Skip to main content

Panipat Again

This…
This is another Panipat.
Not fought for kings or crowns
But for water, for breath, for survival.
The war that came before the world ran dry.
And now,
that war bleeds across borders,
like old wounds reopening with fresh salt.

We will remember...
A meadow murdered
A valley that never surrendered
Question stripped before bullets
A convoy turned coffin.
their silence louder than any anthem.
Soldiers burned in their own base,
in their own sleep, in their own land.
Where uniforms bled while the airbase echoed with gunshots
meant to unmake our resolve
All turned into battlegrounds.
Ten men held a city hostage
while the world watched and wept.

You call these “incidents”?
These are not incidents.
These are scars.
National wounds with names and dates,
Carved into our memory with bullets.

And yet
We forget to blame the ones who drew the lines.
The architects of division,
mapmakers of misery.
Lines that slice through hearts,
homes,
history.

For them
it’s still Mission Accomplished.
They send arms in crates
and peace in press releases.
They fund fires,
then pose beside the ashes.

And here I am,
Told to celebrate a “response.”
To clap for a surgical strike,
a missile fired,
a camp destroyed.
But how do I cheer
When all I see is a child’s toy
amid rubble?

I do not mourn the enemy.
But I mourn the innocence
killed in the crossfire of rhetoric and revenge.

I see what’s coming
A Hiroshima on my Bharat.
A Nagasaki on their Pakistan.
And what then?
Will the dead carry flags to heaven?
Will borders matter to dust?

Ask this
Have we fed every mouth
before biting into each other’s necks?
Are we “developed”
Or just decorated
with weapons and wounds?

Anger is no longer a spark.
It’s wildfire.
Hope has drowned in red rivers.
And fear
Fear is the only anthem we all know by heart.

This…
This is another Panipat.
And we’re all in it.
Barefoot. Blindfolded.
Begging the gods
to pause this madness
before there's no soil left to bury our dead.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

From Meghna Pariyar Thadani To Jai Singh Rathod.

Disclaimer: My mother has always emphasized the joy of writing letters. During my school days, she guided and taught me how to write letters as a lesson in English literature. We were even taught to write telegrams as our CBSE books were outdated. She once mentioned that letter writing is therapeutic and calming. The act of pouring out one's feelings onto paper is like unpacking one's mind. You shed a tear or two, let the emotions flow through your pen, and write more until you feel better. With this in mind, I bring back the lost art of letter writing for a fictional character, Meghna Pariyar from the movie Janne Tu.. Janne Na.., who yearned to express her thoughts and feelings to Jai Singh Rathod. Letter writing allows us to heal our hearts and minds, to release our emotions, and to let them flow freely onto the page. Its obvious that the characters, their arcs and the emotional holds are fictional, they possibly have link to the few of us who have feelings but don't want...
10 comments
Read more

Bombay Gotham

I stand on an island surrounded by the sea, a place that never wanted itself to be  Where the Victorian Gothic facades rise like hymns of another century, and the stone animals perched upon them breathe a silence that outlives every monsoon, every riot, every crumbling of the present. Owls with carved feathers guard the library domes, their eyes wide as if they alone can read the secrets the city hides beneath its noise. Cats, slender and alert, arch above courthouse arches, watching justice arrive late, as it always does here. Reptiles coil around forgotten pillars, their stone tails wrapped in stories that no one remained to finish. Grotesques cling to cornices with teeth bared sentinels of vanished fears, echoes of an empire that carved its nightmares into the body of the city. And beneath them, Bombay rearranges itself. Streets widen; skylines rise; old doors vanish behind new glass; war offices turn into cafés where people speak of futures the past could never have imagined. S...
3 comments
Read more

Hashtag Me

I have never really been one to celebrate small victories. A small win, a short stint, absolutely nothing. Even when I first started cycling, one solitary 50-kilometer ride only felt like a true achievement a feat a mere 5% of cyclists in the entire world have ever claimed in their lifetimes. And then came these spineless cockroaches, scurrying around to demand the resignation of a person who was right in the thick of things and didn't even try to curb the rot. Students died, parents cried, the crowd grew utterly disheartened, while the nation sat in deafening, spineless silence. The nation, by the way, only ever asks if Rhea killed Rajput; beyond that pathetic spectacle, the country just sits comfortably on its throne, surrounded by yes-men nodding along to the misery. I digress, but that is my writing, this is my raw story, and this is precisely the way I am going to tell it. #ThingsToLearnFromTheOdyssey We are the people who watched Rang De Basanti on the silver screen, felt the...
Post a Comment
Read more