Am a Leaf

“Am a leaf, floating lonely in the river,

No dreams of delight, no perils to quiver,

No desires or unrequited love to bother,

But an eternal morose on my mother.”

So whispered the lanky Sacred Knight,

In the graveyard, on a monsoon night,

And gazed he at the star spangled sky,

As if to tell the meteors passing by,

A story by no means he told in the past,

All of a sudden decided to tell at last.

Then when he told his tearful tale,

All those listened grew sad and pale,

The deceased souls, the desolate night,

All felt grief on poor Knight’s blight.

They asked why thus far he failed to tell,

And chose to squander chances to quell,

Woeful memories besmirched with pain,

And paved paths for loneliness to reign.

To that question he answered thus,

In a rueful sound, yet with no fuss.

“To tell I had often longed and longed,

And did tell some women who thronged,

But they, in their days of youthful thrill,

Didn’t fathom why I am weeping shrill,

And never reckoned my emotive grace,

Left me orphaned in absolute disgrace.

Albeit sombre, I am still firm and brave,

Hence never choose to rant or rave,

Cold winters don’t make me shiver,

Am a leaf, floating lonely in the river."

(This is my first rhyming poem. Dedicated to my father who would have been extremely pleased to read this one.)

Proudly Sharing My Birthday with William Butler Yeats

On the same day that I emerged into this world, but one hundred and seventeen years back, was born one of English literature’s greatest exponents, William Butler Yeats. He is considered as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in the year 1923. He was also an Irish nationalist, dramatist, prose writer and a believer in eastern mysticism. It was with great amusement that I found out, of late, that my most favourite poet was born exactly on the same date as I.

William Butler Yeats was born on 13th June, 1865 in Dublin, Ireland. His father, John Butler Yeats was a well known painter and his mother Susan Mary Pollexfen came from a rich Anglo-Irish family in Sligo. In 1885, Yeats’ first set of poems was published in Dublin University Review. It was in 1889 that WB Yeats met Maud Gonne, a young heiress who had dedicated her life to Irish nationalist movement. Yeats developed an infatuation and a great love towards Maud Gonne and he proposed her, but she refused as she thought Yeats to be a lesser revolutionary than what she was. As is the case with many poets, Yeats also gained a lot of ‘inspiration’, if you can call it so, from his lost love. There onwards this incident had a great impact on his poems and the world should be grateful to Maud Gonne for refusing Yeats’ proposal because if she had not done that we would have never got such great poems from this great Irishman.

To all those people who have been in love for a long time but haven’t got it reciprocated from the other side, Yeats gave his advice thus,

O do not love too long, Or you will grow out of fashion, Like an old song.

Yeats was so much upset with his lost love that in almost all his poems we can see a glimpse of his disappointment. In what is considered as one of the greatest love poems ever written in the English language, “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”, Yeats said,

I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

WB Yeats believed that his love for Maud Gonne was a very sincere one. But in the latter part of his life he had the conviction that Maud Gonne had never taken his love seriously. He came to understand that though his love for Ms. Gonne was a sincere one, she never had the same feeling for him. As a reply to, what he considered as her infidelity, Yeats later wrote,

She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;

But I, being young and foolish, With her did not agree.

She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;

But I was young and foolish, And now am full of tears.

Though he was rather passionate about the beauty of Maud Gonne in his youthful days, he became more aware of the futility of beauty in his old age. In his poem “A Prayer for my Daughter” he brought out his scepticism about extreme beauty, as he believed that if someone is extremely beautiful, there is a chance for that person to get obsessed with beauty and lose his/her natural kindness. He said,

Being made beautiful overmuch,

Consider beauty a sufficient end,

Lose natural kindness and maybe

The heart-revealing intimacy

That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Yeats also had other shades to his personality. He was a revolutionary and stood for Irish nationalism and had been appointed in the Irish Senate in the year 1922. In his poem named “The Second Coming” he represents the political condition of his times in the words,

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats died on 28 January, 1939 and his tomb is at Drumcliffe, County Sligo, Ireland. I would consider this to be a small introduction to the poetry of WB Yeats and to all those poem enthusiasts out there, I would recommend to read Yeats. Anyways I am extremely proud and feel privileged to share my birthday with William Butler Yeats. Two other great men who share the same birthday are the Communist intellectual EMS and one of the greatest Malayalam satirist-writer, Mannikoth Ramunni Nair a.k.a. Sanjayan.

