कभी आईने के मायने
अगर समझ में आए आपके
तो थोड़ा मुस्कुराना
सबसे ज़रूरी दोस्ती आपको मुबारक ।

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तुम वक्त, फ़ितूर, ज़मीर बदलते जाना
मैं वही मिलूँगा पहले दफ़ा जैसे
पूछोगे तुम क्यों हो ऐसे जैसे कभी देखा नहीं
मैं बस हसकर जवाब दूँगा
‘ दोस्त हूँ , इतना तो बनता है ना ‘

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from seeking for you days and nights
to seeking for myself seconds and minutes
I remembered what I lost with you to you.

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Memories with you are so addictive
that I’d trade my all for you.

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Abstinence derives itself from a plausible deniability of revolution which you choose to live with than to live away from.

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• Remembering you •

It’s hard to remember you. It’s not like you don’t cross my mind when I see someone holding hands walking to the front and talking to their right, giggling occasionally and tapping on the shoulders. It’s not like you don’t cross my mind, when It’s misty and about to rain, and the cold breeze fills the air with the muddy smell signifying relief from the scorching heat. It’s not like you don’t cross my mind, when in the middle of nowhere when there’s cars passing by and yet, crossing the road feels like a cakewalk.

The silence of you, haunts the noisiest of me, and I wonder why love had to come this far, to be hurting in crevices of space and time, etched out of stone clad boundaries and bulletproof will. Maybe, one day just like the mist, you’ll fade away too, and we’ll call it a circle of life, like everything else.

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पन्नो के भरोसे हम सब का पन्ना,
कितने फाड़ोगे कितने बनाओगे,
एक दिन तुम भी बस पन्नो से ही बाते करोगे,
और एक दिन वो भी सिर्फ़ तुमसे,
और फिर शुरू होगा और एक पन्ना |

पन्नो के भरोसे हम सब का पन्ना |

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• Roots •

Imagine lives being multiple lines, with different start and end points along the time and space line. For anyone to be able to understand the perspective of roots for each one of them, would take introspections as to where the journey started from, and then interventions to see if they understand the points which they didn’t traverse through. This is where on-the-ground exposure comes into picture, in my view. The act of going further backwards that you came from to understand what is it that you need to solve if they are your target audience, be it from administrative perspective, or from social work perspective or a product or understanding a person on a deeper level.

If you look closely, you would see that the mesh converge in the understanding, what lies beneath is a world of cognition, a world of introspection and something so abstract but yet so structured. It’s just that you need to understand, that unless you dig deeper, you would never make sense of what it is that you are looking for, and what it is that you should look for.

Maybe, If we could pause, look around and make efforts to find the roots, the world would be a much better place.

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You do most of the talking
when you’re silent.

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• The channel •

It was cold, and I could see the silhouettes walking with me staring at the ceiling of the head, as if I was one of them. I blended, and then slowly started staring at the ceiling of the heads. It all made sense, as they now mumbled and fumbled with the languages they thought I knew, and then everything went silent.

I looked at them looking at me, and that was the moment I realised I wasn’t one of them, and so did they. I started walking again, with them following me following them, It was as if we were in a circle, i wondered why, and then there was light, at the end of the tunnel, where it seemed to end. I looked back and noticed the silhouettes walking along with me, waiting to see if they were still alive because I was.

The light was brighter than I thought and then slowly It became darker. It seemed that to be watched was a bigger freedom than to be not and that’s how it all began. To be the channel, not one from the Thames, but of the other side, a journey of transition and change, which is seen only by the people who don’t confine themselves into silhouettes.

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