Monday, September 30, 2013

Meter

Grace-VI

This poem has no meter,
It stretches like my deep skin,
To the limits of my passion,
Until it draws blood,
Upon the inhibitions of nature.
I, still, stretch it, closer to you.
Bless me with just one touch,
And gratify my quest for grace.
NEXT PART: Tomorrow. 
PREVIOUS PART: HERE
What is Grace? See the answer HERE.

Sunday, September 29, 2013

Not For The Faint Of Hearts

Grace-V

Love is not for the faint of hearts,
Love is not for the brave ones,
Love is not for the loner, either.
It’s for the one, who met You,
Myself—dear Grace, because of you.


NEXT PART: Tomorrow. 
PREVIOUS PART: HERE
What is Grace? See the answer HERE.

Saturday, September 28, 2013

To Make You Smile

Grace-IV
I have a reason to make you smile,
I have a reason to make you look at me,
I have a tender cause to attend,
A solid conviction,
That you and I are aligned.
Without your gaze, the shade I call life,
Do not exist, Grace. 

NEXT PART: Tomorrow. 
PREVIOUS PART: HERE
What is Grace? See the answer HERE.

Friday, September 27, 2013

I Lied About the Morning

Grace-III
I lied about the morning.
I lied about the sunshine.
About spring, I never was truthful,
I wasn’t telling you everything about life.
But all you need to know about me,
I tell you in three words:
I love her—Grace. 

NEXT PART: Tomorrow. 
PREVIOUS PART: HERE
What is Grace? See the answer HERE.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Grace found

Grace-II


Grace found its accommodation,
When love found its way.
Walls do not shatter, ever,
Once built, whatever you pay.
Grace colours them, with passion,
Making them stand in hope’s way.
Grace, you are the colour,
I coloured, with you my life’s way,
The wall of my incarceration.


NEXT PART: Tomorrow. 
PREVIOUS PART: HERE
What is Grace? See the answer HERE

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

When I turned the pages

Grace-I

When I turned the pages of my life,
When I thought of finding sense out of it,
I found your name engraved,
With the ink of love.
Deep, sensible, meaningful.
You are the word that means ‘me’.

NEXT PART: Tomorrow. 
What is Grace? See the answer HERE

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Grace


“I know a noble heart that beats
   For one it loves how "wildly well!"
I only know for whom it beats;
   But I must never tell!
     Never tell!
Hush! hark! how Echo soft repeats,--
     Ah! never tell!”

—Frances Sargent Osgood
(First published in the Broadway Journal on September 6, 1845)
 
Image Courtesy: Flicker.com
Imagine being the moon, of being able to move away nowhere, turning away from the earth to turn back and to see the same blueness; of the nature of wandering that enables it to come back and face the same side. In writing i-poems, I feel the same, and it’s a feeling close to wonder. I come back, and face the same angel of poetry waiting for me, with unremitted passion. I am not distressed at this glorious routine, of returning at the same spot. Like a river, each time I come back to poems, they reveal something new. No one, steps into the same river twice, I remember reading somewhere.

Grace is the manifestation of the divine upon the earth. I only reflect what I see upon her face, upon the skin of her being, and upon the ground with her shadow. Call it fate or destiny; I come back to her, each time, with a different spirit. She is the reservoir of unending newness and meaning. I only decipher her, Grace.
 
Image Courtesy: Google
The first part of this new series of i-poems comes tomorrow. 


This series is dedicated to my dear Grace.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Why Are You an Extrovert?

The same question can be asked inversely; why are you an introvert? Extroversion and introversion are two personality types that have very serious role to play in how our social systems and cultural practices are structured. Every society has norms that validate either one or both these types. In her phenomenal work, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking Susan Cain takes a step further in analyzing the two personality types. In ‘Part Two’ of the book titled; “Your biology, Your self?” she argues the possibility of biological reasons for explicit introvert or extrovert behavior.

Image Courtesy: Guardian.co.uk
Susan Cain quotes extensively from the findings of Jerome Kagan, the author of Galen’s Prophecy, and “one of the great developmental psychologists of the twentieth century.” Susan Cain says, “Kagan has given us painstakingly documented evidence that high reactivity is one biological basis of introversion.” (104) Extending her arguments a step further, Cain discusses the personality types under the working conditions at financial institutions. Susan Cain traces the causes of the credit crisis born in 2008, into personality types, extroverts specifically. This may sound outrageous. But Cain has a strong evidence base to presume so.

