The covers of privacy are ripped off; the pages of the book of life shiver in the warm wind. One does not find chapters or divisions in this book. All is intermingled in one long narrative. The truth is exposed in the streets. It wears no make-up, it does not disguise its raw semblance. People wear their hearts as an unpolished jewel over their chests. There in the streets you read the secret print of every soul. There – out there: misery, happiness, poverty, tradition, greed, compassion, goats, cows, ox, worship, tears, dirt, smoke, smiles, sun, phalli, disease, deformity, piercings, struggle, suffering, patience, motherhood; and above all, silence untouched by the honks, guffaws, the shitting, screaming, the suffering. A mysterious kind of suffering everyone seems to bear peacefully. This is INDIA. Where life is not speculation, postponement, or expectation. It is an open book, where every act or event happens simultaneously, where the cruelty of fate and arbitrariness of poverty is somehow justified in their placid and stoic faces. In this story one must undress from the cryptic paraphernalia of self-hood; one must descend as an open wound into the balsam of reality. – this is INDIA.

Contemporary Poetry