The morning rain drenched the socks,
I'm in a wet sock, socked half-wit and dim.
Had to fight, there was no light,
Calculus in calcutta is as wet as it is grim.
A soggy weedy smoky haze,
Mom's not doing too well.
She's shrunk and with her what remains of my mind.
It's strange I had teeth as sharp as broken shell.
The world pays for its selfish ways in more or less,
I won't be here, the tomorrow most will see.
Too many people with twisted truths,
Untwist them and they swirl undead zombies, carefree.
I'm glad this city, this state, this country, I came,
It helped like an electron microscope view.
I would have missed from the distant view what,
Poverty and despair a special calcutta brew.
Selfishness and hatred like fancy flower bags,
Show up on every shoulder on every purse.
Calcutta can't blame white Europeans,
Now they are far far far Far worse.
Dengue they hide, corruption their pride,
Ministers and laity race for scruples kill.
Biligerence like boils, the bengali snake in coils,
But only infighting for petty frill.
Just like the rest of the country,
A rot has set, innocence the first casualty, dead.
Before the corrupt old sits on their pyre.
Their babies, gurgling bundles of joy,
Are their own instant Maggie masala horror ready made fire.
Unabashed, unrepentant a race, rancid minister represent its face,
The old poets would have had a frown.
The old bengal which was a premonition of the nation,
Now a lampoon of the circuses in town.
One of the few scenarios when disaster strikes is one that people easily overlook—their own. But since I've been observing my descent into poverty, I wonder how my final moments might arrive.
Like any normal person working in the US at one point in time, I couldn't think of going from A to B without leaving a carbon footprint. At one high point in my career, Jesus Christ was via Rick Warren driving with me three days a week the two-way unsalubrious distance of 100 miles between Austin and San Antonio. This ended badly when I couldn't accommodate the prophet in my heart (I actually said that), which reset my green card. JP, the person overseeing such conversions of heathens at the Veterans Administration into glorious Christmas gifts, had never met the likes of me. Bless her heart. Ironically, Rick Warren's purpose driven life drove mine off the road.
For anyone with one foot on this and another in that other boat, I am only employable if the interest is in science; the spillovers I can manage are like hanging out at the Christian mega church, which is just like hanging out with bengali characters foaming at their mouths at a durga puja pandal for me, with internal consternations and hemorrhagic pain (I spent time in the car or at strip clubs or at the museums during the Houston durga puja). But if you ask me point blank my thoughts, you get my thoughts point blank, and often you get sick afterwards.
It turns out that most people live on this earth at the same time as me but really have archaic mindsets that are almost anachronistic. What I've seen is that most of my classmates (eighties) were very primitive logically. I thought I was in school and things would improve; now I'm almost fifty, and I see the children of the children of my classmates generation still dangerously indoctrinated to a plethora of fictional flimflam, albeit going to a pricier school, where again the people at helm are themselves flying happily blind. Just fatter and more clueless. I wouldn't be surprised if they start linear algebra in the nursery but make brain optional for prime-sinisterial level posts.
After my fledgling enterprise in Hyderabad was squished under the goon and muscle mania of the real power in India, the hooliganity (a word I like), I gained, through growing hardscrabble in the layers, super powers of observation—things that were hidden away from me when I was inside cars or when I stepped out of one, now were revealed. People in city hives have thorns, fangs, claws, and venom, and they don't like each other. Unless you're already clearly a demarcated boss, they'd pull you down and keep you there to suck blood. Nested vampirism and dislocated fulcrums, meaningless customs and truculent attitudes.
Most fine-tuned Indians detect and abhor the stench of poverty. I see how I'll die on the street. The last time I was beaten with hockey sticks was in Assam, I was still in my tweed; now it'll be different. I walk with a hesitant gait, and one swing will do me in. Where in the affluent past I drove, now it's metro, rickshaw, or I walk. It's the last one where I am more susceptible, and after they figure out it was a wasted swing, they'll kick the erstwhile me in the drain. Where I'll rot into a cadaveric aroma that the genteel get very annoyed when it interferes with darjeeling tea, and then the disposer will cut me up, salvage the meat, and send it to the shady eateries that line the many busy office streets where delectable delicacies drag the office goers from bed. And thus, on many plates, I will find my place, being stuck as bone or flesh in someone's teeth and eventually through feces back to the elements.
It's just strange that you have to be unscientific to do any science at all, even at the highest levels of research, and you can't protest or protect the world from this pernicious harm that irrationality is doing to it. I'm just a weak and annoying squeaky voice that the goons will easily take care of; it was a narrow escape today, so I won't be a long bother, but even after I'm gone, if the world continues like this, it's like redoing everything over and over again. Why send your kids to school with such massive contradictions that you haven't resolved in your own head? Ask yourself when you read my obituary. Look under obligate contrarians.
