Tag: 2020

Tokenism

She says she isn’t racist. Didn’t she tell you of her black friend? By the way, she “voted for Obama”.

He says he isn’t homophobic. He’s always on top with a man in bed although he’s “straight as an arrow”.

They say they aren’t sexist. They “allow” their wives to have jobs as long as dinner’s on time and the kids are fed.

Gender diversity is important for our company. We hire equal number of women, in positions of low authority.

Caste discrimination is abhorrent. We work together but eat apart, and make sure they don’t hear our barbs.

These kinds of tokenism mask insidious bigotry, as you can see. Better the devil you know than this daylight trickery.

Lynchpin-up

The question isn’t who David Lynch is; Rather “what”

The David who vanquished the mighty studio Goliath

Dreamweaver, luring cine viewers wide-eyed

To the Lost Highway, from where you hitch a ride

Into the Blue Velvet of a surreal dream logic

Free to interpret or experience, or both, take your pick.

David Lynch is his own sculptor Michelangelo,

Reinventing cinema from a painter’s tableaux

Television for a thinking audience with Twin Peaks

And meditation for the worker bees in TM retreats.

Furniture maker, frequent musical collaborator,

You can’t stop this iconoclast and his coiffeur!

Bi

Accused of sitting on the carnal fence, bisexuals are by far most judged.

Having the best of both worlds is a best case scene, usually the apt choices are fudged.

Bisexuality isn’t to be mistaken, with confusion, delusion or a phase.

I’d expand the range of sexual orientation, rather than diversity erase.

Attraction comes from the person, not the gender of he or she or they,

Bisexuals look beyond biology, the norms they don’t obey.

Dreams

A man was bragging to me, about dreamless sleep and peaceful nights. “No nightmares,” said he, with a triumphant smile.

To all these undreamers of day and night, who pity dreamers our chaotic plight, I’ve had something to say for a while. Would serve you well as you call it a night:

Dreams are the movies we make for “our eyes only”. Romance, erotica, horror and fantasy, adventures, thrillers, crime noir and comedy.

In dreams, we are actors and directors of our own film, writers of our own script, watching and being watched, as viewers of our own parody.

Dreams are where we leave society’s rules behind. Where the Shadow and Self emerge and unfurl in all their glory unconfined.

Where darkness is the womb for light, falling is essential pre-flight, where unseen faces are confidantes, laws of physics and chemistry are less defined.

Dreamers we will forever be, we know not the splice from reality. I wear my Cheshire Cat on my sleeve, the white rabbit is back. He’s piqued my curiosity!

The tribe upstream

There once lived a girl in a hamlet. She was quick to learn new things and had a keen eye. However, she had no friends. The children in the hamlet bored her to bits. They were simpletons with simple desires.

“Why don’t you play with your neighbours?” her mother would ask. To which she would shrug her shoulders, “They are so plain ma, with their sad little marbles and unimaginative toys.”

“Why don’t you come out and play with us?” her young neighbours would beckon in all innocence. She would give a shrug and go back to daydreaming about all the things she’d do when she left the wretched hamlet and all the annoying people who wouldn’t leave her alone.

One day, she went to the market to buy bread. The shop next door had a sign put up: “Apprentice wanted.”

She knew she would get the job if she tried, because she had taught herself to read and write. That wasn’t where her learning ended either. You see, she was smarter than the other kids in the hamlet who didn’t try to learn what they weren’t taught.

She ran home from excitement that day. She had got the job, of course, and would earn enough coin to feed her family and the cat. By and by, she became familiar with the marketplace and the route thereto. The buyers and sellers, the vendors and shoppers.

Among them was a group of kids, who did magic tricks and stunts for kicks. They would talk of travels to lands afar, of shamans and potions, ancient science and mandalas. They lived upstream where there was no struggle, to eke a living out of rubble. The rich upstream had time to kill, complicated pastimes to chill.

The girl was intrigued, she wanted to know it all. She joined their gathering and listened rapt, to their stories till nightfall. It became a ritual to go upstream after a day’s work, listen to their stories and romanticize their every quirk.

Her mother was intrigued. This was unusual for her child, to stay out so late especially since on the route ran animals wild. “Who are these folks upstream, you’re ignoring us for? It’s not just your family; your work, your pets are taken granted for.”

“Stop pestering me,” said the girl. “I’ve found my tribe. The tribe upstream gets me like you never will. You won’t understand it.” Her hamlet gathered around her to weep, she was leaving them for good. Yet they were happy since adventures have, she would.

She went upstream again to join the tribe for a feast. They were having a celebration, you see, for foreign guests from exotic sites. However, she was stopped at the door. “Sorry girl,” said a tribesman she knew, “No riff-raff allowed here tonight.”

Misogyny

A man walking down the alley slipped on a banana peel he didn’t see, and fell on his arse. Someone from a pack of onlookers nodded his head.

“What a fool that man is,” he scoffed.

A woman rushing through the same alley slipped this time. After getting a lascivious look at the woman lying prostrate, the onlooker shook his head and declared:

“What fools women are…”