1. Lo, my son,
This is India's map.
These drained lines flowing out
Like frantic cries of impotence
Are rivers sans progeny
Behold, my son,The shaven headed saffron mounds,
The routes of civilization
That has forgotten its footsteps,
The amorous urban ‘Yakshis'
Wreathed in smiles to entrap you,
The skytracks where hawks screech and scream about,
The chimneys which puff out ashen cash,

The golden mansions of faith
Agape for devout offerings,
Diverse hues and shades, diverse lands,
And withered jungles of life in between.
This is India's map, my son.

2. You repeat the textbook quote:
"India is my country, and every Indian my brother'
Is Bharat but a sweet
Relished once a year on August 15 ?
Is Vharat a pedantic term
Taught by one's father
To resonate a rhetoric speech ?
Is it to be sought in the hasty lines
One draws on the annual answer paper ?
Don't you see below the lines
The hunger of a hapless infant ?
The nakedness of a wayward girl ?
The eyes of a beaten bullock
Quenching to thirst at a mud-ferrow ?
The frantic flutterings of life ?
The religious cults whetting then rapier
In a frenzy of fierry ?
The rat-race or classes and
Ethres falling to mammon ?

3. Son
Where is your brother who feeds you
With the honeydew of his sweatr ?
Why is it that he flees from
The very womb that begot him ?
Who among these is your brother ?
Seek him in the sweating (farms)
Look for him amid the city din,
And in the potent castless of greed.
Ask the temple pigeons
Rankling in the smoke fire of superstition
Or the tender Crescent swallowed by
The python of greed.
Ask the gory hymn, ‘Hey Ram', that gushed out
From an old heart
When hit by a gun-shot,
Or the hot currents that engulf
The north and the south is a whirl

4. Son,
This is the real map of India:
Bharat is the pulsing heart
That beats behind the lines.
You should clutch the creeper,
Reach down the roots,
To the transparency of truth,
And stay there for a short while.

Don't you see the ember of time
In the abandoned torch of some wayfarer ?
As you blow it, breathing into it,
Doesn't an old time spring up in fits and starts ?

Wash your face with the crystal tears
Trickling from the core of the earth.
Go down the steps, and behold
The crimson halls of yore
Where nymphs dance in unitson

Your forefather had inscribed many a myth
In the broken earthen urn.He had rached beyond the ‘Brahma Vrit'
With the arrow of the word.
This ‘Dharmadhwar' is the witness to
The subtime self-realisation
That ‘I am the omnipresent'.
This bunyan bears witness to the wisdom
That the cosmos is enshrined in a tiny seed.
These holy streems stand witness to
The quenching of the lust of life
This fire is the witness to
The supreme sacrifice made to the famished bird.
The magnificant ‘moonrise of enlightenment'
Is witness to one's acceptance of sorrows and suffererings
And meting out "Sukha' and ‘hita'.

5. Son,
This is the bosom of India
Swelling with the elixir of love for all humanity,
From her snowy crown to the watery heel.
Rise like a tonal flame from this breast
Take a pulse beat along,
And a feathery lance.
Dot down the heartlines of the earth,
Ride past the tides of transcience
Return the three worlds, and Return to the haven pf mother's lap,
And be thee a dawn.