The cheetah’s recce

The cheetahwent around the junglein a wheelchair.It was his day off,and he'd also broken his foot.He still wanted to checkif the zebra had grown ripefor his next hunt.But when the wheelchair moved,its creaking joints drove everyone away,so the next day,the cheetah came riding a snail.It was all silent,and no one heard him moveexcept that when …

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Of dreams and dreamers

Here's a fun collaboration I worked on recently. Barkha Kumari has been blogging about her vivid dreams at Diaries of a dreamworm - some of her dreams are beyond dream-level crazy. So she recently featured a poem of mine, about a surreal dream I had during the lockdown, and also a fun interview where she threw …

Haapoos: A limerick

There was a mango called Haapoos who hung from a tree in the college campoos. The parrots pecked at him, his life ran dim. In a week, he turned into a limpoos.

Brain Damage (apologies to Pink Floyd)

The poetry is in the dumps. The poet too is on the slump. Remembering flow and metaphors, he laughs at all the times his words were good enough. The verses now, they don’t make sense. The verses now are full of pretence. Locked indoors, the poet struggles to string words, running out of themes, he …

Highway Hostility

Last night I dreamed I was riding my bicycle. In my dream, the bicycle had no handlebar, and I do not remember what I did with my hands, Also, I was relearning to ride the bike on a highway. I had forgotten to balance, and yet I did not need to. The bike could stay …

Terrible similes for a terrible summer​ ​

This summer sounds like​ a bad sci-fi script​ sneaked out of the trash bin​ and bribed its way to a wealthy production house.​ ​ It feels like​ one long meditation session the universe never signed up for.​ If I could decide for all,​ I would have traded the meditation for hyper sleep pods,​ Have us …

Morning alarm

The school bus arrives at 7 am every day. It notifies everyone, even the non-student me, with its shrill piercing horn. I’m lucky if I’m awake by then. Else it feels like a spear puncturing my ear, or a nail being hammered in from the other ear, or both happening at the same time, and …

Freestyle chess

I learnt chess from a girl on a train. Heads up, this is about the chess and not the girl. Though back then, it might have been the converse. I was eleven, and my memory is faint, from what I can glean, I had a magnetic chess box, worked out well on a train meandering …

Monday musings – to be taken as seriously as you take Sachin Tendulkar as a commentator

There, I must have pissed off a whole billion plus people already. Stay pissed. I’ll stay pleased. And I’ll get back to what I wanted to talk about. I love Mondays. Because they help me get rid of the clutter that has made its residence in me in the weekend. I love Mondays, because there …

Younger

People often tell me I look younger than I am. Some impolite bastards even say I'm lying about my age. Now, what can I possibly gain from lying, except some pride? I have that in small measure, so any source is okay. But I digress. When someone does say I look younger, I am in …