Whale

Are we about to

You Know-

Is there an undercurrent

An unseen movement

Towards-

Are all the lies coming unraveled

Is there a crisis in the making

Supreme Court this Supreme Court that

Caps and gowns and milords

The only ones at the Till, Will, Rudder, Wheel

What's happened to the Executive?

Unwilling maybe-

Mumbling, Bumbling, Yelling, Smelling-

Very upset at this noise about Accountability

Such theoretical nonsense

In the world of real people-

But we people

Are also getting immunised

White noise

Fashion-

All that "breaking news"

Too much pretense

Can make posturing redundant

We're growing posture resistant

Numb, don't care

Beyond outrage

But very malicious-

We are praying for prey

Like the new strain of tuberculosis

Ready to do some old fashioned consuming-

Gasp

Gasp but this is not surprise

Its breathing trouble

Demise times-

It's

Come upon the weaker ones among us

Not so good at

What you need

To ignore impending doom

It's going to be a polite checking out

In orderly queues

You go first

Pehle Aap-

It's

A Lover's Leap without the love

Whales are big

They need lots of water-

Our lies are enormous

Bigger than cyberspace

Bigger than all the zeroes we can imagine

Bigger than that old truth business

Turned out of house and home

And high-rises with power backup

Homeless irrelevance

Ready to catch the new tuberculosis

And the old pneumonia-

Get out truth

Out

Of the way

Embarrassing incontinent fellow

Dribbling accusations-

Talking needlessly of ethics

As if lectures can take the place of manners

Stating the obvious-

No wonder the character is out-of-date

Past his sell-by

If he comes around again

Organise a stampede

And have him squelched-

But be careful to call it something

else

pin it-

Let me see

On tuberculosis

Or bird flu III-

The convenience of disease-

Cannot be overstated.

But even if we do no more than the vulture thing

and wait for polite

Correction-

We'd be

Waiting-

Conducting a vigil

So we can go to the wake

As soon the f-ing truth monger stops breathing

We can open the bottle

tantalising us from the table

And say nice things about him

Gone cold.

See-

Take it back to old times

Truth worries!

Retro nonsense

What next

Tooth Fairies

Instead of the regular kind?

Look, look-

No space for whales here

You're a mother of a mammal

In need of ocean

Here it's house full-

We've filled it all

With lies and positions

and that's the way we like it.

Gautam Mukherjee

Copyright Gautam Mukherjee 2012

Adil Jussawalla

He taught classes I didn't take

At St. Xavier's

But I went to anyway

He was different, with ringlets of long hair

Young like us then

Not trying to hide it either

My chosen Political Science classes were deep

Taught by a serious-minded Oxford educated Jesuit

Who didn't let his biases creep into the exposition-

Eng. lit. was fun the way Jussawala taught it

He experimented

In small doses-

Jussawalla became a noted poet

With very little poetry put out

But he encouraged many-

Published some of mine in Debonair

Where he was Literary Editor

And where Imtiaz Dharker would draw

Portraits of the poet-

Classy

In an uncaring tumult

A roar

Of dhanda

In Amchi Mumbai ruled by VP Naik

Cleaner greener and steadier than now

For eleven long years...

Adil's written another book at last

His third in some fifty years-

He talks still of his struggles

At publishing poetry

Of print

Why print in 2012?

Welcome to cyberspace biddu.

Google, Shoogle, pad this pad that

And the kindling of Kindle.

For music it's the same story

Download to glory

You Tube it all

And leave the paper and vinyl and whatever it is they make CDS out of

To the bins of history.

Vanity, if that's what it is

Has found comfortable rooms now.

Gautam Mukherjee

If

Public school redux

means saloon doors to the shitter

You need to sneak up between times to get any privacy

There's endless brutality

Of an emotional kind

Designed to turn you into a brute

With commas and semi colons in your attitude

But you're still hopeless

In counterpoint to a street bred item

What do you really know about deception

In the midst of your training to deal with nuances?

How you long to be tough

Not just physically

Because games are indeed compulsory

But how can you be

With your clean collar

And legacy money paying your way

Through the tailcoats--

Its truly amazing

What a small timer from nowhere can do

In that little exclusive little claustrophobia that belongs to you

He will steal the dumbest broad

And promptly get a licence to belong

And you still gasping

Like some pet carp-