भूख (Hunger)

बदला बदला सा है लग रहा वो शक़्स क्यों  

के भूख नहीं जानती तहज़ीब-ो-अदब कोई 

शहर से जा रहा वो छाले लिए पैरों में 

के उसे बुला रहा गांव का टूटा घर कोई 

Last night I saw a very disturbing video of a migrant laborer eating a dead dog on a highway in Rajasthan. He must have been terribly hungry and destitute. This is the story of our laborers who leave their villages for cities to earn bread & butter. Cities have proved them wrong; there is no love for them. Employers have not paid them their dues and government is busy in blame games. The poor migrants are going though a very rough patch. That video shook me somewhere deeply and these poems came out. I applaud people who are helping them. At the end of the day, it is people supporting each other only.

The translation –

Why does that person seem different these days?

For hunger knows not of any manners & etiquettes

He is leaving the city with blisters on his feet

For that tattered hut in his village is calling him

Caravan

I keep your warmth tangled in my tresses

Like the wispy clouds entangle the moon

Trapping its silvery halo in dewy softness,

Like a seed within some fleshy ripe fruit

I carry your gaze in my wide open eyes

In them it quietly floats instead of sleep

Like mist over two far-off mountain tops

Like long dead stars on a placid lake

I keep your smell filled in my breath

Laden with old woods, untamed seas

Moss covered rocks on soaked earth

Like a mouthful of winter breeze

I keep your touch locked in my fist

In my palms that I stare night & day

Guessing which line may lead to you

Like a traveler trailing his caravan

That he knows well too, has long gone…

Philosophy Series Sketch No. 04 : Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Sephardi origin. One of the early thinkers of the Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism including modern conceptions of the self and the universe. He came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy. He was born a Jew but at 23, was expelled from his community and shunned by his family for his philosophy and revolutionary ideas. He was a trained lens maker and polisher and earned his income from this craft.Spinoza's magnum opus, 'The Ethics' was published posthumously in the year of his death. The work opposed Descartes' philosophy of mind–body dualism, and earned Spinoza recognition as one of Western philosophy's most important thinkers. Spinoza argues that the way to 'blessedness' or 'salvation' for each person involves an expansion of the mind towards an intuitive understanding of God, of the whole of nature and its laws. In other words, philosophy for Spinoza is like a spiritual practice, whose goal is happiness and liberation.