जळोत माझे शब्द, सरपण बनून एखाद्या शेकोटीत
जिथे चार माणसे हाडे गोठवणाऱ्या थंडीत शोधत असतील
शेवटचा उबारा
बनोत माझे शब्द कच्ची कोरडी भाकरी
भुकेच्या आगीशी खेळ मांडून
असोत माझे शब्द आंधळ्यांचा कंदील
पांगल्याची काठी
अस्तिवाच्या अर्थाची चाल संपू नये

अजून असेन दिसत माझ्या शब्दात मी
तर नाही माझी कविता खरी अजून
मोठी आहे किंमत जिथे
शब्द असतात नियतीचे प्रतिरूप
इतका लागो कस, वेदनांच्या भट्टीत उजळून निघोत शब्द
अक्षरांची लांबी घटो आशयाची खोली वाढताना
माझीच मला पटो ओळख माझे गाणे अंतरात राहो निरंतर
आपल्या आयुष्याचा पडून जावा विसर
माझ्या मस्तीत बनावे मी फकीर

प्रश्न उरू नयेत क्षुद्र त्रिज्यांचे कण कण कुरतडणारे
प्रश्न असोत असे ज्यांच्या उत्तराला असावी
अशक्यातेची परिमाणे
स्वप्नांना असो जहरी दंश
आयुष्याची शांतता वावटळीत फेकणारा
कवितेचा क्षण असो
सार शोषून घेणारा
डोळे मिटोत तेव्हा असावा कृतीचा समाधान
अपूर्णतेच्या शापाताही आनंद असावा अस्सल

दुखे बनोत माझी आयुष्याची कोलमड
व्हावी पडझड सार्याच निवार्याची
अनिकेत असावा चालायचा रस्ता
मान टेकावी तिथे जिथे असेल
अर्थाचा शेवटचा मुक्काम

येवो न येवो बहर डोळे दिपवणारा
नव्या अंकुराची धडपड अखंड रहावी
विजय मिटोत हार करोत राहो डंख
शब्दातली लढाई जिवंत रहावी

Turmoil, silence and my words

It is 2 in the night. I am nocturnal since childhood. But, I always try to adjust my schedule where I sleep fairly early and start my day when morning is vibrant and fresh. I haven’t found good reasoning for this sleep late-start day late schedule. I even feel that day should get its own rhythm by whatever work I am trying to do. Exogenous planning doesn’t sustain for long. A work where disciplined is much productive ends up being routine following activity. The work which demands some sort of turbulence on part of doer converts into uncertain one. Where we need turbulence?
Artists, as I can say by my own little exposure to artist within, certainly need turbulence. Even a thinker, philosopher or activist faces such turbulence. I am not just talking about flux of thoughts and drive one faces in one. There is evident chaos in whatever system one tries to understand. It might be named as diversity, but with whatever term we have for it, it does not allow having simple and plausible reasoning about it. As a writer, when I try to portray any individual, even at simplest level I find counter intuitive views. This variance in perception ignites churning machine in our mind. Failures of connection in different events in similar conditions make us think about conjectures of ultimate human similarities. Is there anything, any art, philosophy, religion, society or any human creation, which is simple, far away from complexity?
But with this omnipresence of chaos, so true is the existence of everything amid this chaos. If there is nothing balancing these entropical tendencies, sheer divergence of mutual actions, how can anything exist at all? How some or other way, we connect? There is something like balance, a calm deep silence which governs us too. We even sense it, some rare inward looking moments, when we touch or have glimpse of it.
The pleasure or wonder is this co-existence. I do not want to reiterate it. Its cliché. What I am trying to tell is how artist differs and their arts, by these balancing forces.
The moods, affairs, controversies and tragic ends associate very closely with most of genuine artists. It is not entirely market demand. To a large extent, they have to have them, to generate a necessary imbalance which will force them to express what they end up expressing better that most of us. The cost paid by any artist is this lifelong turmoil. Any art is not an end for artist, but a selfish way to progress in this turmoil. When turmoil reaches its end, either in wild, stormy peak or experience of something great, artist ends too. Then either remains a shadow of him or a suicide note or a silent solitude, awaiting new turmoil.
There are others, rare, who converse even with this turmoil. They form a tune, an unsung rhythm even in the dins of uncertainties. They see world not as product of incoherencies, but creation of utmost intricate connections. When they express these views of them through their art forms, even if we see them near improbable, we cannot discard it. I can’t at least, even when for me, everything is sure journey towards disorder.
Every art form has some stakes in it. The moment artist leaves his connection from it; there comes realization that it could have been even better. What is moment till I should hold it and when I should leave it to live on its own? Not a very simple question. Especially when what you are going to leave is sole steady platform you had beneath your feet. It is survival that has to be challenged to express anything and even after such a stake, what comes is imperfect. Any art should not be judged by the contradictions or imperfections pointed by impotent critics, but by extent of blood, flesh and existence artist have put on stake.
Simple!! I am alive yet mean I haven’t put best of my stakes. Let me play it my friend, wait, game is getting interesting.

