Finger Prints of the Force

The most powerful goddess
Severed the head of the demon
To annihilate him
But behold
Every where a drop of his blood fell
Another demon arose.

You, the immortal
Not deterred by the calamities
That fell on earth again and again
The strike of a meteorite
The ashes of Vesuvius
The land slides of Mount St. Helen
The mudslides and devastating floods
That strike again and again

Slowly and surely
Your finger prints appear
In the molten lava of volcanoes
In the ever spreading Sahara desert
In the tsunami touched outer banks
Between the stone slabs of Angkor Wat
In the tiny cracks in the middle of the high ways
In the crevices of high rise parking structures

From the deep down frozen landscapes of the artic
To the hot springs deep on the ocean floor
To the decaying flesh and oil spills
Your finger print declares
I am omnipotent
I can be omnipresent
I am here for ever
Alive.

My long lost lover

Once upon a time
Before the logic over ruled my emotions
Before the knowledge stripped of my feelings
There you were,
Far but very near
Omnipotent but tender like a new born baby
Invisible but omnipresent
You were in my home
Looking at me
Smiling at me.

You were my mother,
My child
My beautiful lover
I wrapped you in best clothes
Put gold jewelries on your neck
Woke you up in the morning
Gave you bath and breakfast
Lunch and dinner
And put you to sleep
And wake you up by singing
I never ate any thing
Before feeding you first.

In my own language
I yelled at you
Cajoled you
Fought with you
Did not talk to you like an upset lover

Then as I became wiser
Sophisticated, intellectual
Analytical and advanced.
You left the earth to reside in heaven
And me in this distant world
Scared of the hell
I prayed and asked for your blessings
For my salvation
No more a lover,
Or a son, or a daughter
But some one down trodden
Doing penance for my sins
I am not aware of.

Connecting the Dots

I woke up in the morning
And saw my self in the mirror
Then saw my face
Oh my eyes
They looked kind of swollen
May be I inhaled some dust particles
That bound to the receptors on my cells
Aroused my neutrophils
Where all the proteins
That can talk to each other
Interacted and sent the signal
To produce the edema

I told about the edema to her
Who told her friends
And they told others
And lately every one
In our community knows about it

Now I am afraid
That it will spread to all people in our state
Or even to the whole country
And may be to the whole continent
And every one in the world
Will talk about it in the chat rooms.

In the evening
I gazed to the sky
And thought about
My little abode earth
Serenading the sun in the Milky Way
And galaxies and galaxies
Make up the constellations
One after another
As if there is no end
To this cycle of creation or destruction

I am in the middle of
This manifestation of being alive
From the unfathomable vast universe
To the atoms in the micromolecules
All in order
All in place to do the right thing at the right time
(most of the time)

Every thing appears
as if made to precision
By some one
Or by some thing
Or by some force
Larger than the universe
But smaller than an atomic particle.

Creations and the creators

Theories and speculations bound
About some thing that happened
Billions of years ago
When the universe was apparently created
Or
Millions of years ago
When the spark of life ignited
or
Even thousands of years ago
When god created Adam and Eve
And gave man the power
To rule the earth, the sky and the ocean.

Inside a really old extra large pond
Larger than the largest aircraft carrier
A miniscule fish speculates
About the person who dug the pond
And seeded the fish and why.

I wonder more about
The creations people do every day
The poets, the musicians, the painters
The scientists, the engineers and the cooks
The force that drives them to create
The pain of giving birth
And the patience for nurturing it
And the determinatin for protecting it
From an early demise

I wonder about
The talent that gets wasted
Due to lack of education, scope and support
Or just misdirected adventure into nowhere
Or just inertia of not doing any thing
but becoming normal human beings
The consumers.

Creation
An incessant current
flowing from odd places
From the mind of nuts,
Ugly, sick, bipolar or depressed human beings
Or just weird mad artists or scientists
A flow that they can not control
But produce and produce
Until they are summoned by the creator
To come home.

Invocation of Zeus

More than thousand years ago
You were banished
From the heart of the people
No one could worship you,
No more invocation of the gods
The rulers of the harvest, wind,
sea, love and romance

Instead
People became the worshipper
Of the son of God
No idols but icons
No deity
No divinity
No mystic connection
To the power of the nature
That gives us life
That sustains us

Nature became an object
To study and use its power
But with no reverence
The magic of mythology is swept
Under the carpet of technology
And innovations overwhelms us
But no more invocations.

In the midst of all my stock options
In the midst of all my databases
Emptiness pinches me like a stomach ache
I want to connect some thing, some one
Beyond the walls of my limitations.

