May 18th Pandorathon prompt and my attempts that did not come out so well with me being in an uninspired mood

 A Rapscallion's sermon. May 18th TSL Pandorathon with Santosh Bakaya's prompt

Bhaiyon aur behenon,

mitron

mere pyaare deshvaasiyon:

Spring is the mischief in me

so I give this sermon

though it is becoming summer

Today we have gathered

in this year of the Lord 7 Modi

to announce a certain sea change

into something rich and strange

in our policies

We will roll back demonetization

GST

and remove the eyesores that are statues

of unity

in the land

No more bullet trains

No more Central Vistas

NRC, CAA. riots, mobs, lynchings, banning of beef

No more Ram mandirs

Farmer bills to be rolled back

No more victimizing Muslims

Instead, free vaccines

No more monkey baths

instead tan ki shakti man ki shakti

No more arrests

for pasting posters

instead defense expenditure cutting and

spending money given to temples

for hospitals and education

for creating jobs and industries

businesses

For elections

no more EVMs

and a new EEC

as well as transparency

No more drinking cow urine

You may say

I'm a dreamer

But one can

always wish

rapping on

being a rascal

like me

and a rapscallion

chortling aloud in glee

Rapscallion's sermon -2

Friends, Indians and country men, lend me your ears. I have come to praise Modi, not to razz him. Modi is an honourable man, so are they all, all honourable men. Modi, Amit, Amit, Modi, Adani, Ambani, Ambani, Adani, Tejasvi, HIV, HIV, Tejasvi, Coronil, Ramdev, Ramdev, Coronil, Yogi, Bhogi, not Yogi, not Bhogi.

When Modi sold tea was that ambition on his part? Never. When Amit campaigned in WB did he know it is not World Bank? Never.

When poor workers pasted posters asking why vaccines they should have got had been sent abroad and got arrested, did they all know anything about it. No, they were fast asleep.

Adieu, adieu, adieu, for the time being, lest you think these are wild and whirling words.

May 19th Pandorathon prompt and my story

 May 19th TSL Pandorathon

'She stood hypnotized, rooted to the spot " a short fiction of hundred words with these words. -with Santosh Bakaya

Title: Vandal? or The reaction of an ordinary/common woman/citizen from/of Delhi.

She had grown up in Delhi and found it unbearable. "As a part of the project, three iconic buildings in Delhi -- the National Museum, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), the National Archives Annexe -- are set to be demolished..." "Around 4,58,820 square metres in Delhi will be demolished as part of the renovation process, which includes Shastri Bhavan, Krishi Bhavan, Vigyan Bhavan, Vice President's Residence, Jawahar Bhavan, Nirman Bhavan, Udyog Bhavan and Raksha Bhavan." In the middle of a pandemic they still had money for such large scale construction and destruction, such ornateness and ostentation.

She felt her childhood fall away, hearing of and watching the demolitions. The blood in her turned to ice in determination, in anger. They were conserving, they said. What were they conserving? Not her memories of the city she had called home, at any rate.

She stood in front of the .gigantic, new building. It was quite a huge Vista. She had a Central(ized) view of it. She giggled. She looked around surreptitiously. No one was looking. She bent down, took a stone and threw it at one of the windows. The sound of shattering glass was music to her ears. Someone spotted her and alerted the authorities who started running towards her.

"Mad, must be mad."

"Be careful."

"It's a woman!"

"Terrorist?"

"Naxal?"

The voices floated to her and she started laughing. "Run", someone shouted, at her or the ones approaching, but "she stood hypnotized, rooted to the spot," still laughing, soundlessly, hearing the shattering of the glass again and again in her mind, music to her ears.

TSL Pandorathon Prompt May 17th done - Satire on present Indian English poetry writing scene

 TSL Pandorathon's prompt The Cauldron Speaking in the Nocturnal May 17th Santosh Bakaya May 17th

Mack and his Beths

To the wood of Indian English poetry then I came

"Where a cauldron of unholy loves sang about my ears."

'Wicked wizard in white', I watched with unholy glee

Them cook up the broth and brew of so-called great Indian English Poetry

On the top will float Gitanjali in translation, they cackled

He is the only one who got a Nobel, see

Not that they had read Gora, unlike me,

Or understood it

But only that they came from the same neck of the woods or tongue

The cauldron hissed and sputtered. The fire under it grew warm

They threw it in, as it was light enough to float to the top

We need a Dalit for seasoning, so Namdeo Dhasal in translation is in

We need a kind of Christian, so let us have Jayanta M

A Brahmin convert stews well

The semi Anglo or Catholic can be Jerry Pinto

We need a Muslim, it can be Sahir in translation, presently

We need someone to talk of tribals, like Mahashweta Debi, though that is prose

We must look and speak like democracy. The fire now grew real hot!

