My Poems

  It was winter, golden sunlight spilling gently across the courtyard. Chairs were drawn close, walking sticks resting like tired companions, their shadows stretched over the ground like old memories. The elders sat together, lamenting today’s technology. One complained about Maggi, another about mobile phones and WhatsApp, someone spoke fearfully of artificial intelligence. And then the familiar line surfaced: “Good that we grew old before all this arrived.” Among them sat the wisest old man, joining the gathering for the first time. Quiet, attentive, a soft smile resting on his face. His smile unsettled the others. They asked him why. Unhurried, as if holding time in his palms, he said— Julius Maggi was born in 1867. The man who invented the mobile phone was born a century ago. WhatsApp’s creator belongs to our own generation. Those building AI today are our contemporaries. The things we curse, he said, are born of our own min...

When he was five and refused a toy, Sai looked up and asked, “Dad, how old are you?” “Thirty-five,” his father said. A small silence followed. Then the boy murmured, “When I’m thirty-five, I’ll have a son of five. And I’ll never ever deny him a toy.” Time moved the way it always does. Now Sai is fifteen, bright, focused, scoring high, yet rising into the untidy air of youth and its storms. He wants his ears pierced, a new cut, pants low enough to show the edge of freedom. His parents frown. He turns to his grandfather, who listens, smiles, and asks for time. “When you’re thirty-five,” the old man says, “your son may not even ask. He may step out in a skirt, and your daughter may prefer the bare sky on her skin.” He laughs softly at his own memories— the slap for long hair, the ban on drainpipe pants, the scolding for strange music, the narrow permission of Godzilla and Kabuliwala. Generation to generation, the wheel turns. Eternal. Cyclic. A puzzle wit...