Introverts are more resistant, according to Cain, to ‘reward-sensitivity’, a psychological mad-drive that pushes an individual over the edge, taking blind risks for a satiating reward. This often results in losing what one cannot afford to lose. Risk-takers often feel this emotion, though in the financial crisis, they never listened to warning signs. Introverts, who spent most of their time inside their cubicles, in solitude, rung alarm bells. Introverts are born with qualities that help them in insightful problem solving. What the introverts found out in the calm of their solitary offices were completely missed out by the extroverts who reside in a different and active wavelength, than introverts. The top brass of the institutions never bothered to listen to the silent types and their messages of warning.  

Image Courtesy: Google
“The extroverts are more likely to focus on what is happening around them. It’s as if extroverts are seeing “what is” while their introverted peers are asking “what if”.” (168)

Susan Cain is of the opinion that the ability to persist can make an introvert successful, more than genius. She gives examples of those who took “front-row seats” during the crisis of 2008. In almost all the companies and banks that suffered, the extroverted aggressive risk-takers gambled away more than their lot. She also notices how more aggressive people are given promotions in companies, when they prove the first risk they took to be successful. Risk-takers step up the ladder, leaving behind inhibitors and slow-reflection types.  

“Dopamine is the “reward chemical” released in response to anticipated pleasured. The more responsive your brain is to dopamine…the more likely you are to go after rewards like sex, chocolate, money, and status,” (160) writes Susan Cain. Thus, she once again establishes a complex psychological grounding to the otherwise inexplicable, human greed.
 
Image Courtesy: Google
“Extroverts’ dopamine pathways appear to be more active than those of introverts.” (160) Hope lives and rests upon the introverts. All these insights suggest how significant it is to understand and prune personality types at a very early stage of growth itself. At least, society should provide firm guidelines to respect the passive-types, unlike what we see in action today. 

Sunday, September 22, 2013

The Way Back: A Film Review

Policeman: “Welcome to India. Paper-passport please.”
Janusz, (smiling), “We don’t have any.”

Adolf Hitler sent his prisoners to concentration camps, while his Russian counterpart Joseph Stalin sent away the ‘enemies of his state’ to Siberia to rot and die. ‘The Way Back’ is a drama about how a group of prisoners escaped from a Siberian Gulag camp. Most of them were arrested and sent away for charges that have nothing to do with what they did in person to the state, but what the state thought about these people. Some of them were arrested for just taking photographs of the Leningrad, accused as spies.

Image Courtesy: Google
Janusz reaches the camp for charges of espionage. Through his life, the story develops and many other characters come across, all in need of hope and liberation. How Janusz offers the inmates the hope of freedom may remind us of Moses and his legendary march out of Egypt with Israelites. Although he gets the idea of escaping from the camp from another inmate, he realizes that no one else can make this happen other than himself. So Janusz brings together a group of people including an American, played by Ed Harris, named Mr. Smith.

Even the name Janusz is meant to evoke a sense of liberation, transition, and a new beginning. Janusz becomes the beginner of hope for the six inmates, Mr. Smith, Valka, Voss, Tomasz, Zoran, and Kazik. Janus is the ancient Roman twin faced god of beginnings and metastasis—a clear indication of classical theme, which validates the association of the story with the “Chapter of Exodus” from The Bible. ‘The Way Back’ apparently proclaims that escape from totalitarianism into liberation and hope is a journey guided by providence into salvation. They walked 4000 miles to reach freedom, India.  
Image Courtesy: Google

If you watched ‘Defiance’, the 2008 film, directed by Edward Zwick, then you would find a parallel in ‘The Way Back’ and like it deeply. Still, ‘The Way Back’ pursues in a more philosophical angle into some existential questions unlike ‘Defiance’. In ‘The Way Back’ the characters are driven by the motive of liberation and finding purpose than just a desire to live. In the first part of the movie, one inmate asks Janusz what if they all die in the attempt to escape from the camp. Janusz replies that they will die free men.There is more physical violence in 'Defiance'.

Image Courtesy: Guardian.com
Very less humor is a feature of ‘The Way Back’. Only in the last scene in a sequence of stressful action, do they deliver something quite close to a cheerful remark. This happens at the Indian border, a dialogue from which scene at the start. Some of the characters, among them die, as Janusz had said the death of free men. Only three made into the Indian border, after a tiresome and hazardous journey through storm, snow, and desert. This World War II movie is directed by Peter Weir, and is inspired by the book The Long Walk (1955), by SÅ‚awomir Rawicz. The 4000 miles journey from Siberia to India was full of extremely hostile experiences. Poignantly portrayed characters and the haunting story line makes one feel, in the 133 minutes, as if along with those seven strong men and one woman, one has lived a lifetime.

This is your Saturday FlickHERE for more.