എഴുത്തില്ലാതായതിനെ പറ്റി പലരും പരിഭവം പറഞ്ഞു കേട്ടു. എഴുത്തിനും മുൻപേ ഇല്ലാതായത് വായനയായിരുന്നു. വായന നിലച്ചിട്ടും അകത്ത്, മൂലക്കെവിടെയോ കിടന്ന ബാക്കിപത്രങ്ങളെല്ലാം കുത്തിപ്പൊക്കിയെടുത്ത് കുറച്ചുനാൾ കൂടി എഴുത്ത് തുടർന്നു. അവ തീർന്നപ്പോൾ എഴുത്തും തീർന്നു. സമയം കടിഞ്ഞാണില്ലാത്ത കുതിരയെപ്പോലെ പായുന്നതിനാലും, ചെയ്തു തീർക്കേണ്ട കാര്യങ്ങൾ ദിനംപ്രതി വർദ്ധിച്ചു വരുന്നതിനാലും ഒരു തിരിച്ചുപോക്ക് ഉടനെ തന്നെ ഉണ്ടാവുമോ എന്നറിയില്ല. എന്തായാലും മോഹം വിടുന്നില്ല.

On Killing Your Poetry

(At the outset, let me thank Mr. Gieve Patel for the title plagiarized)
It isn’t easy to kill poetry.
Its seed is resilient, a fighter.
Not the kind that goes down easy.
Like a parasite, it keeps coming back.
Over and over and over again.
It gnaws at your innards.
Ceaseless, restless.
You might be tempted,
To just write and be over with it.
But mind you, that won’t be it.
For it is virile and viral and when one is done,
It wastes no time spawning the next one.
So you write the next one,
And the next one,
And the next one.
And soon, a forest,
Thick, will arise.
But fear not!
For I know the ways,
To nip it in the bud,
Or burn it to the ground.
Now, the irony of this whole enterprise hasn’t escaped me. I want to talk about killing poetry through poetry. More than ironical, it feels cannibalistic on some twisted level. Literally keeping the irony aside (by changing the form from poetry to prose – if you were wondering about the appropriateness of the “literally”), let me get down to the basics. Although I said in the beginning that it is not easy to kill poetry, it sure isn’t impossible. With enough willpower, one can definitely kill the poetry inside them. Trust me, for I know (Of course, that is axiomatic and rather non-falsifiable a hypothesis. But that, sadly, is the best I can give you as of now.)
The first thing to do in order to kill your inner poetry is to limit your vision. And by vision, I don’t mean just the physical vision. No. I’m asking you to narrow your horizon, shorten your roads and of course, close your windows. Avoid detail. Especially the small things in life, for they have a penchant for evoking poetry. Be as superficial as you can and you will be one step closer to your goal of finishing off your poetry.
Step two: Achieve an information overload.
Information (to be precise, mind-numbing and purely factual information) has the amazing ability to push out the poetic elements from your mind. Simply trying to push out poetry won’t work, since that will create a vacuum, which will eventually be filled by newer poetry. On the other hand, if you manage to push out poetry using an information overload, the latter will nicely compensate the vacuum created by the pushing out of the former. And what more, this transition will be imperceptible, since the creation and compensation happens almost simultaneously.
How to achieve an information overload you ask? Well, if your academics or work is not overbearing enough (as can happen to those unfortunate souls among us who chose a career in soft humanities), the internet is your place to be. But be warned! There are places on the internet which, far from overloading your mind with trivial information, can actually nurture the very thing you’re trying to kill: Poetry. Take necessary precautions to steer clear of such places. Off the top of my head, limit yourself to the popular parts of the internet and you should be safe.
The final and by far the most effective step is to ignore poetry altogether. Although this might look like an easy step to follow, it is in fact the hardest. As I’ve mentioned already, poetry is resilient. It just won’t give up. And it takes a lot of effort not to start writing. But, if you are strong enough to ignore the urges long enough, you might just end up with the perfect solution: extermination of the poetry inside you. This works because the seed of poetry is in many ways analogous to yeast. Just like yeast, which dies due to an overdose of the substance it creates naturally, the poetic seed will also keep producing the poetic urges, which, if not timely handled, can stew the seed, eventually leading to its death and thereby leaving us unable to distinguish between the worthy and unworthy of thoughts, so much so that we decide to stop writing altogether. To put it simply, if you ignore poetry long enough, it simply rots away.
So there you have it. The perfect, three-step program to kill your poetry.
Happy non-writing!

