Shail’s News in Verse, a blend of news and poetry, explores death tourism, voting from space, and a celebrity’s legal troubles, exclusively for Different Truths.

Guess karma just got tossed out of the window
‘cos the Sarco pod is here to transform
you into a deserter for life at the press
of a button, breathing in nitrogen
for a price in a trice
living (dying) in an illusion that death
was graceful and quick;
what a hacker’s trick
that’s Dr Nitschke for you;
he kills because he can’t heal.
That’s the pitiable deal.
Check out the modern gas chamber
where an American holds the world record
to be the first one to turn to cinder.

250 miles above the planet,
hovering around earthly reality.
So close and yet so very far.
The irony of things,
the miracle of technology in space,
astronaut Sunita Williams casts vote
while in orbital embrace,
another feather in the cap of NASA, which
can send her up there but not bring her back
soon enough. Whoever wins in the election
has a cosmic debt to repay
to voting cosmonauts in space.

Revered by the Bishnoi clan in Rajasthan
the blackbucks that the actor killed
for hunting flavour were not mere animals.
Revered to every cell, sadly the actors refuse
to dwell on Nature’s protective aura
which despises humans’ hunting horror.
Just when you thought that the actor
had done, seen it all,
had loved, cheated, splashed his bulges
waist above, he is surprised with the ghosts
of the blackbucks that he poached;
it is a line that should not have been
encroached. Now, he is threatened
dime a dozen; guess he might turn it
into a movie someday, Ek Tha Blacbuck,
Blackbuck Bhaijaan or, Tum Mere Ho Kaun!

Picture design by Anumita Roy

Reference:

https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/first-woman-to-die-in-suicide-pod-may-have-been-strangled-to-death-report-101730708423241.html

https://www.livemint.com/elections/us-elections/us-elecction-results-2024-sunita-williams-cast-ballot-in-space-how-nasa-astronauts-vote-iss-process-explained-11730805778814.html

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/maharashtra/salman-khan-gets-another-threat-asked-to-cough-up-5-crore/article68831334.ece

Shail Raghuvanshi

Shail Raghuvanshi is a poet, freelance journalist, copyeditor, voice actor, and artist with 30 years of experience in various media. She has worked as the Cultural Correspondent for India's first integrated media company, PLUS Channel, and has written course material for Madurai Kamaraj University's Post Graduate Programme in Advertising and Public Relations. She has also been a coach of Communicative English. She has published poems, short stories, and articles in leading magazines and anthologies.

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