Anhad ka Baaja

Unbearable

You can choose
Not to read this poem
I could have chosen
Not to write it

You and I can choose
Not to look at
Images of
Burning bodies
But Mohammed al-Dalou
Did not have a choice:
He had to try to rescue
His…

Time Travel

Travelling a couple of hundred miles
To a friend’s sixtieth birthday party
Entailed time-travel
Forty years into the past

Weaponising Tech

Tell me, honestly:
When you got a call
Yesterday
On your cell phone
Didn’t you pull it out
Of your pocket
Even before the first ring
Place it a little distance away
Squint to read who is calling
And then
With an inward shrug
Of relief
Take the call?
Thinking to yourself
Cell phones don’t kill…

Plus ça change

From smallpox blankets
To exploding pagers
Technology
The handmaiden of
Genocide

Trailblazer

This hotshot Israeli engineer
This top-of-the-class
This teacher’s pet
Does he think that
This operation he devised
Will be his alone?
Won’t be reverse-engineered?
Won’t be copycatted?

A taste of heaven

On those rare occasions
When Appa came home early
We, my sister and I
Would walk down to 
The Gateway of India
With him
In the evening

Whistleblowers

Running down the slope
To the road
With a whistle
Small and plastic
To hail
The raddiwala pick-up
Before he zoomed past
I was reminded of
A different whistle in
A different age