(Republished from Vox SEO, the SEO writing forum in Calpine Technologies)

Come on Pinarayi; Face it in the Court Man

The SFI chaps and the DYFI blokes were having a very bad and boring time for quite some time, in fact for the last three years. And it is always so when the LDF is ruling the state of Kerala, as there will be no government actions to become offended about, no government policy to feel hurt about or no government initiative to be angry upon. Their government, their policies and hence a life without boisterous onslaughts on public property or hostile slogans on the “irresponsible” government; certainly a boring and dull life for the young comrades. But suddenly everything changed; the Governor gave CBI the approval to prosecute Pinarayi Vijayan, their greatest leader, on the SNC Lavalin Case. And this was a sort of opportunity that they were looking for. Cometh the hour, cometh the brave comrades.

One of the questions that is in the mind of us Malayalees is that if Pinarayi is really innocent, why are the party and himself so much keen on avoiding going to the court. Even if we accept that this case is a politically motivated one where the Congress Government in the centre used the CBI to come up with such a case, is it not the responsibility of the CPI (M) to prove such a conspiracy? And there are some good reasons for us to believe that the Congress government at the centre has used its leverage on the CBI for putting up cases against their political opponents. But this is not something new and is a clear truth of our system. Whoever comes to government will use governmental machineries against their rivals.

The CPI (M) now argues that the Governor has no right to decline the opinion of the cabinet ministers and therefore his decision to approve prosecution against Pinarayi is unconstitutional. This is because the cabinet ministers, after getting advice from the Advocate General, gave their suggestion to the Governor that there is no prima facie case against Pinarayi and hence there is no need to prosecute him. One just can’t miss the irony here. A cabinet headed by CPI (M) ministers deciding whether to prosecute their own party secretary or not. This is as if the accused himself making judgement whether he is the culprit or not. Can we expect any other suggestion than the one that was given by the cabinet ministers? And they say that they made the decision based on the advice given by the Advocate General and that they haven’t decided by themselves. Come on men, just think about the accusation you throw against your opposition before coming up with such a foolish proposition. You argue that the Congress government at the centre influenced the CBI for concocting a case against Pinarayi. So if we go by that argument, if the Government at centre can influence an organisation like CBI, can’t the state government headed by the CPI (M) members influence the Advocate General to come up with an opinion that suits it? That means there is no steam in that argument and hence we Malayalees who are more intelligent that what you politicians think we are and want us to be, reject the argument and jettison it completely.

Now the rule that you need the approval of the Governor for giving charge sheet to a minister or ex-minister is in itself a stupid rule. The governor is supposed to act based on the advice of the council of ministers and if the council of ministers is from the party of the person in question, the advice of the cabinet will certainly be in line with what happened in this case. So until and unless you have a set of politicians who think and behave in a more moral way, which is anyways not the case in our society, corruption cases on ministers and ex-ministers will have the same fate as that of this case.

For some time I want to be on the side of Mr. Pinarayi and want to reassure him and want to tell him that there is no need for him to worry. He should not worry about going to the court and then if found guilty, go to the jail as there has never been an instance in India where a politician got to the jail on account of corruption. Because our judicial system is so slow and malleable that it has always found it impossible to prove any politician guilty of corruption. So Pinarayi should have no qualms about going to the court. And again as you and your party men claim, you have been a brave comrade all your life with no fear of even walking through the dark streets in Kannur where there had been knife wielding opponents lurking in the dark. And secondly, even if the court declares that you are guilty, you can still make your party agitate against the judiciary, as has been the case always whenever there had been some judgements against the wishes of the party.

These days CPI (M) is hell bent to put all blame for its fiasco on the media. The party is saying that there is some media syndicate that is working to reduce the party to a thing of the past; saying that behind all these issues, there is the hand of the United States and other colonialist forces. In spite of all these doubts, the party has not been able to prove any if these things with ample proof. So it seems that the whole party is facing a sort of psychological problem called paranoia, where they feel that no one could be trusted and everyone around them are trying to kill them, kill the party. Or if it is not this disorder, then the party leaders in Kerala think that they are on par with great socialist leaders like Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and hence the United States is after them and trying to finish them off.

Now coming back to the SFI kids, or say men. I had been the member of the SFI in University College and had participated in the so called “agitations against injustice.” And for that matter, everyone in the college was an SFI member, because party memberships were imposed on anyone and everyone with a nominal fee of Re.1. Of course it never mattered whether you have given the fee or not, the big hearted leaders of the party never asked for the nominal fee. Anyways being an ex member of the SFI, I am pretty happy to know that my new comrades have got a great opportunity to get to the streets and do whatever they like.