Vocal Volts
In instrumentality’s musical wilds,
I’ve lost count of the times
Words lose their highs
And meanings subterraneously lie…
So the concert night springs a surprise.
I shelter behind an oceanic console
Into which electronic rivulets flow
From instruments and where trying
Hard to swim are vocals,
Kicking their feet… but perhaps
Desperately calling a lifeboat…
Up when stands the sound engineer,
Hearing as if lyrics crying yonder…
And begins a rebalance where
Words are clear, even in whisper…
Riding the music down to fans,
Seeding their hearts with pearls, opening clams.
In a minute, the crowd’s sway
Loses the frenzy but so coordinates
With each other, the moon and the stage
That the performance seems
Shared between the band and them.
I can’t help the suspicion
The cheeky engineer and I…
Might well have been twins.
– Bolbul
PS: ‘Instrumentality’ used here in an out of dictionary sense based on context
Milk Out of Doodh
‘If you drank mother’s milk,
I challenge you to pick
The gauntlet!’, they routinely said
In Bihar… from where he left
For the IIT, with a rank
Bespeaking a high quotient of intellect.
On the fancy train to Delhi,
The teen imagined naively,
Grazing pastures green with the currency
Of success, fringed with palms friendly.
For the morning’s queue for registration,
Had him sandwiched between lads
Named Sam, Danny, Andy and Mads,
Discussing affaires de St. Columba and Modern,
In English… rapidly fired over and through him.
That night he wondered if his name
Would as a particular noun remain
Or whether Harry, deriving from Bihar,
Or Bhaiya, meaning milk carrier,
Be a generic replacement.
Descended from mighty Patliputrans,
His ego… fashionably teen,
Curdled in retreat, even felt recalcitrant
About mixing with a city generation
That had tasted not mother’s milk
And clung to Western teats.
Climbing out and away
From milk or doodh pockets
Would be a couple years’ wait…
But what’s strange is that his ‘friends’,
All living in the USA,
Are now Samir, Anand, Madhav and Dinesh…
Whereas his own name of Anirudh,
In American sounds sweet as doodh.
– Bolbul
Pop Pop
In the kingdom of lollipops,
Silence falls with the sound of pop pop…
Feet fly yet knees buckle
Into corners, under tables…
As ears beg hearts to stop
Pounding, so they’d hear a nutjob’s
Clickety, clackety incoming walk.
That moment watching the upward graph
Of flashing tickertape stocks
Loafers well planted on luxury yachts
Support… barons of liberties and amendments,
Of hunting to military armaments
Who wish people will understand
The increased need for barrels
Delivering justice from the hand of God.
A gaggle of newly minted angels drop
To ground, now useless lollipops,
Whispering to parents to worry not…
Life is after all a short bus stop.
– Bolbul
Dark Honey
A love born resin
Of pain, years oozing,
Hardened in the chest,
Made breath difficult to ingest…
So plucking will one day,
He threw it far away.
But the projectile from depths forced,
To him unbeknownst,
Lodged itself in the throat…
Altering the delivery of words
Of the poet once hurt.
Now listeners from far and wide,
Glued like moths, drunkenly opine…
Never tasted so honeyed a voice.
– Bolbul
Concierto de las Flores
I once… felt magic-stunned,
By chance stumbling among
Dahlias gold and white, flecked crimson,
Lost in performance…
Of an act orchestral yet silent.
The story involved the sun
Whose feet balletic jumped
From leaf to leaf,
Spread flat or by the midriff hung.
Acrobatically, they also reached
Flower-heads atop slender minarets…
Where perhaps an anthropodic princess
Waited for a kiss.
The scene was choreographed so,
A thousand bodies together rose
And fell, like a sea of singing swells,
Separate and inseparable.
The musicality and cohesion from
One eye corner to other, made me question
If the concerto of wordless volume
Was written deliberately for an instrument.
Slipping beyond the bushes,
The sun then momentarily lit my brushes…
And the curiosity hushed.
– Bolbul
Spades of Pink
Suddenly turned an algal pink,
Lake Retba, with its accidental sea link,
Now to Senegal’s economy delivers,
Tourists gobsmacked and
An unexpected form of angling.
Coated with shea-butter,
Numerous men loin-cloth bare…
Under a sun-run center
For organic salt manufacture,
Employ themselves for hours after hours,
Chopping the bottom of these waters.
Their eyes like happy fishes swim
Far each morning, scouting
The lake’s bottom and halt
Where stacked appears the lake bed
With silver for their spades.
When muscled will power,
On rented canoes, has raised gleaming towers,
They head home to sell the bounty
For tens of US dollars.
– Bolbul
The Maunds of Waram
Until kapi grew on hilly dargah lands,
Awarded by Mysorean rulers as ‘inam’…
Consumed in Sufi or Arabic form,
It stayed out of the tax collector’s arms.
But the government, per wont then,
Had to dip into pockets, friends,
Of raiyats… and for this
They practiced the sharing or ‘batayee’ system,
Known as waram, at an equal 50-50 percent.
The tedious collection of Waram,
Two centuries ago, brought to kapi trajectory,
Its first major point of inflection…
As the Mysore Maharaja handed to Parry’s
The task of share collection.
Thus began the cultural transformation
Of kapi or bundu into coffee,
With a twist of taxation,
Upon golden maunds of waram…
With its export triggering European consumption.
