Vijayshankar’s evocative poem captures the grim socio-political realities of our time on DifferentTruths.com.
There is no longer any exultation in the sunrise.
nor any grief in the setting of the moon.
Tea has been emptied of its taste.
Even the impulse to kiss one’s child has withered.
The expectancy of meeting and parting has eroded.
I find myself without a response
to the most ordinary gesture of greeting.
A flower blooming at the threshold
extinguishes, rather than consoles, the mind.
I am no longer certain
who arrives, who departs.
I cannot say
how long it has been since the regime changed;
Yet I sense, with clarity,
that the mechanisms of subordination
have grown more exacting, more severe.
Amidst the proliferation of ordinary deaths,
Even the spectacular violence appears subdued.
The pandemic itself seems to have shamed them;
as though dispossessing the goddess of her vessel of blood.
The state grows restless—
fearful that its artistry may be blunted,
that it may no longer attain
the aesthetic satisfaction of a well-executed killing.
Through covert surveillance,
it seeks to verify our patriotism
while invoking, with solemn insistence:
The nation demands sacrifice.
The state’s foremost priority, it seems,
is the preservation of the arts—
even if that art be the art of killing.
Come then, let us assist
in this noble and historic undertaking.
Let us render our exhausted, unproductive lives
useful to the nation—
before insurgent poems begin to descend upon us.
Let us, therefore,
preserve the killers’ craft.
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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