Where had I seen you? I know your cloudless face, bleary-eyed forehead. Everything says what I imagined you in my remotest dream and desire. It takes a long while to forget your intrepid looking body and soul, Did God fashion you in his own hand and in his own image. Is God the creator of your soul? Where are you hailing from? I asked you. You remained as if a stormy-petrel is whispering a soul song in your ear.

But I got my heart at you when you abruptly melted into your own clouds. In tears and jeers you cheered at your sovereignty. Your sovereignty spoke in many languages. In many words, it became a tome of dignity. You are just an epitome of rude fire and smoky fumes that never burn at the slightest provocation of love or hate. At the end of the tunnel I got you not running behind the stray dogs.

What should I name you? Nymph of the valley? The jingle of your body language is still deafening my silence. You are standing at the threshold of my conscience. You are neither singing nor dancing. Your presence makes all the difference as if someday you will kiss some somnambulist on his journey to oblivion. You are right at the corner of my wakefulness when all the birds have left their nests to greet the tomorrow to come.

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The night lengthens
In shadows of deathless darkness
Corpses of silence dancing the way
All along the fairy footsteps of the shadows
And singing the moments of the last peninsula
Foraying into the depth of the seven seas
The wordless world shouts for nothing
Vertically at the top of the expanding sky
To reverberate the swan song
In couplets of ever more longings
For you to say something
To the stranger of darkness kissing
The night passing by.

You say nothing
Out of the heart of a forlorn flower
You close your bleary eyes
On the spreading petals of lilting white
As if to melt into the guiles
Of swallowing moments
Like flapping wings of the dragonfly
The stranger of night dies with you
In a cauldron of beloving silence
And the lengthening night sighs
At the whipping lash of the darkness.

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Is it that much easy telling lies or saying no to lies? It seems too easy but really not so. Beware of your gut feelings or otherwise you will be taken to the lying detector to ascertain the veracity of your lies and truths for that matter. Yes, you have to have enough of your guts to tell lies whenever you feel like. Whenever somebody is good, is it not that he fails in his courage to be all that bad to others? Same is the case of telling the truth. It might seem paradoxical in the end. But meanwhile we have learned to live with paradoxes and time and again this has been proved to be so in every walk of our life or at least at certain stage of our life.

So, telling lies is not all that easy.

Once I had an experience of that sort. I was traveling in a crowded mini-bus going through lanes and by-lanes of Calcutta. I was standing in the middle. A poor-looking man was standing just in front of me. When the bus reached a junction I saw him pick pocketing somebody's purse. And immediately after that there rose a great uproar inside the bus. Everybody suspected that poor-looking man but he denied (telling lies!) point-blank and fended for himself. As I was standing just near by some people went on asking me whether I have seen anything of that mischief. At that time I was trembling within myself but somehow managed to politely say that I had not seen anything (again, telling lies!). And the man got scott-free.

But why did I of all tell that lie which I should not do? Is it that I just failed to be courageous enough to tell the truth. Or, for the fear of freedom I told blank lies on their face? First of all, I took pity on that man because of his poor social status and secondly, inwardly I got scared of telling the grim truth. As I failed to muster up enough courage to face the music of reality, I shied away from it by resorting to telling lies and I saved myself from the disgrace of my inner disquietude. On the other hand, that cut-purse too saved the day for himself by resorting to the same tactics like me. Are the two lies of the same freedom of fear? Or, are they the two sides of the same story?

Whatever they are in truth, they are not too far from each other. It is fear of freedom that coerced and submerged us into the respective world of subjective reality. Had that cut-purse not committed that mischief which he had all that freedom, he would have been enjoyed that reality which coerced him as gullible as ever to be protectorate of himself. But the fear of that situational compulsion and freedom egged him on to think and act otherwise by way of acting and telling lies consequently. Consequent upon that he loses his freedom to desiccates truth from reality and also truth from lies, truth coming in the way of lies and lies in the way of truth. This is the obverse feeling of that socially outcast at the decisive moments of seeing reality as it is.

On the other hand, at that very decisive moment I too saw reality as it was. In that fray I told lies of not seeing reality as like of him because I saw that reality from a divergent standpoint which was to me a fear of telling the truth from the lies and it was lacking in moral courage too. The situational compulsion to free myself from fear of freedom denigrated me to the extent of not abiding by the rules of law which constitutes my spectrum of freedom. Rather than that, being true to lies provided me a kind of freedom in way that castrated my sense of being a moral messiah in a big bad world where truths vibe well with lies but never poised to overwhelm moral fornication and perjury in any way whatsoever.

And there lies the intolerant paradox. If somebody says he never tells lies, it is also that he never tells the truth for the life of him. If he really does not tell lies, then how could he testify that he always tells the truth to the world where he has absolved all of his freedom to the altar of his circumstantial existence which is more at stake when it comes to questioning his beings as a sovereign human creature. Nevertheless he is more prone to prove himself or deceive himself as one of the protagonists of degenerated morality - a kind of sham morality which saves the day for vague truism. Truism apart, the chance of saving the grace of the inner soul of the moral messiahs is belied at the slightest tinkering of the degenerated morality which is torn apart when confronted with the objective reality of the situation.

