My Right to Hate

If they can have their rogues, why can't I have my thugs too?
If they can nurture hate, why censure me when the same I do?

It is my right to hate and fear... all those who are not like me...

And to repress and suppress all those who presume to be free!

If they can fetter their women and treat them as lesser beings...

Why the shock and the mock when I treat mine as personal things?

How dare these girls walk upright... they can’t script their fate

The open celebration of love is an affront to my right to hate!

My very culture is at stake... the leash cannot be set free

The reasoning of humanism can never deter my tribe or me...

My right to hate is truly supreme and sans any challenge

It is fuelled by age old wrongs that deserve resolute revenge!

Our enemy are those who flee our morality enclosure

Who dream of a society of free and open disclosure...

We must watch out for them... they on the other side

We must hate them and fear them and hit them and hide!

Our rights are under severe threat from all those humanist nuts...

Their sweet saccharine smiles make me want to empty my guts!

And worse are the religious ones who read the same things that I do...

Yet they believe in love and compassion for those other people too?

Those who protest our mission are the ones who walk the wrong way...

Their lives are immoral and evil, where sisters are permitted to stray!

What a silly thing to believe that we all are one and the same...

And that my lofty hate campaign is illogical and legally lame?

Our right to be regressive cannot be ever suppressed

The ideology of hate needs newer followers impressed...

So let’s spread the canard of settings things right...

The ones like us, on the other side, will help our fight!

Merchants of hate, in every corner, need a common plan

One which talks of values and violence with the same élan!

We must get together to fight ... a fight for true democracy

Where the right to hate must be one of equal opportunity!

-        Pravin Sabnis (27 June 2012)

NUTS & GUTS

Some parents say: from your roots don’t go astray

Education in the mother-tongue is the need of the day…

Other parents say: let our children have our way

Education in English will ensure an apt global pay…

But heed the children and what they have to say

Surely they would rather learn only the fun way!

A real mess is served in the education tray…

where the nut gets screwed and the gut gives way!

The syllabus is a maze real knotty, and hey…

Queries are termed naughty in the class bay!

Self-esteem is eclipsed in the mind where it held sway…

As irrelevant leads to irreverence with every passing day!

What’s the point of learning Geography, if on eclipse day

… parent and teacher retire to the dark superstition bay?

What’s the point of testing data from the Science tray…

…if the permission to experiment is stalled by a ‘nay’?

The wonderful world of mathematics goes regularly astray…

the mechanical obscures the elementary, every single way!

Dates and details get hammered into a mind turning clay,

as History lessons defeat the message in the factual fray!

Not just black on white, prose or verse is really about grey

… unbridled is imagination, but education narrows the way!

Why the compulsion to learn by rote without going astray?

Theatre-fun would be better for the Bard to seize the day!

Learning is directly proportional to the fun, they say…

Yet book is thrust in the hand that must play with clay!

‘Leave the kids alone’ sang Pink Floyd on another day

Languages are the drapes for expression, just another way

What use is the nut when the gut gives way?

What use is a label with learning far away?

The language is second to what the syllabus has to say

Education must empower the nut without the gut giving way!

- Pravin K. Sabnis

23 March 2011

WHY?

Words wander away when departs a little son of a dear friend… from the old college days a poem resonates with questions that arise when a life dies young…

WHY?

Why death?

Why life?

The sun sets to rise again,

Does Life die to live again?

If it does, why death?

If not, why life?

- Pravin Sabnis (1989)

Holi

Leaves sprout… flowers bloom

Trees smile and chase the gloom

Spring is here to spread the cheer

Shed your inhibitions, have no fear!

Here’s the flavoured milk, say cheers

For the veterans, open the bhang & beers

The fire’s going down, bring more wood

There it lies where once the tree stood

A full moon looks on as winds stoke embers,

in the season of spring, trees get dismembered

Wood chars, so does the plastic trash

flowers singe smearing earth with ash.

Next we get to spray the colours everywhere

Made from mud, paint and chemicals not very rare

But don’t you mind the itch and the stains

It won’t happen till spring comes again!

- 3 March 2007

It would be better for bad thoughts to burn

Instead of screaming abuses around the fiery urn…

It would be better to celebrate the colours of life

And a resolve to shun discrimination and unjust strife!

- 1 March 2010

- Pravin K. Sabnis

what's your religion?

One day,
we may be stopped in our tracks by a maniacal mob…
… and be confronted with the Questions…

“what’s your religion?
Same as ours?
Or different like theirs?”

And our lives will depend
… on our answers
… and their religion!

We must ask ourselves whether we have learnt any lessons from the numerous killings, brutal attacks and rapist rioting, born of divisive religious fanaticism…

Thoughts of Mining Terrorists

Good! The politician has raised the scare
And proclaimed our villages unsafe out there
The issues are not as simple as they look
These villagers are terrorists and crooks

That farmer insists that we cannot transgress
Surely he is an obstacle to our true progress
The land may be his, but the lease is mine
How dare he say, “To hell with the MINE”

Our farmers, our villagers are no longer the same
They are terrorists playing a deadly game
They are moving ahead to breach our peace
Do something now, do not suffer the siege

The plot it thickens and so does the stink
Especially that guy who tells them to think
He is training them to use dangerous arms
If they take to thinking, we will be forced to alms

They who think are the most dangerous
Their questions are the most furious
But questions are not the only artillery
They have cameras too in their weaponry

Worse they have lost all sense of shame
They are giving our nation a bad name
Screaming across the world wide web
About things which are best left unsaid

They are dangerous and we have to act with speed
Their increasing solidarity is precarious indeed
Round them up and expose their terrorist connection
Every arm that is raised has a weapon-association

People are yet to hear what that teacher said
That mining terrorism will have everyone dead
Beat them at their own game and spread the news
That they share the distant terrorist’s views

Throw them behind bars and black them out
We must finally erase every rebellious shout
The gullible rest will swallow our nationalist con
With greater strength our Mining terrorism shall go on!

- Pravin Sabnis (20 June 2008)

Written to counter the malicious charge of the politicians that Naxalites are part of the growing solidarity of Goans against fraudulent Mining that is trampling human rights and the laws of the land due to the patronage of the conniving administration. Researcher-activist Seby Rodrigues, farmer Rama Velip, teacher Ramesh Gauns and their determined tribe cannot be demolished by deceitful labeling by the agents of Mining Terrorism

itna bhi mat rulaye

here is my first Hindi verse written at the western Consultation on SEZs (it was inspired by a video and spirited presentation of the fight against SEZs in Gujarat):

KAFAN
itna bhi mat rulaye, ki aasoon sukh jaye...
aur sujhi huyi ankhon se lava beh jaye...
itna bhi mat sataye, ki har path bandh ho jaye...
aur sar pe kafan bandhne ka vikalp bach jaye !

the english translation would be

SHROUD 

Do not make me cry so… lest my tears turn dry...

it is lava that will flow from the swollen eye...

Do not trouble me so… that each road turns a dead end

and a shroud draped on my head is the only option to fend!

(Kafan-shroud)

-Pravin Sabnis
25 April 2008, Pune