कोशिश

कुछ अलग है
यह मेरी रोज रोज की रियाज़
कुछ अलग है
इन आखों की फ़ौजी तलाश
शब्दों की सुनी गहराइयों मे
यह अस्तित्व की खोज
कुछ अलग है मेरी हर हार
हर दिन मैं पाता हूँ
एक अकीर्तित जीत,
एक मुट्ठी भर जिंदगी की
कुछ अलग है मेरी मनमानी,
चिड़चिड़ा -- मेरे जुर्म, मेरे साजिश
हक़ीकत से मैं लेता हूँ ब्यान
खोए हुए ख्वाबों की
कुछ अलग हैं मेरे उम्मीदों की शिखरें

कुछ अलग है मेरी कोशिश

(I need to write more often in Hindi. Because every-time I do -- among other gains, it seems worth the Koshish) 

And I will sing to myself again...

Do songs lie? Are they magic spells that make us superhuman (and very romantic / idealistic) heroes far removed from the mortal nature of our ears and fears? And what happens when the spell breaks and all that is left to hear is the silence?

I wouldn't know all that. What I do know is that for almost a year now, I have hummed this song (mostly to myself and the wide expanses that I range across -- birding and to the loneliness of the night) to something akin to distraction. And every time, I trip on a trance-like feeling, a euphoria of joy -- of a deep understanding of the meaning of every word, of an overall feeling of arrival.

In the continuum of my belief, I am still tripping.

That these are Gulzaar Saab's lines and so evocatively poetic probably add to their mystique and appeal to my inner ear. That I heard them and heeded to them, that I hear them and feel blessedly alive (again?) makes them true enough. And then again, how can Gulzaar Saab's lines lie?  

Thodi aur Koshish (akele hi sahi)

Paradoxically -- for someone who has always been afflicted by gravitas, has always been serious and aloof -- I have constantly seen myself as an eternal child, someone who hasn't really grown up.

Now firmly in my forties, with the hair on my head showing more salt than pepper, I feel no older -- maybe because of the more-than-a-decade of motorcycling ingrained in me, or because of the artless (and awestruck) poems that I write, or because of the borderline juvenile obsession with which I photograph birds (and nature).

But its not because of the way I am, or because of what I do that I feel most like a child, it is because of my ears.

Increasingly, across the last 3-4 years, it is when I have persisted in looking for a solution (while dealing with the light-headedness and headaches arising from hearing aid trials and audiology sessions) continuing to battle my aural frustrations, it is when I have been to institutes like AYJNIHH or AURED, that I have felt the maximum import of being Hard of Hearing; felt lost and defenceless (like a child?) and struggled to deal with the utter defeat -- of not knowing an adult way to come to terms with it.

But it is also at these institutes that I have felt like a child in another way, felt a kinship with the 4 and 5 year old kids running pell-mell in the corridors unmindful of the large hearing aids draped over their ears (technically called Behind The Ear instruments) wondering at how their ears can tolerate the din (simplistically speaking, most hearing aids are bad at filtering out noises; unless they are programmed -- but when programmed, they damp speech too). It is here again that I have met the amazing people who teach these children to do something that most of us take for granted.

Teach them to hear.

Teach them to speak.

Teach them that they are special, that they are loved, that they are expected to go out in the world and do wonderful things (like other normal children are taught to).

Teach them with a belief and selflessness that would touch even the most cynical amongst us, with a conviction that belies mainline epithets like "Children of a lesser God" or "differently abled" or even "hearing handicapped".

Teach them to never stop trying, to never give up.

It is because of interacting with teachers like these, because of being touched by their grace that I (in my own frustrated adult way) never stop trying to hear.

It is because of knowing them that I refuse to be deaf.

Happy Teachers' Day to all such teachers out there, to those who devote their lives to making special children's lives special.

Because, though love, life and the road have taught me numerous lessons in turn, it is only you who have inspired me to continue the Koshish, to make the most of the gifts that I have been given.


*First published on Facebook, yesterday -- on Teachers' Day.

The Rain's a Requiem Tonight

I have stilled
the frenetic bird flight of my thoughts, of you
into this frozen lifeless spread
this sheet of glass framing

The window of my listless soul. Outside
the rain falls,
in another listlessness
its cloying wetness, a weepy requiem

No ears can hear.

Sightlessly seeing, I stay inside
the familiar embrace of a cold only the rejected know. Outside
from the brimming eyes of a grieving sky,
in a flood the tears roll.

Soon you will be an alien pain.

The lacerations on my soul will heal
into scab I can never touch or peel,
again, I will live.

Till then, the salve
is the play of these flightless words
the poultice of my loneliness,
the silence of another answer-less night.

The Quiet

I have never really thought at length about why I have got used to wandering (not by motorcycle, but the relatively slower way -- on cycle and thereafter afoot) so much, over the last 3 plus years, since when I brought out my first book.

It largely had to do with the need to sit and work on what I had already put together as a first draft; but I can clearly see that it also had to do with a need to relate to the open spaces and the wildernesses around me -- to see art, individualism, identity and even life, in the dirt tracks, the cracked earth, the sunburnt rock (there are a lot of abandoned quarries around my place) and the waters I would go visit, Shameerpet Lake, the puddles of ochre / red rain water and the spirogyra-laced pokhuri like waters collected in the quarries.

Moving On dealt with a lot of those "relatings" in poems that are artless (and to a certain extent boyishly awestruck) in perspective, uninhibited in treatment and "inked" with a minimalism (especially in my pithy choice of words) that can probably be expected from someone to whom words are are kith and kin.

By the time I brought out my second book, I was an addicted walker -- thanks to my close encounters with butterflies and an increasing felicity to relate to birds. By this time, the poetry was almost incidental -- I had started to learn how to deal with my immediacy and also started to learn how to let the poem brew in me. In fact, apart from the poems dealing with butterflies in my second book, most of the others have a contemplatively detached and "quiet" air as if the poems are voiced by the elements, by time, or by a stoic whom nothing can touch.

I still don't know if I am ready (or capable) to look at my third book in a contemplative or objective mien; in many ways it was the toughest of the three, but again there is that sense of quiet in many of the poems in them, even when I am being irreverent in my take on a particular bird; there is an utter lack of anything to do with the aural element of birdwatching in any of the poems. Its another thing that whenever I am ghooming and I come across Francolins (called Teetar in Hindi) and stalk them to get close to them and photograph them properly and they first go to ground and then take off in an "explosive whirrrrrrr" it completely deafens me, almost as if I have a proper pair of ears.

Its also another thing that I can hear and feel the lake breeze and the rain squalls and tree songs (I need to be able to see the tree for this to happen) and I seem to be hearing it even better with the passing years.

And there are times when I am up in the penthouse (which is where I incidentally "wrote" most of the poems of my second and third book) when I am stunned by the clarity of what I can hear -- mostly the silence, sometimes my thoughts and on rare occasions, the bars of some Old Hindi song that I hum to myself.

It is at times like this that I feel the most content, that I feel foolish for having again and again tried to go out of this quiet -- into the clamorously questioning eyes of women -- to search for love.

Surely it would have been better if I had been less of a "moth-being-attracted-to-the-candle-flame" and more of a nature poet?