How Inequality Created Mankind

A long time ago, when our ancestors were still living in the trees, there lived a humanoid, whom I will call Lucy. Times were tough for Lucy. She was what later humans would refer to as “the runt of the litter.” Due to her small size and consequently weak physique, Lucy always got the worst of everything. She got the worst food, the worst mates and the worst spots to sleep at night. One night, when the group was  staying in a particularly small tree, Lucy was kicked out of even the worst spot. She was forced to spend her time on the ground, terrified out of her wits. All her nerves were on edge as she curled into a ball between the roots of the tree, too scared to even open her eyes.

Morning came and Lucy crawled out, all stiff and weary. After another difficult day of foraging and gathering, that night, Lucy was again denied a spot to sleep in the tree. But this time, she felt braver. The one night that she spent alone on the ground had toughened her. This time, instead of squeezing inside the tree’s roots, she gathered a bunch of leaves and fallen branches, and fashioned something resembling a bed inside a rather spacious section of the roots. And that night, she slept peacefully. She wasn't  afraid of the ground anymore. 

Next day, Lucy did not climb back up the trees. Why should she? She was safe on the ground. And gathering food from the ground was easier than from the trees, where she would have to fight the others and still up with the worst.

Some days passed by and Lucy noticed that she was no longer alone on the ground. More weaklings had opted to climb down and try their luck on the ground. The different was slowly becoming the norm.

Lucy could be the torchbearer of a very significant step in human evolution because she was physically disadvantaged. This disadvantage forced her to improvise and adapt, and thereby devise something new and innovative. To make a very generic statement (as I have done in the title), the entire human civilization owes its shape to inequality. I use the term in its widest sense, that of an inter-species, universal inequality.

Except for our brains, human beings are the most disadvantaged among the species on earth. Most of our primal, landmark innovations seem to be aimed at getting over this disadvantage as a species. A variety of innovations ranging from the first clothes to the airplane comes to mind. Another major part seems to be a result of the intra-species inequality, that is, disadvantaged humans trying to be at par with the well-off of their species, or, the latter trying to widen the gap. Invention of the wheel and numerous other means of convenience serve as examples.

I would go so far as to posit that without the inherent inter-species and intra-species inequality, the Homo Sapiens would still be stuck in some primitive phase of evolution. In fact, such a line of reasoning would allow us to question whether the very idea of evolution, or that of life itself would have been possible without the idea of inequality.

The basic tenet of evolution is the diversification of genes. Natural selection and differentiation come much later. And diversification – or difference of any sort for that matter – presupposes inequality. If things are equal, where is the scope for diversification?

Moving away from abstract notions and minutiae to a more complex level of affairs, is it possible to conceive of a society that is Equal in the complete sense of the term? I simply cannot wrap my head around the idea. I can think of such a society only in terms of what it would lack. For instance, in an Equal society, which would inherently be homogeneous, there will be no place for art. This might be an extreme generalization, but in a world without differences, how can there be any comparison, and therefore art? In fact, even the notion of a society would not arise in an Equal world. What would be the motivating factor for a species to form into a group if every member is equally efficient and therefore self-sufficient?

Inequality seems to be the norm in the basic foundational concepts, including nature . Equality then takes the shape of an unattainable and Utopian ideal.

While my logic may find its peace with such a notion, my rationale may find it hard to accept. And that’s rightly so. Human civilization has expanded this notion of inequality to such an extent that it can no longer be sustained by logic. Sure, nature isn't equal. But unlike humans, nature is justly unequal.

Nevertheless, I find it rather interesting a notion that our entire existence may be based on an ideal that we oppose and try to resist day in and day out.