कवितेचा ताल हरवला होतं बराच आधी
चाल होती आपल्याच चालण्याची
अर्थाच्या खुणा पुसटच होत्या
संदिग्धताच होती कवितेची ओळख

पुसताना आता आपलीच प्रतिमा
रेष आणि रेष मिसळताना समोरच्या
अव्यक्त अवकाशात
मला माझा आकार जाणवू लागलाय
मला माझा आवाज ऐकू येऊ लागलाय

शहर होतंय वेडसर का मी
हा माझा माझ्याशीच अबोला का?

धावत जातात भविष्याच्या सावल्या
गोंडस आणि भीषण
आठवणीचे व्रण
आणि मी पाहत राहतो त्यांना वेगळं होताना माझ्यातून

आधीचा मी आणि नंतरचा
कुठे आखू रेष
अर्थाच्या जाळ्यात सहज फसला नाद
आवेगात राहून गेला शुद्धीचा निनाद
तरलो त्यातूनही
पोचलो जिथे भाषा फक्त अंतराची

मी आखली नाहीच रेष
तूच एक दिवस सापडून गेलीस मला
माझ्या अविभाज्य एकटेपणाला
केलास तुझ्या अस्तिवाने अधोरेखित

आता नियम आहेत, आहेत शक्याशक्यतेची क्षुल्लक बंधने
पण मला असोशी नाही यापुढे
मी आहे या शहरात, माझाच मी, तुझाच मी
तुझं शहर
पाउस आहे तिथे
आहे निवांत शांत किनारा, माडांच्या सावलीत डोक्यावर निळे मायाळू आकाश
संथ लाटांचे मुग्ध गाणे
पावलांना सुखावणारी वाळू
आणि कवितेचे सारे अर्थ शिम्पलांच्या पोटात उमलणारे
सारे ऋतू बहराच्या उत्सवात
तुझ्या शहरात

By those 8

Recently a bomb blasted at German Bakery in Pune. The news which was immediately reported has death of 8 people. I read it. It was somewhere at back of my mind.
I sit at tiny tea-shop with friends. We often have long running philosophical or political or any of that sort debates with cups of teas and smokes. The shop is managed by a old person. He limps but somehow he is able to manage the shop. He seldom talks with us. he offers biscuits whenever he eats. And, he insists that we take it at least one. Apart from that and except some information about his surgery-awaiting knee, I haven’t had many discussions with him.
That day, when my friend and I were having tea over there and our discussions centering on insurgencies and blasts, that person told us about Pune blast. I nodded and said, ‘yea! Only 8 died.” I didn’t feel much about my sentence. My friend later pointed out, though lightly, that I said very casually about those 8 who died. He too felt that this is not very uncommon as blasts are becoming ubiquitous in news. But, I was asking myself, why and how I said that. I ask it even now.
I am not worried about insensitivity. I prefer dry insensitivity that impotent but superficial sensitivity. People caring much about expressions of emotions are often shallow at emotions. I too was like that. But, once I realized that when I response to such a happening, a disturbing one, by my reactions (and mostly inaction), implicitly I care about image of mine in others’ mind and not bother much about truest feelings in myself about it, I prefer to gulp those initial bursts, see how much time they remain active and what shape they take within me. Even if I would have expressed that ‘oh! 8 died!!’, would that have been true reflection of what that incidence meant for me? No. nobody who are important in my life died there. No repercussion of it shakes my dear ones. What makes me connected to it? What makes me feel that whatever I said was not acceptable to myself?
Not so easy questions. None of this is a new question. I swing from end of total disconnectedness to feeling a live connection with those. With whom? With those who are away from my innermost circle of people. With those, whose faces and facts I don’t know but I sense their existence. They affect me as I am not able to build a shell around myself. I talk to myself through my reflections in them. I am one of them and I hate to be so unidentified to myself. I am not one of them, but I try that they should recognize me as one. They are twin to my contradictions.
Am I making this question simple? Will I able to reach a conclusion about my actions towards this distant, faceless existences by any self-search? If I keep searching this unending segregation of similar me’s, will there be any solution emerging?
I don’t like to be a questioner. I like to be an answer. I ask to myself and I answer to those who ask others.
I have answers within me. There is simple way out of such questions. If any action is generating so many storms of self doubts, it is not worth doing. If something is right, it will reconcile with questioning mind. It is not reconciling means it is not what I need to have. Simple!
The only connection I have with someone else is one which cannot be explained. This lack of explanations makes it painful, turbulent; but then my friend, that is how beautiful things are.

