Amazon burns Each flame licks a life Each ember leads to strife How will man survive? From the meat roasted by the flames That rise as if from Earth’s insides? The birds that no longer fly Lie roasted, toasted, drained of colour. The brilliant macaw with its plumes of blue and yellow, The golden monkey that leaps from tree to[Read More...]
It is an age-old question as to the extent art reflects the world we live in. Bertolt Brecht allegedly said to the contrary that art was “not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” The Marxist German playwright devised theatrical methods designed to distance the audience from the staged drama while drawing self-reflexive[Read More...]
Tsunami of aggressive nationalism Across USA, Europe and beyond Internationalism is my creed; patriotism acceptable But not the sedition law My ancestors born in Pakistan Part of undivided India Communal partitioning in 1947 Affected lives My mother born in 1921 At Suri Mohalla, Rawalpindi Completed her studies At middle school, Rawalpindi At school she learnt needle work[Read More...]
I do not wish the sun to rise And I do not wish the moon to disappear The carpenter who made this bed Has done more than he could dream for Saving me from the nightmare of getting up To see what I do not wish to see And to hear what I do not wish to hear If ever[Read More...]
The post The Carpenter Friend appeared first on Countercurrents.
Sometimes I do not like meeting people Whenever I do not like meeting myself Meaningless actions and meaningless words Among the multitude of meaningless people Make me feel the need to enjoy the absurdity To understand that a word in need Is just a word indeed. And when the heaven fell on earth I thought it was a dead flower[Read More...]
The post The Dead Flower appeared first on Countercurrents.
A soul without a body was walking Wondering how much time was left in his life The corpses on the side of the road Seemed to be breathing A man with a chopped hand Was struggling to ride a bicycle Women hid their faces For the shame others have done to them The past was best to be forgotten The[Read More...]
The post Kashmir appeared first on Countercurrents.
On the night of broken glass he reads a poem by Faiz. Outside, someone drives under influence down a frail bridge across the river, after the rains. jo toot gaya, so toot gaya ‘Khuda Hafiz. Khuda Hafiz, Would there be salvage after the wreck?’ asks the squeaky wiper blades to the tune of filmy rain dance that fogs the pane.[Read More...]
(Wisdom-King Achala: The Unshakeable) Presented here are some tales and some verses by Bhusukupa, mystic, poet, who lived in the eastern parts of the Indian subcontinent around a millennium ago. Lovers of Bangla literature remember him as the poet who wrote seven and a half poems of the Chawrjyapawd collection that contains verses that speak of the Tantric SahajaYana or[Read More...]
Call it a summer whim or something about this grim moment of ours, but I had an urge to post at TomDispatch my very first piece of published writing. It appeared 48 years ago in what was, at the time, one of the more obscure journals on the face of the Earth, one I helped found as a then-antiwar-China-scholar-to-be: the Bulletin of Concerned Asian[Read More...]
Sacred Games-2 is slated to begin from August 15 on Netflix Cinema is the worst form of expression, and particularly more so, when we are bombarded with over 400 hours of news, real news, enacted news in our 24 hours, round the year, which has rendered an ordinary citizen gasping. Even real time wars, street to street battles and massacres[Read More...]
