Sans Logic Poem by BASAB CHAUDHURI

History teaches—
we do not learn.

All failures and successes
have been rehearsed, repeated, enacted;
yet we do not learn,
or do not want to learn,
or do not learn how to learn.

A cycle of failure and success continues.

We meet, we talk—
but do we meet to talk,
or talk so that we may meet again?

These meetings—more show than substance;
decisions already taken,
drafted before the gathering.
That is how the world operates.

The framework remains the same;
we merely go and act.

Compare an ant on graph paper—
its movement along the axes;
it does not know how it moves.
We, however, know its change of position;
we observe, we laugh,
sometimes we mimic.

A meeting—
Diogenes of Sinope
and Alexander the Great.

The king asked the philosopher,
"What do you need? "

The philosopher replied,
"Stand out of my sunlight."

Audacity—
had he not been Alexander,
he might have been Diogenes.

This is history.
Did we learn?

Life—
a strange concoction of half-truths and half-lies.

Like the ant on graph paper,
we too move—
sans truth,
sans logic,
sans everything.