Conversations within me

And then it comes,

Through unquenched thirst of yours...

Through the loneliness that is never alone.....

Melt the differences of shades of words

And meaning is still in the balance of breaths

Memories shape dreams and present slowly unfolds in the womb of night

Tears roll and smiles fall, I answer when you never call

Mine senses and touches of yours

My poems have wounds of yours

Though they never plead, though they never bleed

Silence of storm, middle of battlefield

Nothingness of yours that is what I feel

Trying to shape as per my will

Wishing a moment of submerging in you

Either you hold me or let me through....

Song of nobody

What should of this evening? Or what should I do at this melancholy time? I find all my songs disappearing into scattered flocks of birds. My words are colours spread across this sky, beautiful yet ephemeral. Sky, being eternal has no colour. What should I be? Sky of colours or colours of sky?
What should I make of you? Do you form my words or do my words carve you? You both are so same and I can have only one. You do not recognise yourself in those words and words cannot live in your shade. Whom should I seek? Or should I submerge myself in this evening, ageing speedily into night, mother of all completions?
Reason gives me no space to hold. Desire binds me to stay rooted. Poems blossom, then draught of stale analogies linger. Adventures into unknown end in redefinition of trivial. Losses and gains! Pleasures and pains!!
Night will come soon. Birds are holding this evening in their wings. Colours are converging to silence of dark. When these stars, distant and enlightened, ask me to count starts inside me, will i have moments to cherish? Will I tell them agonies and miseries?
Restless soul I am. I start where way often ends.

Anecdotes

We provide examples when we discuss. It is difficult and boring to talk in general and abstract manner for long time. To make it simple, we use examples. Examples are of crucial importance. Even in established teaching methodology, examples follow theory; I often feel that in process of understanding examples precedes abstraction. Our cognition has many biases or inherent limitation of naivety. One of them is failure to differentiate examples from anecdotes.
In my encounters with people, except those where I was not observer but active participant, what I have really remembered are anecdotes. And I see that I form my cognition of people from those anecdotes. But then they are ‘anecdotes’ is the fact that separates them from being closest approximation of reality. To have such closet approximation, which is aim of much of the social research, one must understand to separate anecdotes from general. My mind confuses me in anecdotes with examples. I consider anecdotes as examples of desired closet approximation and I end up constructing a structure that fails to explain most of the things. It is dull and similar looking general which needs explanation. Anecdotes are simply failure or limitation of explanations. They drive abstraction to misspecification.
How it happens in practice? When I try to evaluate how a government decision had affected group of people, what catches my attention are mostly anecdotes. As a simple onlooker, what I see prominently becomes my initial impression. What I see prominently are people who are able to achieve some distinction. This distinction of them makes them anecdotes. They are useful as tool of falsification but not for positive explanations. What should shape theory is observation of people who are indistinct and constitute larger chunk. This needs time, real excavation and fight with boredom. It is difficult and hence, we are biased toward simple, plausible but wrong theory of anecdotes. Our images are inmost of the case anecdotes. Mumbai is Nariman point or Dharavi, not suburb called ‘Ghatkopar’.
But there are anecdotes or exceptions or outliers or deviations in most of the aces. They are not limiting cases but distinct from theoretical explanations. Should we seek for theory that can incorporate them? Yes! We should. However, that does not make existing theory useless. These exceptions do not undermine existing limited explanations. It is fallacy of one who studies if such undermining happens. There is no complete and consistent explanation of anything. Explanations are approximations. Even our language is an excellent but limited approximation of exchangeable individual ideas or feelings. We often understand these limits. Then why Science can have such a limit? After all, it is creation of human being which itself is incomplete and inconsistent.
Statistics, however criticized for not providing an answer but a confidence interval around any answer, reminds us of these limitations. If we proclaim truth, they have edges of contradictions.
Perfection of explanation is pleasant dream. It doesn’t let me sleep and I cannot live it.

