At the mercy of Fate

The moment when a pencil rolls down a table to it's edge and moves to and fro from the corner of the table to the edge threateningly to fall off... Seems to me one of the most intriguing moment... The pencil is about to slide off the edge and still somehow manages to hold on.

I decided to observe this and din't know how long this view held my attention... The moment kept on lingering and kept me enthralled by it's tryst.

I got so entangled in this movement of the pencil that I started to empathize with it... Just left hanging in between... Left at the mercy of it's fate... Or for all the practical purposes... At the mercy of gravitational force and numerous theories of physics... (oh! God bless Newton's soul!!!).

Honestly it was getting on my nerves... It just left me thinking this is exactly where I stood once... And many others like me were kept by this ruthless Destiny hanging by the hook... So many fates undecided... Finally getting too exhausted I pulled the pencil from the edge and placed it on my pen stand... Aahhh!!! Can't express the relief in words!!!!

The next day when I passed by the corridors of the court, I just happen to look at a lady sitting on the bench of a courtroom with her child around 5-6 years old sitting next to her tired of all the protests he could make to leave the mundane atmosphere of the courtroom. I don't know why the mother son duo were in the court but all I could think of the pencil moving to and fro by the edge of the table... Yet another life hanging by at the mercy of the fate...

Journey of a Writer

Scribbling at random on walls, crawls into the slate

The scribbles of odd shapes curve into letters,

Chalks used to engrave, half eaten, succumb to pencils

And slate is swapped by notebooks with four liners.

The four line notebook pages mark beginning of journey,

From letters in lower case then letters in upper case.

Then letters show way to words, “A for Apple” & “B for Boy”,

The words reshuffle and soon generate a sentence.

“This is a rat” & “That is a cat” fit in between the four lines,

And the complexities fill in with nouns, verbs and a lot more.

Adjectives, prepositions adorn the simple sentences,

And present tense can’t suffice the need of verbal downpour.

Effortless sentences bear the weight of tenses,

And the soon we realise past in not just past.

Past perfect, comes into picture to our amazement,

Soon pencil tips break and fine nibs stand steadfast.

The four lines shrink to one lines, sharpners make way for bottle of ink.

So are fancy pencil boxes crammed with blotting papers and old cloth.

Insight that mistakes cannot be rubbed of nor can be overwritten,

Reveal the incompetence of erasers and life’s first lesson is taught.

The fingers blotted with ink grow to be more skilled,

And so do the copious expressions and bountiful array of thoughts.

Writing on parchments seems ancient and perishing,

And digital notebooks bid farewell to paper, pens and ink blots.

Space for writing & overwriting sentences gets colossal,

They are not mere sorted words but expressions carved.

The lines of orderly words get intricate and so do the thoughts,

Inscribed pages belch while the sense-datum remains starved.