Hands Held High for Mumbai

It’s high time we realize we do not need a bomb blast to tell us our city is on high alert. Isn’t the whole world always on high alert. It’s been a decade of militancy, and really, we’ve got to introspect, are we really scared of death? Or are we selfish in being grateful, that we weren’t one of the many persons to have lost their ,lives. With time, many of us would even forget such a dastardly act of cowardice, but we have to understand that death does not have to come through a bomb blast, it can reach you through the most inexplicably subtle of ways, before you have time to react.

In this state of paranoia, we must obliterate every feeling of racial prejudice, any inhibition against ethnicity or religion from our mental curriculum, and stand with solidarity in the face of these heinous acts of terrorism. It is a difficult time for Mumbai, specially for grieving families who have lost loved ones, but calamities such as this give rise to fear and hatred; terrorists thrive on such realities, corroding our minds with scars that seldom heal, invariably making terrorists out of the timid.

It is time we put aside our cultural differences, transcend barriers of creed, and show these scumbags that unity in belief can create soldiers out of simpletons. Love and peace are only options, and we must pledge to build a solidified nation, common in perception, free from dissension, full of inspiration.

Starting from today, promise to put rudeness aside, put brotherhood in your stride, and eliminate hatred far and wide. 

Will you smell like a bunch of roses?

Will you smell like a bunch of roses, or whatever my favourite flowers were, I seem to forget. All this, when my nose is blocked and don’t want to use my olfactory receptors?

Or will you sleep like the mellow sunflower, waiting for another day to descend upon it , erasing the light of yesterday?

Will you be the never ending melody of a clarinet, waged in triumph of love over evil, of hope in despair, of laughter in pain, of joy in loss, and so that two souls may unite?

Or will you be buried so deep in melancholic suicide that even the deepest of excavations fail in tracing the symphony that once became the sound of music?

Will you be the broad daylight I wish to receive, every time the heavens flash into my eyes?

Or will you glisten only in solitude, when I’m not there, and so aren’t you?

Will you ever be the reason that I breathe into the skies, float on fresh grass, the dew kisses my lips, and the froth of the seas is effervescent and sprays its foam on my desiccated face?

Or will you be my sole reason of contempt, my mission of malevolence, and the cause I despise everything nature and society has to offer.

Read from the beginning and alternate between stanzas and you will see life is beautiful.

Read from the second stanza and alternate likewise and you will see how pathetic you’ve made life for yourself.

May you never read the second stanza. Never begin with Or.