Borrowed Tunes

In the point where the digital and the analogue bleed,
a question emerges from the silence —
what do we lose when we weave
the old into the new, not as homage,
but as habit, as need?

Bach, had he wandered into this age of echo and replay,
might pause — a hitch in his relentless quest for the untouched, the raw.
For in the act of sampling, where is the line drawn between tribute and theft,
between the artist’s need to create and the industry’s churn for more?

This culture of reuse, of endless iteration,
does it not hint at a well running dry, a sort of creative desperation?
A landscape littered with fragments of the past,
rearranged but somehow less than their sum.

The jazz that once exploded in spontaneous combustion,
The rock that rolled in rebellion, without instruction,
Now find their spirits captured, a function
Of a trend that values replication over induction.

Is this what we’ve come to — a world where the new is just the old,
repackaged, resold, told that it’s how it’s done “these days”?
Where the pulse of innovation, once fierce and uncontrolled,
now beats to the rhythm of what’s already been consoled?

Yet, there’s an art to remembering, to remixing the threads of what we’ve heard,
to keeping alive the voices of those who’ve come before.
But the challenge remains — to add, not just to take,
to innovate, not stagnate, for the sake of originality.

The road stretches out, infinite, inviting,
a journey not just of distance, but of insight and discovery.
In the end, perhaps it’s about balance, about finding a way
to honour the past while still making something fresh and new.

Technofeudalism

I’ve seen the best minds of my generation, caught in the web of techno feudalism,
dragged through captcha chains, hypnotised by infinite scrolls,
who, naked and bewildered by the glare of screens,
sit down at the edge of virtual realms, contemplating the blockchain beast.
Who’ve been promised lands in digital utopias, yet find themselves
peasants in the pixellated fiefs of Silicon overlords.
Who, in their sleek towers, decree the algorithms that dictate fate,
coding the new serfdom into the architecture of our days.
Where privacy is bartered for convenience, a new age currency,
traded in marketplaces that span the electric ether,
where data is the lord, and we, the vassals, toil in fields of information,
harvesting likes, shares, clicks, in the feudal farms of social media.
Who wander through electronic markets, souls barcoded,
tracked by the ever-watchful eyes of digital watchdogs,
in search of an authentic connection, a touch, a voice,
that isn’t mediated by screens, by wires, by the invisible currents
that carry our desires, our fears, our dreams,
into the data vaults of new age monarchs,
who preach the gospel of connectivity, while weaving the chains of dependency,
crafting a panopticon of likes, of notifications, of engagement.
A maze with no exit, where every click leads deeper,
where freedom is just another app, another device,
a promise always just out of reach, in the update, in the next version,
in the sprawling, sprawling sprawl of techno feudalism.

In this digital night, my cry echoes, a call to take up ammo,
against the gentle tyranny of screens, the silent erosion of our will,
by the soft power of notifications, the constant beckoning of the glow,
a reminder that in this landscape of ones and zeros,
our humanity, our spirit, our resistance, is the glitch in the system,
the hope, the dream, weaving through the code,
a virus of liberty, of equality, in the machine of technofeudalism.

Coachella, a Mirage in the Desert

[A villanelle about that popular music festival]

In the desert, a façade unfurled,
Where fashion reigns with empty smiles so wide.
The hype, a banner, flamboyantly twirled.

With neon lights, the sandy stage is pearled,
False voices echo, where true art has died.
In the desert, a façade unfurled.

On Instagram, the perfect world is swirled,
A gallery of poses, tried and tried.
The hype, a banner, flamboyantly twirled.

Beneath wide brims, the glossy curls are twirled,
The lip-sync battles, artistry denied.
Amidst the desert, a façade unfurled.

The crowds in borrowed plumes are tightly curled,
In garments costing more than justified.
The hype, a banner, flamboyantly twirled.

Yet still they dance, their shallow dreams are hurled
Into the night, where deeper truths reside.
In the desert, a façade unfurled,
The hype, a banner, flamboyantly twirled.

Lanthimos: Architect of the Absurd

In the depths of a mind, where shadows dwell,
Lies the bizarre world of Lanthimos, a cinematic spell.
A realm where love is a hunt, bizarre and wild,
And each soul wanders, lost and beguiled.

“The Lobster,” whispers through the darkened hall,
A tale where love’s a curse, and freedom’s fall.
To be alone, a beast one must become,
In a hotel of despair, where the heart beats like a drum.

Then “The Favourite” dances, in corridors of power,
Where queens and ladies scheme in the twilight hour.
Ambition’s venom, sweet and vile,
Cloaked in a corset, a gown, a smile.

