Burial Of The Dread (With Due Apologies To The Great T.S. Eliot) Poem by Subhojit Kar

October is the cruelest month, breeding
Kashphool out of the wet land, mixing
Prayer with promiscuity, stirring
The golden fields with winter chill
Monsoon kept us dizzy, covering
City streets in warm showers, feeding
A little hope in our dampened souls.
Summer squeezed us, coming over dust and grime
With sporadic sputters of rain and no thunderstorm
We went through the same rigmarole
Of lectures, assignments, tests, caught cold
Moving in and out of AC classrooms and cursed our tutors.
Festivities in air, bright young things tempting us
All the time, but we'll look away.....
Pen and paper, laptop, tablet, tips and tricks
Time Management, Mock Tests, formulae and equations- -
That's all we should bother about now
At least, that's what our boring teachers say.

Heads down, furiously scribbling notes, racing
From school to tutorial to home, cramming
Notes and slogging till late night, rushing
Again back to school next day, while those tempting
Vivacious ones go frolicking
With our street-smart peers, their opulence stinking
Secure about their future and worrying nothing.
Where will all this asceticism lead us to?
IITs, IIMs, and/or to MNCs, Foreign Banks, USA?
Sons of ambitious parents, you can't say or guess
For you know only what's been drilled in your brain
Your programmed rat races, your peers' robotic flings
Delay, delay, delay gratification till your tunneled run
Takes you to the lap of plenty.

Only if the sun beats too hard at you, or you run
Out of breath, and the AC car gives no shelter
The channel surfing no relief and the mobile ringtones
No soothing sound of water-tremolo, then let me take you
To the shadow under the blue-green rock
(Come in under the shadow of this rock)
And I will show you something different from either
Your teachers' mocking tones ripping you in the mornings
Or your batchmates' gladiator faces in the evenings.
I will show you love, life and prayer
Between moth-eaten pages in a single, dried hibiscus flower.


Note: Kashphool is a kind of slender, white flowers growing in autumn.