तत् त्वं असि. अहं ब्रम्हास्मि.

Think
A  While.
About the Journey.
It  happens  in  years
And  in   an  eye  blink,
Man to child, rosebud to flower.
Strange as the thought, stranger the strife -
To find all the wisdom within, within yourself.
Yet to wander all about, wander all around outside.
For   as   you   keep  aging,  you   learn   how  to   lie
Forget simple wisdom, you forget just to stare at the sky.
Soul  holds  the  world;  the world - not the soul. Tat tvam asi.

Cookie Man

(Don't ask how. Don't ask why.)

Crimson evening. Lonesome street.
A sweet candy of a tooth. And nothing to eat.
Now that the evening's set, the mood is on.
A sunbathed view to a mellow song.

And I see a shadow. Of a crowdless ruck.
Dazed. And I wonder if it's the Cookie Truck.
I've been so high. So high on blue.
Cookie Man, is it really you?

I hear your bell, your striking chime.
A toneless rhythm, but a whineless rhyme.
The street corner's empty, the routine isn't new.
Cookie Man, why don't you come through?

Use sugar brown and spoon burned.
That's something you don't need to learn.
I'll buy you out. Never pass the buck.
When all of the world's leaning on beginner's luck.

Don't make me wait now, Cookie Man.
It's only just a cookie. My cookie. Please understand.
If the jigsaw doesn't place, and the song not rhyme -
Know it's only a more beautiful line.

The beautiful we ever seek. With a dauntless eye.
Yet crouch somehow in worldly pride
But what is now must come to pass.
It works this way. It always has.

Your smirk I see fading fast.
The spoon is burned. The die is cast.
Of shameful trial, of taboo ways, I tell you this -
The motion is set. The wheel's a-spinned.

Watch how the cookie crumbles now.

You can only say as much as you know.
Go speaking on and on, although.
I taste it now. Sweet déjà  vu.
The dream's just started. Words just won't do.

...My view's a-hazed. The world's a-new.
Cookie Man, is it really you?

Plan B

Daddy would leave for work with a briefcase in his hand
Little me then thought one day I'll be in command

Then I watched the birds fly and above them a plane
Bye, bye officeman! On ground I don't want to remain.

And the very next day Charlie's Chocolate Factory had me turned in -
Forget flying when in cholocate you can sink.

And as I grew older, so it came to be
A new day, a new dream, a new melody

At school I learned of heroes in my history text
They'd come and change the world, so it said.

But now the world misses them, misses them all
War, poverty, corruption - the common man's call

So I decided one day I'd change the way it works
The system, the government, the construct truck

Hercules would just be no match for me -
Unlike Achilles I'd have no weak heel.

Splendid and magnificent, I'd do it all
But before I headed off to work the wall -

I'd go to college to get a degree, Plan B
In case I didn't get where I wanted to be

And I passed out. Right after I passed out.
Too hungry to help another, I was in doubt

My plane had crashed, in a whirly style
I thought I'd do it all but only maybe after a while.

So I turned to Plan B
And I got a white collar job for me.

And that's how it's been all along
I laugh when I hear some kid sing that song

When I look back, I wonder how I lost my cape,
How a saviour of the world turned into a domesticated ape.

Because I thought I might fall
I guess I did manage to fall at all.

Seems like growing up is letting go
Of all your dreams, of all your goals

One day, a pilot, another day an angel sent
The next day a judge, a cop or the president.

So many things you start out to be
In the end you're left with just Plan B.

(Plan B... such a misery)

When The Ship Comes In

'I'm not given a hotel room just because of my ragged appearance - I'll show them. I'll show them alright.'

In all the ways that Dylan inspires me and well a million others alike (not), his panache sets fire! Yes, the song from Dylan's '64 album - The Times They Are a-Changin', is believed to have been written in response to a hotel clerk's refusal to rent him a hotel room for his raggedy appearance. Talk about aggression with a classy tone and verve – and you’ve got a Dylan song at hand!

One of Dylan’s classic song poems, When The Ship Comes In is well pieced, and shows Dylan’s sheer defiance in stating ‘I’m just not going to take that sh*t’ - and very firmly at that. And because it’s Bob Dylan you know for sure he'll go about in a very classy way.

Full with poetic imagery coupled with serenely fitting allegory, a few suiting references and a lot more than a hint of positivity, the song easily landmarks as a Dylan-ish Dylan song (not to forget it is from before he went electric!). 


It's not hard to see why this song become a sort of an icon to empower all moments anti-authoritarian. 

…Then the sands will roll
Out a carpet of gold
For your weary toes to be a-touchin'
And the ship's wise men
Will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin'.

Dylan fan or not – this piece of work is not to miss! And I meant both – the song and the man…

Academia Blues

(For all of the misery we've been put through all of these years...)