So, when I say I tell lies and only lies it is like I never feel like telling the truth to the world as I think truth and lies converge on the same catastrophic point doing away with the tailor-made dichotomy that caters to the evangelical services of the morality - which is degenerated ab initio - that never looks back to what is happening in the real world of millions of people under the false impression of evangelical truth. That truth is belied or falsified time and again at the decisive moments of confrontational truth of lies. That is why I say I never ever tell the truth as because I know the instrument of lying is a forecasting metaphor of masquerading truth as lies or lies as truth and that is to say that when I say that I tell lies and lies only, I mean that lies are the objective truth of everyday reality of life and lies cannot be lies unless objectified by the truth.

This paradox is like defacing the currency of Diogenes. The Greek philosopher made it a mission of his life "to deface the currency" in order that the false coins be out of state's circulation. By that way he sought to expose the falsity and sham truths of conventional ideas and beliefs and at the same time to eradicate them out of the Greek society. Metaphorically this was my views of lies when I lied that I had not seen or known anything of the pickpocketing incident. That incidence of lies bared the objective truth of our society to the hilt and told the world that on a base of false truths that cut-purse had exposed the falsity of the charge of conviction against him. And that way bare lies won the day for him. And the truth prevailed!

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Is education a one-way traffic? The teacher will gorge out something from his memory or from his notebook and the students will listen to him like some dumb dudes? If this is education practiced in one-way-traffic module, what is destined to happen is happening all over the world and most predictably the so-called educated people have been turned into dumb dudes. They have fallen a victim to 'culture of silence'. This 'culture of silence' is the way of life that the powers-that-be have intelligently instilled into the mindset of the common denominators and that is what they want.

Paul Freire in his seminal book Pedagogy of The Oppressed says that it is not education. Conventional education is mechanical and parroting to the point of being corrupted to the core in so far as it tends to exert pressure on the common people to eat the humble pie of existence. It cannot enlighten the students with new visions and thoughts. According to his opinion, proper education should be dialogical and interactive between the teacher and the students. Only that way education can become pro-active in the sense that proactivity with the existing standard of life would interact with the way we should live.

So, education's sole objective should be to educate the mass of people how to change this world. To change the world, people have to know the actual reality of the world in due perspective and thereby to transcend that reality. If they know it, they will automatically want to change the undesirable societal condition of the world. On that condition, the teacher cannot parrot some methodological ideas which are barren and inefficacious. From the teacher a student will learn something and then he should be prompted to ask questions one after another to get plausible answers themselves with the aiding and abetting with the proper help and guidance from the attending teacher.

That is a two-way traffic and two-way-traffic education is truly dialogical and interactive. And interactive and dialogical education is the only proper way to educate the mass of people who are burning within themselves to change the unjust world. To reiterate it again, first and foremost they should know and be of the firm conviction that the world they live in is utterly an unjust one. Gaining this conviction is not just gaining in knowledge but remold one's mindset with a vision, a vision that shows the new light at the end of the tunnel at the crossroad of life's one and only true mission.

Freire is a Brazilian educator who conducted many educational workshops among the poor and illiterate peasants and factory workers of Latin American countries to lend a hand to their political education so that they could know the world better. And he returned with immense and enthusiastic responses from them. He says in his book, "In the midst of the argument a man who previously had been a factory worker for many years spoke out : 'Perhaps I am the only one here of working class origin. I can't say that I've understood everything you've said, but I can say one thing - when I begin this course I was naive, and when I found how naive I was, I started to get critical...' "

And getting critical is the bottomline of Freire's pedagogy as far as the liberating education is concerned. It generates critical consciousness and that "conscientization" then cries for freedom from all shackles of oppression prevalent in the society. Freire says : "Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsively. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for the human completion."

Now let us briefly point to the "culture of silence" which shackles the mindset of the wretched of the earth. The oppressors of the world do not like the idea that the wretched people never raise their voice against injustice and cry for their legitimate demand of freedom. It is rather that they remain "dumb dudes" meekly surrendering themselves to their existential fatalism. They should not get critical of their essences of existence reverberating in their political consciousness. And here lies the crux. As long as the oppressed people eschew the "culture of violence", their juggernaut of economic appropriation and political shenanigans will roll on undisturbed and uninterrupted.

So, let them sing the songs of silence!

