Viayshankar’s evocative poem on DifferentTruths.com masterfully explores the resilience of thought and language against the futile assaults of ignorance.
They arrived furtively,
with the timidity of those who prefer obscurity—
as darkness lunges
toward the fragile insistence of a flame.
Abruptly, they cast
a refuse-like utterance
upon the open page of history.
Water was hurled—
yet it was no act of cleansing;
it was a failed conspiracy,
an attempt to drown language itself.
They forgot—
thought is not paper
to be dissolved by moisture;
it is a seed of fire,
capable of germination
even within inundation.
The lamp continued to burn—
as a river remains unperturbed
by the indignity of stones,
as a teacher disciplines speech
into an instrument of luminous restraint.
This assault of ignorance
was not upon a solitary mind alone;
it struck at the dignity of language,
the credibility of reason,
and that shared aspiration
we name the university.
Perhaps they presumed
that history would bend under insult,
that ideas would tremble into silence;
yet the shoulders of history
do not yield so easily,
nor are ideas ever so solitary.
Beyond every dustbin
there stands a library;
beyond every sullied splash
a sentence continues to shine.
And beyond each act of violence,
resistance discovers—
with quiet deliberation—
its most non-violent idiom.
There we shall remain,
where words lie wounded;
we shall plant them again,
as a cultivator persists
even after the blight of seeds,
sowing deeper into the soil.
We shall germinate—
like a forest gathering its own luminosity.
Light will return,
inscribing a fracture within darkness;
from the disciplined procession
of tireless ants,
another sun
will come into being.
Picture design by Anumita Roy
Vijayshankar Chaturvedi is a senior journalist, author, and public intellectual with over three decades in the Indian media. He spent more than a decade on Jansatta’s editorial team and now contributes incisive columns on public policy, international affairs, and socio-political issues to Jansatta, Navbharat Times, ABP News, Samalochan, Jan Chowk, and Hindi Saamana. His recent explorations delve deeply into human consciousness, decision-making processes, and the profound transformation of agency in the AI era.
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