Two very important subjects
What do you think of when you hear the word ‘economics’? Does your mind race to the salmon pink newspapers? Or is it the graphs indicating growth and decline? If the word ‘boring’ springs to your mind, you are neither alone and nor is it your fault. Economics, for all its noble (and Nobel) intentions, is a rather heavy subject. To a commoner, living a life itself proves to be an endless lesson in economics. He doesn’t have the time or patience to get acquainted with the mind-numbing terms and theories. His idea of budget could very well be limited to the space in his pocket. However, we can’t discard the messengers simply because they bring us messages we don’t fully understand. Economists, for the last couple of centuries, have helped us understand our world better. Their literature may not mollycoddle our ego most of the time but it’d be foolish to ignore them. When you zoom out a bit, the chasm between a commoner and an economist might throw some light on the raging differences—as well as the resulting indifference — between the bare truths and their sophisticated explanations. No doubt there are confrontations and controversies and mudslinging and younameit. Yet, we can’t flee to utopia in any case. Which is why a stream of studies dedicated to irreverent knowledge and consummate wisdom can’t be discredited. Economics, behavioral or otherwise, strive to present us the world for what it is.
On the other hand, we’ve got poetry. It’s all around us. You don’t necessarily have to be a poet to justify your poetics. That said, would it be fair to suggest that poets are a dying breed today? Or like a born poet would want you to know, there’s no such a color as fairness anymore. After all, we live in a world where Rupi Kaur outsells Homer. But then, again, it isn’t the former’s fault for she is in tune with what her readers want to see inside the pages. On either side of the window, everything is changing—you, me, our intertwined realities. Every seven years, we resurrect ourselves replacing everything from our cells to our eyelashes. Change is constant whether we notice it or not. What the poets manage to capture is the essence of this progression as well as our decay. Poetry refuses to be confined to languages as it speaks to us from an entirely different place; a place where words have very little to do with how we truly feel. Wherever we go and however we are, some verses don’t leave us alone, either in the form of a nursery rhyme we learnt decades ago or in the tune of a song we absolutely love but can’t sing without offending the gods of music. As said earlier, poetry is everywhere. Fortunately, so are the poets. They seem few in numbers not because they are endangered but because we bask in our ignorance of the influence poetry has on our existence. Poetry, for good or for best, continues to show us the world for it isn’t.
