Customer is King?

Supermarkets are like televisions…
When you see much variety and choice,
You get overwhelmed and think
Ah! Yes customer is king!
But scratch your head and see again
You only can buy what is sold
And much of what is sold, buy you won’t
Just as on TV, they show you a lot of trash
And in flipping channels for more, you imitate
Life’s story of seeking the beyond. And yet
When you stop to see, you can
Never see what you wanted to see – you merely
Choose from what they think you should see…
God bless you for thinking you are king!
The king in real is the one who owns
The channel that hoodwinks you into thinking
It shows all you wanted to see…
The king in real is he who owns
The shop that outwits you into thinking
It sells all you wanted to buy…
Hmm! Customer is king? Neat deception!
Deepesh Chandrasekharan

Mountaintop

High above the tormenting turbulence
We reached the Himalayan highs
With stoical pines staring motionless
At the poignant silence all around,
All solemn and deadly still.
Even the restless winds have been
Reined in to an eerie chilly numbness.

We, winding up snake roads from tail
To hood and up to down, thank God
The sun shone bright to remind us that
We still were in the same planet.
Our feeling-awe, astonishment, discomfort
Nervousness- all rolled into a gaping
Mouth and widened eyes and nostrils
Yearning to suck more of the freshness
We may run out of after a week.
(10,000 ft above sea level, 11 Kms before Chail, H.P.)

Television

We sit gaping at flashing screens
Yelling and screaming and hurling packages
Of sound and picture carefully crafted to paste us onto them. We
Often throw ourselves on it and yearn
For that ungettable nothing by switching
Channels rapidly like flipping through an
Uninteresting interesting book in the library
About to close. Torn between this yearning and
The guilt of having wasted hours, we overwork
Our fingers on the worn-out buttons of the remote,
The cheap Chinese batteries unable to comprehend
Our inability to discern. What do we want? The TV
Refuses to give us that. We forget that it only gives us
What they want to give us. Where is our choice? We sit in
Emptiness looking for the eluding fulfillment. God
Bless the TV! I think it’s not for me.

SECULAR NATION

You ask the question
‘Will a Jew be less Jewish skull-cap-bereft?’
‘Will scarf-less heads put Islam to shame?’
You seem to think of ‘others’ as
Plotters to tear apart your hearts.
Think about it, my friend,
‘With your “secularity” implemented,
Will your blood stained glasses stop
Showing you cruel intent in innocent eyes?’
‘Will your gaze become less colored now
After ages of accumulated myopia?’
Let horses be horses and carts, carts.
Teach each to respect each.
Plant love in your dry vision
Can’t you see that differences
Are seen only if you see them?

-C.DEEPESH