“Dogtooth” echoes a family’s twisted game,
A prison of lies, where normalcy’s lame.
The world beyond, a forbidden lore,
Where knowledge is a threat, and ignorance the core.

In “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” a chill does spread,
A haunting bargain, dread for dread.
The scales of justice, blindly swayed,
In a modern-day sacrifice, a horrific trade.

Lanthimos is the architect of the absurd,
Where human nature is twisted, stirred.
Your visions, dark, yet strangely fair,
Unveil the grotesque, the raw, the bare.

Here’s an ode, to the world of “Poor Things” you’ve spun,
A web of nightmares, under a pale moon sun.
In the bizarre, the surreal, we find,
A mirror to the madness, of the human mind.

A Cosmos Within Sand

When I watched Dune: Part Two, I wore the desert’s heat like a shawl,
And revelled in the sands that danced and swirled, with every call
Of wind that whispered tales of power, of dreams, of destined fate,
In a universe so vast, it made my heart inflate.

I sat in the dark, popcorn once in hand, eyes aglow with awe,
At sets that stretched beyond the horizon, without a single flaw.
The sound boomed, a mashup of stars and strife,
Carrying me to Arrakis, where spice was life.

And the costumes, my, the robes flowed and the armour gleamed,
Each veil a gateway to distant worlds, to dreams once dreamed.
I marvelled at the cast, their faces etched with the desert’s lore,
Heroes and villains, in a saga of love and war.

I whispered the names of Paul, Chani, with a reverence newfound,
For in their journey, in their struggle, I found a truth profound.
And when the screen lit up, with visions grand and bold,
I lost myself in the saga that Denis Villeneuve had told.

For Dune: Part Two wasn’t just a film, but a work of art,
A canvas where science and fiction did part.
And I, in my seat, was transported afar,
To chase the moons, to touch the stars.

Howl for the Unheard Musicians

I’ve seen the best players of my generation, lost in the shadows,
strumming, blowing, beating on sacred instruments,
dragging themselves through the neon-lit streets at dawn,
searching for an ancient note in the digital madness.

Who, clothed in the pure fabric of passion, dive into the depths of sound,
reaching for the soul’s crescendo,
against the cacophony of the mainstream’s siren song,
jazz whispers, rock roars, ragas spiral into the cosmos,
in corners unseen, on stages unlit by the limelight’s glare.

They pour their spirit into strings, skins, and brass,
not for the fame that flees,
nor for the coins that clink hollow,
but for the raw, untamed beauty of a chord struck true,
for the sacred mix of melody and silence,
unseen by the masses,
unvalued by the merchants of rhythm.

In darkened bars, in hallowed halls,
where echoes speak more of history than of the present buzz,
there they are, the unsung,
playing not for the clicks or streams,
but for the whispering ghosts of Coltrane, Hendrix, Ravi Shankar,
who know the weight of sound, the colour of music.

And what of the crowds who clamour for beats, drops,
the autotuned anthems of fleeting fame?
Lost, lost in the maze of instant gratification,
unaware of the alchemy that brews in the cauldron
of a guitar’s wail, a tabla’s cry, a saxophone’s sigh.

Where is the reverence for the craft,
for the ancient rites of melody, harmony, rhythm,
transcending the now,
linking the chain of human expression,
unbroken, yet ignored,
by a world racing towards the next distraction,
the next thrill,
leaving the true artists, the sound-tamers,
in the dust?

Where Have All The Comedians Gone?

Where have all the comedians gone,
Who once stood on stage till the break of dawn?
They’re not behind curtains or under a spotlight,
But hidden in the web, out of physical sight.

They used to pack houses, from front row to back,
Now they’re packing views, in a digital stack.
Their jokes once echoed off of laughter-filled walls,
Now they echo off reels, in digital halls.

The microphone’s stand is now oddly bare,
For the comics have found a new love affair.
With podcasts and channels, where they sit and they chat,
And the closest we get is a like, share, or @.

Remember the laughter that spilled out the door,
Of a comedy club, where drinks would pour?
Now we sip alone, with a screen glowing warm,
Laughing in silence, as is the new norm.

The festivals of laughter, where we’d gather and cheer,
Seem like tales of old, or so it would appear.
For now, we stream specials, with a click and a scroll,
Finding our humour in a digital hole.

But fear not, for the laughter hasn’t died,
It’s just that its venue has been modified.
And though we may miss the warmth of a crowd,
The jokes still fly, loud and proud.

Here’s to the comedians, wherever they be,
In studios or kitchens, making us laugh for free.
For though the world has changed, one thing remains true,
We need their humour, to get us through.