Samsar mahasagar, the bondage

Before you came
You were not there in mind
Now
There are no moments
Without thoughts about you
The further you you are
The worrier I get

All my efforts
All my sadhana
All my actualization
Appear as to love you
(Even if I never say loudly)
To care for you
To make your life little better than mine

And when I hear you smile
When I see you for a while
I feel I am in heaven
Even while faring in the turbulent sea

With time you changed
I changed
The relationship changed
But we are yoked together
For ever and ever.

The Killing Field

Yaksha asked Yudhisthira
“What is amazing?”
Yudhisthira said
“Human beings see death every day, every where
But can never think
That will happen to them personally.”

It is hard to imagine certain incidents in life
Like the death of our parents, siblings and children
And still harder
To imagine our own demise,
Even though that is a given.
Birth comes with the guarantee of a death.

Every morning
The world offers me in the form of news
Death and more death
Mud slides in Philippines,
Boat disasters in Indonesia
Mine disasters in China

In USA
about five people die in car accident per hour
Not to speak of how many died in Vietnam by bombing
Nor die now in Iraq, thanks to our tax dollar.

We killed
And still love to kill our kind
In the name of God
Or in the name of race or tribe or politics
In old west, Europe, India, Japan, Cambodia, Yugoslavia
And Burundi

Like a drop of water on a taro leaf
Life is so fragile
Nature's fury
in the form of earthquake, cyclone, tsunami, hurricane
Drought and flood
Added to the constant human effort
To kill more and more faster and more painfully
Transforms this world to a killing field

Moments are for ever

When I visit India
It appears
As if I never left home
The dirt, the noise and the nosy people
Become familiar only after a short while.

My USA life becomes a dream
As if I was never there at all
Even I can not properly sketch the road I take to work
And once I back
India becomes a dream again
As if I had a long sleep and just woke up
On my own bed
Only the photographs remind me of the reality.

Spring comes
with flowers
On every nook and corner of the trees
Summer comes
And erases all the pains of the winter
Fully dressed green trees
The fun fairs and festivals
Appear as if they are there for ever
But not really

Then the winter creeps in
Welcome by naked plants
Shivering mornings and
Show case snow flakes on the window shield
And inside my heavy duty jacket
I feel as if the winter is for ever
And will never go away.

My mind
A mesh of wishes, wistful thinking
The meadow of past pains with the stream of delicious dreams
That come true like soap bubbles
I am a pawn of my mind
Appearing as it wants me to appear
Glossing over the past and
Thinking as if the present is here for ever.

Establishment of World Order

Just before the big fight
Butterflies swarm
In Arjuna’s stomach
And Krishna comes to his rescue
Providing the essence of all knowledge to him
So that he can kill his relatives, teacher and all
Because it is his Dharma
His duty as a warrior prince
“Death is assured when we are born.
So, why worry?”

He continues
“Whenever the virtue is in trouble
Whenever bad guys torture the good guys
I, the omnipotent God, take birth as a human being
To protect the good guys
By killing the bad guys.”

Sounds very interesting
As if the solution to a problem
Is the elimination of the troublemaker
No transformation
No metamorphosis needed
Just getting rid of him, physically
Cutting off his head by an arrow
Or vaporizing him by a laser beam
Or even nuclear bombing the city he lives in.

This view resonates
In our cultures
In our history
And in our thoughts
As expounded in myths, in stories, in science fictions
And in TV shows
Superman, Bionic Woman, Spiderman
And the star wars
Return of the Jedi


I wonder
Why there is no
Alternative to shock and awe
Establishing the world order by carpet bombing
I guess
Not every one can be Valmiki after all
Or
It is easier to eliminate than to transform.

Eat and be merry

There was a big feast
After my father’ death
I think the largest, I have seen
Hundreds of people from the villages
Came to feast
Many I did not know.

We also had a feast after my marriage
But smaller in scale
Only family members and relatives
from both sides of the aisle came.

Still smaller was the feast
When my daughter was born in US
Only close friends came with small gifts

Birth and death
Intervened by the ceremony of
Legalizing the process of procreation
Are the land marks of our existence
Each one celebrated
The coming into life
As well the good bye

Each time
It is a feast
As if the road to the heart
Is through our mouths

Of course, that is the fact
No wonder
My wife toils for hours, even days
Cutting
Cooking vegetables, fishes and chicken
And I clean dishes
Before invitees come for dinner
Usually at Indian standard time

They come
They eat and eat
Snacks, main meal and deserts
And praise her profusely
You are such a good cook
No one said to me
You wash dishes so well

All her efforts
Disappear in few minutes
To be purged on the other side of the tube next day.