And a couple of foreigners who quote the Gita, please!

Rest can be Left, or Centre or Right, or might

Throw in a few women to stir the pot with a little blight

Call one the Nightingale of India and the other behind her back

A Nympho and also say she lost it, you know, at the end

When she became a Muslim, so let's still call her Das.

Add a few Parsis for garnishing

And a Jew, measure for measure!

But as for the main set

Make sure they are all Brahmins

Kshatriyas and Vaishyas

Who think they know English

Better than the rest

(Only that they don't!)

-Don't you know that democracy is majoritarian or the minority with power? -

But don't forget, ne'er forget

"We are Siamese" multiplied, "if you please."

The three witches, or muses

Laughed uproariously

Double trouble cause now, cauldron, to boil, and bubble

They evilly cackled

Deaf, Dumb and Blind their names

And the cause of the death of poet-kings

No queens, they can only be witches, except for one or two

What of the songs of the Odiyas

Or Kashmiris

Or Tamils

What of the other states of India

Don't they have their music too?

What about the Sikhs and Buddhists and Jains?

Sikhs are accounted for, we have Gulzar and Khushwant (more prose)

Ambedkar (Buddhist prose), Jain; no idea

Or of the LGBTQIA? Hoshang will do, yaar.

He adds to the Parsi set too. And, yeah, Seth.

You think they don't have their spin and spiel?

The witches of the canon say

Koshy, don't worry

You, like King Peter Pevensie, will remain

The High King of the Clear Northern Skies

Of Narnia, where there's place for you

Where the magic of fantasy reigns!

Leave the cauldron to the deaf

Blind and dumb and let it steam and simmer

The chickens will be broiled

The others will be soiled

All will be eaten

And forgotten

Time will do it spoil, so toil

For whom the bell tolls

Tomorrow and forever

Is written on the sands of time

And most of the names get lost

Washed away by the waves of centuries

Only one or two shall remain.

Rightly, or wrongly,

The rest are just pawns in our game.

While Ramanujan sells his Vedic grass/gas

I remember Nakulan

Who broke his twice born thread

Coughing out his life, lungs, and poems

And the spittoon (kolambi)

Full of blood.

TSL Pandorathon Day sixteenth Prompt and story

 TSL's Pandorathon May sixteenth with Santosh Bakaya

The Gossipy Neighbour

She, Rebecca, was alone in a big house, rented. Till her husband retired they lived in rented houses, of various shapes and sizes. This one was big and she felt happy in it initially. But she used to get lonely as in the morning her husband would go off to work to ISRO, then one son to Mar Ivanios, then one son to Art's College, then one daughter to Women's College, and the youngest to St. Joseph's HS. One day, a new neighbour moved into the next house who was from another state. Rebecca could speak the language of that state which was not Malayalam. Thinking that the new lady, Ammu, must be feeling lonely too, in a locality where no one spoke her language, she struck up a conversation with her. Ammu was surprised at how well Rebecca spoke in her mother tongue, though that was alien to her.

Rebecca had a domestic helper and after some time Ammu told her she found it hard working alone with no one to help her so Rebecca arranged for her helper, Panjami, to go to her neighbour's house too.

The neighbour Ammu offered to pay the helper Panjami double the amount Rebecca gave if she would work only for her.

Then the neighbour also told Rebecca that the helper was a big thief. She would, she said, take away rice even under her fingernails.

Rebecca started laughing. She told the gossipy neighbour, "let her take it if she does, after all if Panjami tries to steal rice under her fingernails she can only carry ten grains away at one time each day and it will take her a long time to make it amount to something."

TSL Pandorathon May 15th Prompt on Identity by Ananya Dhawan and my take on it.

 May 15th prompt by Ananya Dhawan which is on Identity.

A Prose poem.

When people ask me what my identity is I always fall silent. I define it differently from everyone I know. So.

They see me as certain things, Keralite, Malayali, South Indian, Dravidian, Syrian Christian, CSI father, Mar Thomite mother, middle class, Bangalore, NRI, professor of English, writer, born 20th century, Indian, brown, medium height, democratic and left-leaning, straight etc.

When I look in the mirror I only see that I am middle-aged, brown-skinned and a man.