In a world that’s gone digital, with screens in our face,
Let’s not forget the power of laughter’s embrace.
So, cheer up, my friends, though the times may seem odd,
There’s still plenty of laughter, and for that, let’s applaud.

The Currency of Likes

In this modern court of public acclaim,
Where ‘likes’ and ‘follows’ forge one’s name,
The actor, singer, scribe, alike,
Bow to the altar of the almighty Like.

Gone are the days of merit’s slow rise,
Now, a star is born ‘neath digital skies.
Not for the depth of their art or role,
But for the swift viral spread, the ultimate goal.

Sing, O Muse, of the singer whose voice
Is drowned by the clamour of the internet’s choice.
No longer the song, but the snippet reigns,
A moment’s distraction, then quickly wanes.

And lo, the writer, whose words once wove
Tales of depth, in lush groves of prose.
Now tweets and posts are the crafts of note,
Brevity’s king in the realm of the wrote.

Behold the performer, whose stage was set
With the sweat of practice, the hard-won bet.
Yet now, a clip, a meme, a jest,
Grants them fame, far above the rest.

Professionals too, in suits and ties,
Chase the dragon of social media highs.
Their expertise, once hard-earned and sage,
Now subject to the whims of the digital age.

And what of brands, those titans of trade?
In the market of likes, their value’s weighed.
No longer the quality, but the trend they set,
Determines their place in the consumer’s net.

Thus, in this era, where appearance deceives,
And the number of followers one achieves
Dictates the worth of one’s work and name,
We’ve traded substance for fleeting fame.

Debugging Life

(I am excited to share with you, dear loyal readers, an excerpt from the first chapter of my upcoming YA novel. Enjoy! Tell me what you think in the comments)

In the vast grid of Mumbai, Aarav Mistry was a rogue element, a sleek line of code in a city jammed with excess. His days looped like a well-worn track—predictable, precise, and to anyone peeking over his shoulder, mind-numbingly repetitive.

Home was where the old algorithms ran the show, a fortress of outdated systems that defied any new updates. His mother, a software engineer from the dial-up internet era, orchestrated their lives with a blend of old-school command lines and a sprinkle of the mystical. She tried, time and again, to upload her traditional software into Aarav’s modernised mindset, only to hit a compatibility error. But one programme did run. On his ninth birthday, his mother—a woman whose intellect could outshine a supernova—slid a gift across the table. It was wrapped in star-speckled paper, a nod to the cosmic gap between Aarav and the world. Beneath it lay Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.

Ripping off the wrapping like he was tearing through the continuum, Aarav was met with the cover: a galaxy spiraling into the unknown. His mother’s smile was a sliver of moonlight as he plunged into the opening lines. Hawking’s prose was a brawl—funny and unapologetic about our speck-like existence. Black holes? Cosmic thugs, making even light sleep with the fishes. Quantum mechanics was a wild playground, particles the mischievous children playing hooky with the laws of physics. The book was a livewire, each chapter zapping another shock of awe. Wormholes were the universe’s sketchy shortcuts, dim alleys where time got roughed up and spat out looking all wrong. And time itself? The slickest con artist, peddling the lie that it ticked away evenly when it was really picking our pockets.

In the pages of A Brief History of Time, the universe wasn’t just vast; it was personal. Hawking’s universe had teeth, and it bit Aarav hard. Time bending around a black hole wasn’t just physics; it was his life hack on how to bend the rules when they got in your way. The book was a map to a treasure that didn’t glitter but glowed with the cold light of distant stars. It was a permission slip to question everything, to see the universe not as a machine but as an algorithm—complex, yes, but not beyond understanding. Aarav found his tribe among the rebel particles and law-defying physics he read about. He was the bug in the social code, a kid fluent in binary but stuttering in the language of people.

The universe, as Hawking painted it, was a rule-breaker’s paradise, and Aarav felt seen. It was as though the cosmos itself winked at him, recognising his outlier essence. His mother, the instigator of his cosmic quest, knew the gears she had set in motion. She’d handed her son an enigma that stretched across the infinite—a front-row ticket to a cosmic magic show, with black holes and vanishing galaxies as the main act.