Conversations and I

Writing after a break, a break which I hope help me to redefine my writing, meaning that I want my words to have and to understand the limits this writing, which is a conversation to myself and with few others has. I keep no hope that somebody will understand what these words and the one who writes this mean or don’t mean. I write because it is becoming impossible to do anything except this writing at this point of time.
Why do I converse? Why do I need or feel like spending my time with someone else when i know that it is just me who actually lives. And, then I pose this question in greater dimension to existence of society around me. The one essential aspect of any conversation, relation or social exchange is giving up something of your own or something which you desired little bit less than what you have gained from that exchange, relation or conversation. There is loss of free and completely own action when one indulges in any interaction. However rude it may seem, a person with good amount of neutral thinking ability will realise that we weigh this in our mind and then decide to go ahead with interaction. Even if such comparison is not evident, a person cannot remain in interaction completely. At some point, one feels boredom, see something important that that interaction or seeks to have change. That change may lead to another interaction or solitude. It seems that we do not accept it easily. We try to eternalise our interactions, sketch them in ultra-human manner and project them beyond human and space-time limitations. This counterfactual observation can vindicate earlier claim of mine that we compare.
On broad sense, people seem to use ‘societal structures’ as risk lowering instruments. Poor people seem more social. As wealth status upgrades, families become self-centric. As this status upgrades even more, family members try to seek their own spheres. To feel it, visit slums and then any metropolitan apartment. A counterargument can be rich or well off have interactions which might not be evident or obvious. But, then most of these interactions are purpose driven or contact making. A poor who faces grave difficulties of subsistence, failures and frustrations seek societal interaction to support emotional losses. By seeing others who face similar or worse situations, he finds some interest in his struggle or continuous problem solving. It is need based largely.
I sometimes wonder why government seems to be essential. Or in general, why large social structures come into existence? It is really a social contract. I see that by altering my free actions to some extent, I am able to generate kind of insurance. Not much of the time we like to obey rules. We accept some inconvenience to get some ‘secured returns’. We are able to cover some fearful uncertainty by accepting the contract. But, when these social structures ask me to curtail my actions for some coverage of uncertainty which is not fearful for me, I hesitate to commit. Our social commitments or concerns are function of our social status.
I understand that what I have written above is not theorem but a statistical fact. There are exceptions and they help to generalise.
There is something else which I think can take someone to interaction with other person. I often find most of my ideas or explanations when I talk with someone. I see my own reflections in my conversations. I find my own unseen regions when I converse. Here, I must say that I do not listen to other person very well. I like to flow uninterrupted. I talk with myself, even when there is someone else who is listening to me.
These words have kind of pains structured in them. After writing, I hate myself sometimes. I might be adding something to pool of knowledge, I do not know and sometimes I do not care. I want to be disconnected with whatever I have written. I want to see it as an observer. They should be so perfect that there need not be anything further.
I get tired. I like to forget my existence once I write. I like to throw myself into something wild and thoughtless pleasure activity.
Incompleteness keeps these words away from expressing exactness. I know it. That is why I go indifferent in writing or not writing.
I understand that I cannot share myself completely and at the same time, I think how I know if there is anyone of this kind unless I seek for it.
Happiness is real when one feels it. One feels it and should learn to share it with oneself. I haven’t learned it yet.