When I look inside I see that the soul has no colour, and no sex or gender or age.

When I look deeper I see nothing, There is no such thing called an i/Identity, only a den (the body) and nothing inside but a flux, a beautiful ever-changing constancy of a flux that will end with my death and be no more. It has no name, time, place, space or anything else attached to its namelessness or non-beingness. This does not mean it is meaningless. This scares the hell out of people who are all so hung up on their identity/identities, defensive, protective and aggressive or passive-aggressive proud of them/it, their petty I/i, me,me, my, we, us, ours, mine trip, so they end up avoiding me totally. It doesn't matter equals energy.

TSL Pandorathon 14 and my poem on it

 TSL Pandorathon #14 – 14.05.2021- When a kitten and a baby elephant became great friends with Santosh Bakaya

A/The baby elephant and a/the kitten:

One wore a glove and one a mitten

I called the former Pelephant

And the kitten Oliphaunt

The elephant herd was moving

Out on the green grass of the savannah, marching

And unseen, under a big foot's crush

The poor lil' ginger tabby kitten would have become mush

When Pelephant saw him

And squealed loud enough to reach the sky's rim

His dad heard, the king

And withdrew his foot, by Zing!

Now who the hell is Zing?

You wonder, while fingering your bling

Zing is the Elephant God

In Africa's savannahs, you clod!

Pelephant and Oliphaunt

Became fast friends, eating raw ant

When one day a lion

Attacked Pelephant, by Dion!

Now who the hell is Dion?

You may wonder, while grimacing like a moron

Dion is the God of the cats

You'd know, if you had anything under your hats

The kitten waved his mitten

And said, you big Lion

Leave my friend alone

Bully your wife, instead, at home

Why should I? asked the Lion

Because you are my relative. Now begone!

Said the kitten, not fazed

By the mane of the Lion, who was amazed!

He slunk away, suitably chastised

Pelephant danced, her happy butt wibble-wobbled

They were quits now, but happy-happies

To be friends, and have more adventures

Under the blue skies in the savannah

In the tall green grass of Africa

Pelephant and Oliphaunt

Our famed and storied tabby kitten with a mitten and glove-wearing baby elephant.

 TSL's Pandorathon May 13- "The sky had a sullen, resentful air today." Make this part of a flash fiction of 100 words. With Santosh Bakaya

Why today? Why not yesterday? If it had been yesterday it would have been good. Yesterday everything was fine with me. A little contrast would have been welcome. Today it is like the pathetic fallacy, pathetic...When you're down, the sky should be up like the ceiling and not down. Sullen? Resentful? Like one? Black, dark, frowning. Why? Well, for instance, all this bad news, and no end in sight. It gets to you, you know, deaths of relatives and friends and many sick, fighting and you don't know if they will recover, and absence of hospitals, beds, doctors, nurses, oxymeters, vehicles, ambulances, vaccines, oxygen cylinders, oxygen concentrators, health system collapse, no Remdesivir, no meds, wear masks, gloves, what not.... The silver lining was the recoveries but then here come new variants, carriers asymptomatic, lockdowns, breakdowns, new or rather worse diseases like muco something or the other surfacing or resurfacing, immobility, happy hypoxia, young deaths, children dying, you name it, we have it, the sky at least should be exempt, right? Why the hell is it not?!

#TSL Pandorathon May 12 and my poem on it

 #TSL Pandorathon May 12 "He looked at her, his eyes twin dots of anger. " Write on it in any form you like but use a form of some sort and specify what your form is.

with Santosh Bakaya

Nonsense verse Form used: limerick

He looked at her,

His eyes twin dots of anger.

What a horror of a prompt!

I feel I don't get it, and am rather defunct!

Before my eyes swim (twin?) dots of lunatic terror!

May 11th TSL Pandorathon Prompt by Santosh Bakaya and poem by me

 TSL's Pandorathon May 11th Prompt: A conversation between a frown and a smile given by Santosh Bakaya

The frown said: "You are anti-national"

The smile said nothing but "You are mistaken"

The frown said you are against my religion

The smile said nothing but lost none of its lustre

The frown said you are against the high castes

The smile said nothing but broke into a laugh

The frown said you a ------------- NRI

The smile smiled on by changing the narrative of the adjective

The frown said you discriminate against the rich

The smile did not hear, it was helping the poor

The silly frown said pro-Islam does not translate to anti-terrorist

The smile became wider at the patently absurd

The smile was used to facing the contradictions

in others between words, beliefs, actions, and what not

because it faced them in itself already daily, everyday

so it kept on smiling through thick and thin

through the vicissitudes of life, the bouquets, and brickbats

the plaudits and the insults, it was equable to all

The smile kept on smiling despite all the frowns

It soon became all smile and vanished in a grin

a chortle, a chuckle, a mischievous giggle

Between the smile's and the frown's wars the smile always won

Till the frown had to be found far away, flown.

