Back to the Future – 0 & I

Back to the Future – 0

At times it’s as simple as that
When we just need to rewind
And trace back our steps
To where we started from.

These are times
When the problems are
Simple and straightforward
Like going up the hill
And coming back.

Strangely enough
These are also the times
When it gets way too complex
And confoundingly complicated
That we lose all hope
And despair at hitting a dead-end.

It’s such a time we live in.
Let’s go back..
..to a bright new future.
Isn’t that what nature does?

After the night gets so dark and unbearable
Dawn breaks
And a new day begins all over
Which almost seems like yesterday.

It is
And it’s not
Because there is no way to go back
Except to a new future.

Hope flies
Wishes are horses
For those who are alive and awake
When the dawn breaks.

– Chandra Vikash
November 2017

Back to the Future – I

(The City Woman repartees)

For those who are alive and awake
When dawn breaks
It is hard to close your eyes
To strings of fire crackers
Going off like a pack of lies.

To the heart that breaks
From hurt and neglect
Hard to turn away
Say “It does not affect…”
Me.
(Hard to see me
Amid the Us, Ours, even You.)

Those for whom a new day begins
There’s no easy win
No end can be dead
No tunnel unlit
She knows not of darkness
Who carries her own spark.

Horses born of wishes
Ride ahead of her
Proclamations of hope
Trailing off their silken manes.
All the while she walks.

Straight and forward
Pulling from her sack
Problems of the world
Confounding and complex
She nibbles between meals
Leaving a breadcrumb trail
Like a story of the past.

If we choose
To be alive and awake
When dawn breaks
We too, seal the fate
Of the long dark night.

I tell you
Even the sun
Will come to see
Hoping for rumor
Where truth exists
That there is competition.

Ruth D’Costa
November 2017

Why did Sita leave behind palatial comforts for the tough and unsafe stay in the forests?

If we don’t let our young and inquisitive minds to enquire and explore the rich treasure and deeper secrets of our history of Ramayana and Mahabharata and the glorious reins of the Chola, Krishnadevaraya, Pal, Chandragupta, Maharana Pratap and Shivaji and their significance to present realities in a contemporary idiom, they are likely to fall prey to the false, misleading and mischievous narratives like the controversial Sanjay Bhansali movie on Rani Padmavati.

Here is an enquiry and exploration into some of the intriguing aspects of Ramayana.

Why would Ram a young newly crowned king, who is banished to the forests for 14 years by happenstance, agree to take along his newly wed adoring, beautiful and valorous wife Sita, who is likely to get mesmerized by a conjured golden deer, rather than let her stay back in the secure comforts of the palace?

Especially when he was aware of the terror unleashed by the powerful demon king Ravan, who wanted to colonise the indigenous protectors on the whole Earth just like the capitalist oligarchs like Rothschild are doing today.

Why didn’t the same yardsticks apply to Urmila, who was we’d to his younger brother Lakshman, who accompanies his elder brother to the forests?

What role does Sita play in the ultimate conquest over the powerful Ravan?

No less intriguing in the Mahabharat epic from another era is why Draupadi is called Krishnaa and not either of his two queens and the fabled consort called Radha? That’s in the next blog.