And I ask like a fool
Why are we so food centric?
She thinks I am a real nut
What kind of question is this?

We are not alone
Wherever I went in the world
People are celebrating life by eating
We eat and eat
Until we can not eat any more
And let others celebrate our departure
By eating.

Living in Heaven

I wake up to the melodies of the world
To the soft music on the air
To the giggles of a small girl
To the songs of the cuckoos
To the soft sound of the sitar and violin

I wake up to the magic of the sights
To amaze at the daring display on the eastern sky
To see me in my lover’s eyes
To sip the vibrant color of the murals and frescos
To marvel at the tulips with so much to show
To feel the loftiness of each word in a poem

I wake up to the magic of the smell
Of the evening roses, of primroses
Of the hot spicy dishes
To her enticing aroma near by
To the scented fresh air of the burning incense

I wake up to the magic of her touch
To the warmth of the monsoon rain drops
To the closeness of the melting snow flakes on me
To the snuggle of my baby girl
To the kiss of the spring breeze

Alas
Great men and birds are known
Only after they are gone.

Cluster bombing

You are wrong
If you think that
Only America and Israel
Use cluster bombs

They have been used
For thousands of years
And being used every day all over the world
But actually for creating things
Making sure that the future survives
The uncertainty of chance

Every year
Pine trees lash out cloud of spores
Sunflowers smear the bees with millions of pollens
Fish and turtles lay out thousands of eggs
Males flood the love passage with millions of sperms
And mushrooms go ballistic

Out of these millions
With the chance worse than once in a blue moon
The progeny strolls
To bear the burden of the selfish genes

After work
I open my mailbox
And get bombarded with solicitation and coupons
Lots of mails I did not ask for
Telling me
The more I buy
The more I save
And I am not alone
Every mail box is filled with them too
And lately
My email inbox with one GB space
The favorite arena for cluster bombing

In the land of possibilities

Long long time ago
When Vietnam in America meant Vietnam
I landed in the cradle of possibilities

I came from a land
Where every thing was defined
Which hand to use for writing
Which hand to use to eat
And who is senior and
Who can have a future and
Who will be servant for ever.
Every thing decided by birth and Karma

Every thing was already defined
The pencil was brown
The chalk was white
The car was Ambassador
Dinner and lunch were rice and curry
And the newspaper was Samaj
And dance was Odissi.

Every thing in life was already defined
I go to school, then to college
Then get a safe government job with extras,
Get married to one I don’t know
And have kids immediately
Raise the kids and then retire
Read Geeta for my salvation

Now
In the land of possibilities.
Any thing was possible
With no particular sequence bracketing what I can do
I can have kids before marriage
Have no kid after marriage
I can go to school after retiring
And I can dive into myriads of possibilities
What to do in life to actualize

In the land of possibilities
The limit is my imagination
What to do in life
Where to shop and what camera to buy
What to eat for lunch and dinner.
To whom to be friend with
and what to do for pleasure.

The world inside me shudders
At the chance of exposing myself
To myriad chances
To be some one great in life
Or lose it all and be a homeless
In the land of possibilities.

With a grain of salt

My Princeton professor said
Take it with a grain of salt
Of what you read or hear

This iconoclastic statement
Amazed me
Destroyed my inner assurance
Of the facts,
Of the truths
Of Gods
Of science
Of the concept of heaven and hell
Suddenly every thing was amorphous


For me
Philosophers
Scientists
Poets
Were living gods
What they say was the truth
To be believed and revered
Not questioned

Now
As l listened to him
As I followed him
As I read the methods they used
And analyzed their’s data myself
Before reading what they think it means
My perception of me and my world
About the inner working of the cells and mind
All got struck by a fly swatter
So many theories of creation after all.

My professor was right
Every one’s inference might be the fact
But check it out yourself.
Trust but verify.


********************
imagene
January 11, 2007

War of Worlds

In the heart of Sahara
I was wishing for the rain storm

There was no forecast for it
There has been none for many years
But I desired it any way

With all my believes
I kneeled down in front of my icons
My rain gods,
Indra, Chaac, Tlaloc and Zeus
With all their power
They can make it happen
Wherever they want
Whenever they want

With the gentle kiss of the incense
I woke up in a different world
Where clapping of thunder
Welcome the monsoon goddess
In snow white outfit
On her cat walk from the head of Shiva
To appease the amorous frogs

My trance was broken
By the sand storm blowing onto my face
But I did not want to open my eyes
And be away from my saviors
My believes and my imagination.