TSL PANDORATHON MAY 10th PROMPT AND POEM WRITTEN ON IT

 With Santosh Bakaya TSL Padorathon May 10th on a bread slice ruing its being burnt in a toaster

In the beginning

God begat bread

And bread was the bread of life

But man

Inspired by some Satanic Brits, probably

Begat

Behold!

The Toaster

Man put slices of bread in it

To torture bread

Till out it popped

A sight to see, but not to tell!

And had toast

For breakfast and to make sandwiches

Till one day

It begat heat

Coils got burnt

And the slice of bread got blackened

No longer the bread of life

It rued

And rued

"Who will scrape me off,

Off with this carcinogenic mess?

I was so much happier

In the loaf cover

Rubbing against my fellow sufferers

On either side

Not knowing

A worse fate will befall us

Than the plastic cover!"

Ir rued and rued

Till the dog called Rover....

Reader, we can draw a parallel

Which will spoil the poetry

The bread was life before Covid

The toaster was the first wave

The getting burned is the second wave

And Rover is death itself

TSL's Pandorathon May 9th Poem by Koshy AV

 Pandorathon #9 – 09-05-2021 - When the stars found their glow being reflected in the gutter.

with Santosh Bakaya

When the stars found their glow being reflected in the gutter

A man in prison began writing from the depths

When the moon cast its shadow on lovers

Romeo and Juliet died tragic deaths

When the sun was setting over his son

A god cheated and send the latter to his end

When a flower was in the field, an iris

Blue, in the world eyes and irises were blinded

I looked for hope in a world where there was none

I found it still, but only in star-glow in a gutter

Sara's poem and its translations

 Sara 3 - A slogan

My mother was defintely a 'womanist'*. Without knowing it. Though I have titled this a slogan, in her papers this three- liner has no name.

Women arise awake

For no war is won

Without a fight

(c) Sara 2012 - 2/93

औरतों -

उठो, जागो!

कोई भी जंग

लड़े बगैर

जीती नहीं जा सकती है!

Sunita Singh's translation of my mom's war cry of a poem!

औरतें बेदार होती हैं

लड़े बागयर

कोई जंग जीती नहीं जा सकती

Aurthein bedaar hoti hain

lade baghair

koi jang jeeti nahin ja sakti

transcreated and transliterated by Bina Biswas.

സ്ത്രീകളെ, ഉണരുവിന്‍, ഉയരുവിന്‍,

ജയിക്കാനാവില്ലൊരു യുദ്ധവും,

പോരാട്ടമില്ലാതെ.

translated by Ra Sh Ravi Shanker N

sthreekale uyaruvin, unaruvin

jayikkanavilloruyudhavum

oru porattamillathe

transliteration by A.V.Koshy

নারী ওঠো, জাগো

কোনো যুদ্ধই জেতা যায় না

লডাই ছাড়া।

naree otho, jago

kono juddho-i jeta jai na

lorai chara

translated and transliterated into Bengali by Madhumita Mukherjee Ghosh

Nari jagi ja tu

sangram bina

kebe hue kichhi hasil?

Odiya, transliterated by Sudam Panigrahi.

Pengale, ezhunthirungal, unarungal,

Oru yudhdhavum vendrathillai,

Porattam illamal.

Tamil translation by Lakshmi Venkatachalam

Gauri Dixit translates my Mother's poem into Marathi

स्त्रियांनो, उठा जाग्या व्हा!

कोणतेही युध्द

लढल्याशिवाय नाही जिंकता येत.

Susma Sharma Gurumayum

Nupioibasa, mikap thok o, hougatlo

Lan da joi oidabani

Lanthengnadradi

(Manipuri)

With extreme gratefulness to the translators. The copyright of their translations etc. belongs to them.

*

wom·an·ist (wmn-st)

adj.

Having or expressing a belief in or respect for women and their talents and abilities beyond the boundaries of race and class: "Womanist ... tradition assumes, because of our experiences during slavery, that black women already are capable" (Alice Walker).

n.

One whose beliefs or actions are informed by womanist ideals.