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I am apolitical, are you?
When you are political, what do you mean? By casting votes for one scoundrel or another? Or, you root for what those scoundrels ejaculate all those bullshits off their butts? Or, toeing the line of tails of those bastards?
Yes, scoundrels they are, no ditherings about that. And they are born bastards, to be sure. I repeat when I say from the depth of my skin that they are bastards on the one hand and scoundrels on the other - the two sides of the same coin.
A bastard is he who is shamefully born on the horseback of the parents not married to each other - so, with the stigma of an illegitimate son whose means and beginning mark his vicious character traits. And that is why those bastards should be disowned as social outcasts.
And a scoundrel is he who is morally perverted not caring a whit for any moral principles and those who commit immorality and are wont to unprincipled acts and deeds are criminals of cognizable offence. We treat or rather we should treat offenders of cognizable offence with social stigma and we should disown them as social outcasts.
So, as I say with a much more conviction, all those politicians who you cast your vote for or who you root for rabble-rousing voice are every inch a bastard and and scoundrel down to to the bottom pit. Can anybody vouchsafe that they are not like that and that they are otherwise? They are saviour of the commonwealth? If you can save your grace, then I cannot but say that you are wearing a fool's cap on you head and you are deceiving none but you.
So, is it that deceiving yourself, or for that matter, deceiving your own conscience is your politics? Yes, it is. As because when you are in league with or a party to a bunch of bastards and scoundrels, you are not doing precious anything or singing paeans to the moral rectitude of your innner voice. And you cannot deny that the Socretarian inner voice is the zing thing of human souls. Matter-of-factly speaking, that oracles of inner voice told Socrates to be ready to lay down his life for the cause of moral rectitude and he never felt humbled when he decided to give up on politics.
Actually, Aristotle made all the difference. He told prophetically that man is a political animal homo politicus. Yes, man is a political animal. No doubt about that. And that politics is man's struggle for existence against all odds and with the association of others. This is associative or communal politics of commonwealth. This plurality of politics is what politics is per se. Commonwealth for common people is the summum bonum of Aristotlian politics. At least, this is what is implicitly meant by politics. But Aristiotle had never been a messiah of the people's right to politics.
But your politics is never meant in that direction. Your politics is infra dig to human conscience and is far removed from moral rectitude as you are associated with the whore-mongering business of your politicians. By siding with them, you are colluding with them in their man-hunting skullduggery. Hypocrats as they always are, hypocricy is the main trick of their political legerdemain.
Hypocricy thy name is politics, man.
Hypocricy is the USP of universal politics. All politicians have this USP. They sell it as their merchandise to run this dynastic business and have been doing this from time immemorial. And this way they have set up a behemoth of dynasty.
And it has come to stay that politics remain a dynastic business of a handful of smaller creatures who have big hands to shake you and bear hugs to huddle you into a herd of cattle. Yes, in the field of politics, you are nothing but a herd of cattle as you are docile enough to be led by the nose as if by the hissing whistlings of the Pied Piper of Hamlyn. At least that piedpiper could be relied upon his missionary zeal but your politicians never ever.
Without those politicians, what is your politics? Nothing, whatsoever. With them in tow, you follow their politics and taking you in tow, they become the self-professed commandeers of politics - so, it is mutually conclusive.
And you cannot live without politics.
You cannot be whistle-blowers. You cannot get out of the bounds of the politics of those so-called commandeers.
It is such a vicious circle! It entangles you in a serpentine coil. Even if it bites you, you are not shy.
So, you cannot keep shy of it.
You are political animals through your walks of life.
You cast your votes whenever and as many times you are called in at the festivity of hustings. You are gathered together whenever the whistle blows. The whisle blows time and again and the festivity cmes as ritually as ever. You never get wiser regarding what happens in the long run.
Actually, nothing worthwhile happens.
You know it and you know it not.
The show goes on and on. Only actors and detractors sometimes change their well-veiled masks. Under these masks, evil designs are written all over.
You know it and you know it not.
And Spitzers call the shots all the while.
You are political but its apoltical politics. You are apolitically political.
But I am politically apolitical.
There is difference between these two.
Know the difference and get more and more wiser and only then you could be true-blue political. Otherwise Spitzers will be ruling the roost as ever - once and for all and you will remain the herd of cattle in the sticky field of politics.

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A flirty rose
With a little yellow heart
Guised in crystalline silence
The green petals wobbling
In shy of fluttering fragrance
Overlapping the siren of the wind
Swinging and sighing shyly
In native monotony
Like the stormy petrel
Rousing the piercing thorns
Into the heart of the soil
Virgin and prime
Metaphorically
To deface the soul
Of the little yellow heart

Lovely little birds
The peacock blue wings flapping
Flocking around the shadows
Receding fearsome scarecrows
Guileless as ever
Like the twinkling eyes
Of the storm
Blowing in fickle desires
To console the flirty little rose

The flirty little rose
Not knowing the thorns
To despise the angst
Of fickle desires
The little yellow heart swears
In temptation of its last will
To dethrone the knighthood
Out of the hound of the forbidden
And the little yellow heart rejoices
At the fall of a few dew drops
Upon the spreading green petals
Of the flirty little rose at bay
In the vase of desire and dreams.

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