– Bolbul
(based on Dr Sharmila Shrivastava’s research)
Runaway Runway
In a room on the flight path to Palam,
A late teen and IIT freshman,
Found black nights startlingly welcome,
Beguilingly handsome and a pal incomparable…
Whose company poeticized his imagination.
For they brought at intervals of ten
Minutes, farers of the Silk Route of heavens,
Transporting over yonder desert and mountains,
Cargoes tantalizing on grunting Boeings…
But with a crucial difference from loads ancient.
Amid equations sheet printed,
Winking green and red,
The youngster’s head, new milieu stretched,
Felt the nightlong traffic… a la Arabian Nights,
At futuristic lores hinted…
In which soft riches,
Their polishing centers and traders coruscated.
The deep skies networked and navigable,
Echoing radio calls multi-lingual,
Urged him to reimagine Sinbad’s fables,
Centered around souls like himself…
Then someday soon seek a runway
And an air current to set sail.
Warmed by the companionship and attention,
The freshman would invite often,
The friendly night before rose the sun
To share with him at Surd’s dhaba
An omelette and bun.
– Bolbul
A Nodding Crown
Once, to satiate the taste for tamales,
Atoto took me to Iztli’s
Whose wife Meca baked marvels of corn,
With kingly recipes .. for generations handed down.
Despite the delectable treats,
Served with cactus flowers, gravies and sweetmeats,
I most recall the host’s fierce, multi-plumed personality,
From the evening’s memories.
Tossing a rubber ball at me,
Iztli had stretched his only
Hand… checking if I could catch
And accept friendship simultaneously.
Within minutes, how well deserved
That feathery diadem of birds
Fluttering and humming was,
I discovered… for under it
A virtual library he stored,
Of ball courts and players, suitably geared.
Comparing cultures, ball games and rituals,
‘Mesoamerica,’ he said drawing lines
On ground, ‘had stadia over 2400 combined,
Of stone, shapes standardized
In the form of letter ‘I’.’
His ancestral tribe around Oaxaca,
Where ruled the Olmec family of Meca,
Had played games of the ball before 1600 BC,
Offered them to gods ritually,
Rewarded winners and punished losers heavily.
‘Now let’s hear old world stories!’
Gobsmacked with the inventory
Under his plumed head,
I blurted, ‘Iztli, I know not much!
Say, couldn’t we all travel to Egypt?!’
But Iztli was already nodding excitedly,
‘Yo Meca,’ he said, ‘pack some tamales!’
– Bolbul
Pick it, Ludic!
See how rises a playing breeze
Upon a face dull and still…
As if across a grass field,
When the eyes notice
A ball to pick up
And toss it to the limits of happiness ?!
Those ‘knowing’ Homo Sapiens
Running businesses and governments,
Deflate inner children
Whose articulate recognition
Would change our kind’s arterial condition.
Let’s scour the fields of history, yaar,
Run from Egypt to China far,
Jump over the ocean
To courts Mesoamerican…
See who picked up balls and where,
And strengthen our ID
As a playing species.
The history of ball games… our own,
Isn’t anywhere taught… how strange?!
O readers, we are Homo Ludens –
Playful children, let’s exclaim.
– Bolbul
Ball Yoga
Unto man’s heart, questing for an all-weather pal,
God whispered… ‘Shake hands with the ball.’
– Bolbul
Preface
In the home of my friend Atoto,
The lowlands of Mexico,
We met when the sun was low,
Two decades ago.
I caught him whistling behind a tree,
Alone, practicing juggling tricks.
‘Yo’, I’d said, ‘way to go!
Sometimes I do that too
But can’t quite whistle so!’
Ha, ha, laughed had Atoto,
Extending a hand, calling me bro’.
‘There were many like me, figurines,
Often with a whistling hole.
Men were nuts about playing ball
Until fell the saddest pall
On our lands and all was gone.’
Thus we spake, about games
Of the ball, played then
And now, the cultures and places
Wherefrom athletes big and small came.
Over years we exchanged
Facts, poetry, fiction, shards of pottery,
Noted social and kingly vagaries,
Illustrated ballplay rites varied
And cooked up a story pot-pourri.
‘Whee, whee’… hear that, yo?
‘Just begin the tale!’, means impatient Atoto…
– Bolbul
Wee Wait
Thinker:
They are all over- to coin an endearment-
Petite pistachios this season,
By mountain ranges fragrant with slogans.
Crackling so… now seems the bursting hour
Of a sunshiny civilization!
Wife:
Collegians many and schooling some,
Yet the fires they adorn
With… the road to freedoms!
Yes, an unseen future feels come.
Newscaster:
They burn… are burned,
Yet in rising numbers churn,
Leaving the past nowhere to turn.
Thinker:
Wee ones, the world awaits
Your rule…now distant
Only a hair’s breadth!
It shall bear your epochal names!
– Bolbul
Petalled Buddha
My mind encounters waters deep,
Watches poisonous thoughts creep
When ancient and sage words
Shoot from materiality’s mud
And spread their pink petals…
Clear over water which makes pearls
Rolling off the flower’s neck
Yet leaves it untouched.
I am epiphanously told that as the Padma
Remains unsullied and fragrant… so shall I –
In worldy lake, a detached atma…
Born of the one primeval Brahma.
Next scared, I shall Rememba !!
– Bolbul
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