" Click click. Tick tock. Words drop. Tongues suture. Time flows. You try to leash it. You try to box it. You try to restrain it. You try to reverse it. You try to hold it dear, deep within the recesses of your phone’s gallery. Filled with screenshots of unfinished conversations. Vistas from untouched lands. Fragments of incomplete rants. You scroll up, and down. But the pictures never change. The conversations remain half-said, and full dead. The vistas remain immobile. And the rants still make you self-conscious. I have been in this city for nearly nine months now. Each day the city shrinks in its capacity to contain or offer. And I sit here, writing about the mundane experience there is to know. About living in a third world country. Having boys barely out of school, come and deliver drinking water to me. Other boys offering to pick up my garbage every morning. Other boys preparing tea by the sutta shop. Other boys beeping their rickshaw at me. And I sit here, soaked up in my privilege. Cocooned. Insulated. Isolated. Cordoned off. In a world of make-believe threats. A world of major digressions. A world of microaggressions. A world of inequality. A world without humour. A world without light. A world without adventures. A world with just enough to keep you alive. I sit here, pretending that I philosophise, I call myself a writer. I am deeply self-reflective, but just reflecting on the hollowness that exists is only making me hear the echoes better. Echoes of not conforming. Echoes of not living a life deeply. Echoes of the past; echoes betrayed by my memories. Memories which smoothen out the creases. Recollections which straighten up the clutter. Reminiscences of catastrophic lethargy and indifference swept out. Harking back to instances of humiliation - the first slap, the first rejection, the first inquisition - promptly expunged. Poetry brings these memories back. In fragments. In metaphors, images and epithets. Like summoning half-forgotten dreams. Distilling experiences. I attended a political meeting recently where a professor just before reading his poetry said, “Poetry is a luxury where action is necessary.” Poem implicates like news reports explicate. To survive in a world where educated children are human resources. Where wind and water are natural resources. Where all modes of kinship with objects both inanimate and animate are reduced to their material value. We need poetry. To name the nameless so it can be thought. Think the thoughtless so that one can act. Act impossible to know the constraints of possibility. To subjectify the world around us. Not to colonise."
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