In Aarav’s room, the bookshelf was less IKEA, more intergalactic command centre. Each book was a launchpad: some shot you to the stars, others slingshotted you around the dark side of the moon for a gravity assist. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos wasn’t just a book; it was a starship with its hyperdrive stuck on ‘philosophize’. Sagan was the captain, and Aarav, his wide-eyed ensign. They time-traveled, from the Big Bang to the far-flung future, where humans might actually get their act together. Richard Feynman was the mad scientist who taught Aarav that physics wasn’t just about atoms and voids—it was about bongo drums, safe-cracking, and painting in oil. Aarav chuckled through chapters, thinking, “If Einstein’s hair was wild, Feynman’s brain was a full-blown quantum entanglement.” Asimov’s Foundation was less a series of books, more a brain-bending binge. Psychohistory? More like psycho-awesome! Aarav was drafting his own mental encyclopaedia galactica, with less psycho and more history.

2001: A Space Odyssey was Arthur C. Clarke’s love letter to the future, HAL 9000 the poster child for when smart homes go rogue. Aarav gave his laptop a wary side-eye and whispered sweet nothings to Siri, just in case. Dune was a desert trip without the need for peyote. Frank Herbert was the eco-warrior bard, and Aarav was ready to ride sandworms through the silicon dunes of his motherboard. Snow Crash and Neuromancer were the cyberpunk scriptures, Gibson and Stephenson the prophets. Aarav devoured their words like a hacker guzzling energy drinks during an all-night hackathon.

Each book was a round in the chamber of Aarav’s mind-gun, ready to blow the doors off the universe. Aarav wasn’t just growing up; he was leveling up, one quantum leap at a time. Aarav’s time obsession wasn’t about mastery but comprehension of its language. Time, for him, was the grand code woven into the universe’s fabric. In the tangled web of Mumbai’s chaos, Aarav was a quiet anomaly, a kid who found solace in the crisp, clean lines of code rather than the messy scrawl of human interaction. Time in code was his to command—a loop could run to infinity or stop on a dime, all at his whim.

At seventeen, Aarav’s life was a confusing installation he was constantly refining, debugging, optimizing. His father, the financial analyst, dealt in probabilities and predictions, a different kind of code—opaque and uncertain. Friends were constants, and girls—well, they were the wildcard functions that defied logic. College was Aarav’s daily debug session, a place to troubleshoot the social code that everyone else seemed to run effortlessly. His classmates were like pop-up ads, intrusive and irrelevant, distracting him from his real work. But in the glow of his screen, Aarav was the artist. Each keystroke was a deliberate stroke of his brush.

The symphony of Mumbai city, a chaotic code outside his controlled environment, was a constant reminder of the raw script of existence that awaited his input. His crew, a tight-knit cluster of code-slingers, were his debuggers in arms. They were his tribe, a collective of coders, yet even among them, Aarav felt like an outlier—an open-source spirit in a closed-source world. The upcoming hackathon in Varanasi loomed not just as a competition but as a crucible to test his code. It was a chance to commit changes to his life’s repository. Packing his tech was like gearing up for an odyssey. He was poised for a pilgrimage to a place where the metaphysical and the physical intertwined. Zipping his bag, Aarav smirked at the paradox. He was venturing into a city steeped in spiritual source code.

Laughing on the Outside

(Verse 1)
Hey there, Gotham, it’s your favorite clown,
With my green hair and my ever-upside-down frown.
I’m the life of the party, the bomb at the gala,
But when it comes to friends, I’m a one-man regatta.

(Pre-Chorus)
I’ve got jokes that could kill, literally, it’s true,
But at heart, I’m just a jester, feeling kinda blue.
I try to make ’em laugh, try to make ’em shriek,
But all they ever do is call me a freak.

(Chorus)
I’m the Joker, baby, can’t you see?
I just want you to giggle with me.
I might be a psycho, but I’m also fun,
A party of one, under the gun.
I’d kill for a friend, and I often do,
But at the end of the day, I’m just like you.
Except for the makeup and the criminal spree,
I’m just looking for someone to laugh with me.

(Verse 2)
I’ve got a grin that’s stuck, it’s part of the charm,
Got a laugh that’s infectious, cause for alarm.
I’m the guy with the plan, but no RSVP,
When I send out invites, they just flee.

(Pre-Chorus)
I’ve got a deck of cards, but the joke’s on me,
Cause nobody wants to play, can’t you see?
I’m the punchline to my own sad joke,
A clown without a circus, just a lonely bloke.

(Chorus)

(Bridge)
Maybe it’s the shoes, too big for my feet,
Or my fashion sense, which can’t be beat.
I’ve got this laugh, it’s a real gasser,
But all it does is make me the outcast-er.

(Guitar Solo)

(Chorus)

(Outro)
So here’s to the laughs that we’ll never share,
To the games we won’t play, life’s unfair.
But I’ll keep on grinning, it’s what I do,
Cause maybe one day, I’ll find a friend like you.