When you curse the apple that did fall
Wish Schrodinger's cat had better hit a wall
E doesn't equal M, C squared
Einstein had better only played the violin there

Yes, you're doing the academia blues
It isn’t a joking thing, isn’t easy to get through
We're talking nasty, we're talking academia blues
Beat you each time, like a hammer on the head
There isn't any 3-D path harder to tread

Each time you're put through a chain of Carboxylation
You feel it's bad as asphyxiation
Feel that carbon had better not exist?
Life would have been better, much better than this!

Math stopped being, numbers and signs
Long back, long back when science too was fine -
Simple and easy to comprehend
Minus the uncertainty, minus the Hamiltonian grand

Then bombed we were with fat boy and little man
Statistics, semiconductors, scientific slang
Observe, analyse, record – they ask us to do
And then to mug up formulae without a sound or two

For we're living through them, academia blues
From morning till the day is through.
You should for once try our shoes
It's the oldest and the latest news
The spited and the spiteful - Academia blues!

To you the periodic table was never nice
Neither the DNA, all of which you wished to splice
Couldn’t care less if copper salt was blue
Wondered Murphy’s Law couldn’t be more true!

When you're going roughage – oh, I meant bananas
Doing crazy vectors, or studying the wild Savanna
When you're going insane, going Academia nuts!
When the light at the tunnel end has clearly shut
You may give it a rest. Might want to cut loose
You can wait till they haunt you - come Monday, Academia blues!

Brand 'Love'

(Let me make clear at the outset that a person like me who's almost always certainly uncertain, never ever uses the words 'I believe'. Too much responsibility for someone who can go along easy saying 'I think'.)

Right from when you start talking you start to hear all the talk about love, to be more specific - the romantic kind of love. It's in the movies, in the songs, on your television set, the adverts - everywhere. Face it, you've grown up to cheesy romantic movies, heard a few thousand tacky cliched lines that people never get tired using. You've been the victim of a very smart propaganda. A propoganda so amazingly effective that the first image that comes to your mind when you hear the word 'heart' is not one of a pumping organ!

It's always played in my mind that Brand Love was created much the way Hallmark and the likes have always tried to popularise Valentine's Day in an antic that is rather obviously commercial. If loving is in fact caring and sharing, with an added bit (incentive, if you will) of pure brutish pleasure, need we fancy it up to the scale we always have?

Perpetuation of species is the answer you're looking for. Yes, that I think has always been a necessary need. If you don't make them believe, how the will cycle go on, the circle complete? Yes, Brand Love - funny the way it spells out, ain't it?

(Then again, if you ever hear me using a fancy line, know that I've only  been talking about what 'I think'... :D)

Hid-den-seek

What do you see when you look at me
Colour, face, chin or kin
Do you think to bother, bother to think
To go beyond my many skins
What do you hear when I speak
The tone, the pitch or the way in which
I have been taught to speak

As a picture hides the wall cracks, that just couldn't find their way in it
A story forgets to tell stories. Of many. They say,
A picture tells a beautiful lie, not so much an ugly truth
And that does go the other way
As you've been sold, as you've been told
As the adverts tell you to go - So you know
We live on things made to ‘struct
The power we crave, I'm sure we must

We've lost a certain significant right side
In a noisy dead end street
While our heart's been reduced to a mere
Pump that keeps us longer lest we stop to breathe
We seek comfort, we choose convenience
To write a critique than save the cause

And the pictures that our mind makes
We've trained it to hurry, to fasten its pace
Our one-tracked lives, they just can't wait
To hear a different song, to escape our fate
God, oh God, what did you end up to make
Tell me but anything, if not a rat race

A picture hides the wall cracks, that just couldn't find their way in it
As a story forgets to tell stories. Of many. They say,
A picture tells a beautiful lie, not so much an ugly truth
And that does go the other way
As you've been sold, as you've been told
As the adverts tell you to go - so you know
We need no more than listening to ourselves
While on screechy whistles the world around us, blows

IITs and BITS - Exchanging Places?

Until a few years back, the IITs were considered the place only for the exceptionally intelligent, that evident in their short but highly difficult entrance test, the IITJEE. On the other hand, BITS accepted students on the basis of their score in the boards - ensuring invariably, the student intake was some of the most hardworking and diligent students from across the country, maybe not with as much amount of grey matter (only according to the set measuring scale) as IITians.

The new scheme of things, seems to me, to have BITS assume the place of the IITs and vice versa. The reason - the current IIT-JEE paper requires a vast knowledge of details and trivial information, especially in the Chemistry and Physics sections, thus ensuring a place for the industrious. Add to that the fact that the percentage of reservations in the IITs has gone up considerably and you'd be forced to rethink. BITSAT - the online admission test for BITS, accepted a few years back, focuses on skills such as language and analytical thinking (apart from PCM) - which one would be safe to say, have more to do with gray cells rather than sheer hard work. 

A good number of my friends who came out with flying colours in IITJEE achieved scores in BITSAT, modest for their JEE scores. One wonders if that was because of their carefreeness after JEE, or reflective of what I've mentioned above.

PS - Admittedly, an inspiration for this article may be some of the most exceptional people I've encountered in my life after coming to BITS Pilani.