 feet
Waved at the teenager bride in a bullock cart
With preying eyes
The bare breasted women in Nice doing sunworship
Glanced at the widows in Varanasi praying
In knee deep water.

As the naked kids played
The soccer ball made out of newspaper
On the dirt and muddy field
The space probe to the Jupiter and beyond
Sent photos to JPL lab with dazzling color

From the safe height beyond the radar detection
The B2 bomber dropped the cluster bombs
On bare feet naked kids collecting cassava roots.

As the automated machine
Read the brain waves
And as the expression of thousands of genes got
Computed in few seconds
The time sat for eternity in the shade of a mango tree
With the boy with a stick tending his goats.


As the night fell
The crickets took over the world around my home
Never knowing the rushing sound
Coming from the speeding cars on nearby freeway
People rushing to nowhere
In parallel universes.

Spider Web

I am the predator and the prey
Consumed in the web of life.

This web is mine
My own creation
Out of my inner feelings
Perceptions, dreams and nightmares
This is my world,
My thirst (trushna)
My desire (kamana)
For me to cherish and flourish
For my ecstasy and tears.

I travel on the road
I made with my strength
Limited by my fears of unknowns
My castle and my prison
Guarded by invisible barriers
I put in place
For me not to escape
From myself

Scary Thoughts

I would like to fill up my moments
With something to do
Watch TV or read something
Or go to parties
To talk about things
That I can not solve any way
We just talk and talk
Eat and eat
And laugh and laugh
Having a good time after all.

It is scary to think about
Time without those
The moment of silence
When I have to face myself
One on one
And confront the question
What am I doing any way
For the last so many decades?

It is nice to be aloof
From myself
Pursuing something
Easy to do
Needing no discipline
Or sacrifice of desire
Just following the protocols
Of living as I am supposed

In the midst of this good life
Something pokes me from behind
Where will these all end
When I go away for ever?

We create the world we live in

Christmas day is a wonderful day
The wishes, the gifts and the decorations
Helping us to create the world we live in.

Many times
That might sound odd
Impossible
So many forces drag us in so many ways
We become puppets
We surrender to survive

At the same time
We try our best
To make the world we want it to be
And live in it
Like immigrant homes
An oasis
A tiny reproduction of the home away from home

We think of festivals
Twinkling lights, dragons and saints
We create gods in our own image
Out of clay, marble
Stone or plastics or paintings
Make them beautiful, serene
We give them power to protect us
Like Ganesh
From the horror we can face
in our daily lives

We create myths
Helena, Leda, Vishnu and Siva,
The garden of Eden
The spirits to guide us
The force to protect us
As superman
Bionic woman
Spiderman
And
Durga

We burn incense
We become born again
We find Satan or saviors
In the same person
And we pray and fall prey
And live
In the world we create for ourselves.

An early morning thought

SMART
(Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely)

The dreamland scenes
A mixture of my wishes, nightmares and fantasies
Evaporated as I opened my eyes
To start another day

Still on the bed
I kept thinking
Where did I start?
And where am I going
And does it make any sense at all
To live another day
In this earth,
In this paradise of creation
To create something
Self actualizing?

My inner river
Does not flow freely any more
Once I got educated
Got a job
Got a family
But dammed by duties
Responsibilities
Social etiquettes
And money I need to make

Still in the midst of all these demands
My inner uniqueness
Has to express somehow
To make the life worth living
For another day

The show goes on

The crumpled petals
Take their last breath
In the evening of demise

The old deceased woman
A collection of bones
Awaits for the cremation

The dear’s remnant stinks
After the satiated tiger sleeps

Death and decadence rule
The dark corridor of living

In the crack of the concrete highway
Two leaves of a tiny plant smile
The passionate rose buds
Wait patiently to spray their aroma
On unsuspecting bees and butterflies
With iridescent colored wings.
The tiny baby girl blossoms
Becomes the dancing peacock at the sight of the rain cloud
The gait of the newly born deer
Erases the trauma of an untimely death.

The show goes on
Even though
We
Mere objects for the decoration of the universe
The plants
The animals
The flowers
The jewelries
Paintings and sculptures
The soap bubbles in dazzling colors and shapes
Lose it all and return to oblivion.

anticipation

Before we met
There was anticipation
Lots of it
Dream, dread and what will I do?
All combined in an amazing swirl.

Then suddenly you came
With very little fan fare
The moment became etched
Like the germination of my youth
Like the birth of my daughter
Like the growth of my children
Like the death of my father
Like my automobile accident
It just became part of my life
And then it was over

Still the moment
Stays as fresh as ever
In my mind’s sky
Undiminished
Untarnished by trickeries of memory
Unshaken by the storms of time
As if we are meeting right now
For the first time.

when does life begin?

When does the life begin?
This big debate
Forgets to take into account
The unbroken continuity of a life force
From parents to off springs
Through sperms and eggs
Or otherwise

Like small rivulets coming out of a river
Either making it to the ocean
Or dying in the desert
Life propagates
Often in the process
Becoming the food to sustain other living beings
Like cauliflowers and carrots
Crabs and even cows

Or just passes into oblivion
Like millions of sperms
Millions of pollens
Millions of pine or mushroom spores

Out of those millions
A few make it
Like the acorn
That does fall in the forest
But not on a drive way
And joins the relay race of life
To pass the gene to the progeny.

life, an incredible machine

Oblivious to me, so many things are happening around me. The oak tree in front of my house is shedding leaves as a signature of fall. At the same time there are so many acorns on the drive way. Each of them has the capacity to give rise to a new oak tree, but they don’t. Most of them will perish or be food for some animal. Inside each there are two tiny cotyledons, surrounding a tiny stem and a tiny root, waiting for the water to germinate. I feel bad for the end of the acorns this way. But that has been the pattern of living beings any way, producing a lot, hoping that some will be able to propagate the species.

I started as a botanist, looking at petals of a flower, looking at the phylotaxy (the arrangement of leaves) and sometimes peeping inside the structure and seeing the cellular organization by staining with various dyes. Then moved into looking the life at the molecular level, sometimes forgetting that the molecules eventually work together to build the structure. Now like many scientists I am looking at life at the structural level, how things have been put together using bioinformatics tools.

The complexities and the precision of cell cycle, proliferation, differentiation, conception, embryogenesis demonstrate the ingenuity of creation. Even at the molecular level how different molecules work in cohort in clock work fashion. Without out knowledge or intervention, stimuli from the environment use our sense organs to send impulses to the nerve terminals to start action potentials via afferent nerves to the right places in the brain to generate right response via efferent nerves. Billions of synapses act together to run every thing smoothly for most of us for most of the time. We carry on this complex complicated machine from our birth until death. By the way, do you realize that the death is also a programmed process?