Rats in a Race
Always keep hurrying on the streets,
With our eyes so dull and lifeless,
Reflecting no result, no victory or defeat,
Just a vacant look, not more, not less.
Nothing to look back upon, nothing to look forward to,
Deathlike we move about here and sometime there,
Caring not what we’ve done or ought to do,
Carefree, as if on our way to nowhere.
We say, these days the world is such that people do not care.
But what makes the world and its nebulous ways?
Abandoning reality, stopping perception, deliberately being unaware,
Ignoring the implications that life displays.
We are busy
Finding justifications
For not making an effort:
An effort to raise questions,
And effort to answer them,
An effort to find a path,
Or, even better, to create that;
For only a path can have purposeful direction
Leading to something,
But we want to keep moving in circles of convention
And end up in nothing.
Schools, jobs, family, people and mindless fun,
Thus we survive and thus we die,
Whole life ending as a rat-race run,
Not pausing even to ask a why.
Not knowing where to want to go, wandering in no-man’s land,
Afraid of losing, afraid of choosing, always afraid to take a stand;
Afraid of death, afraid of life, in a corner we are shrinking,
Afraid of facing facts, we have defensively abandoned thinking.
Seeking solace in religion, rituals, cults and community,
We hide behind face-lifted, empty, meaningless pledges;
Unintegrated selves trying to achieve communal unity
With undefined minds of indistinct edges.
We say, man has become selfish.
But do we care to know
What self is or ought to be?
Do we really not care?
Or we deliberately avoid
Facing accusing facts
For ignoring obvious questions?
While shouting, screaming, replying unheard and imagined voices,
While justifying the wrongs we do and have done,
And persistently, consistently ignoring alternate choices,
We are left with nothing and right about none.
Let’s look beyond illusory shroud,
The facts are all clear and loud;
Search for the self and its voice,
There is not another choice;
Let us be our selves, our own entities,
Let’s not lose our minds and our identities;
Do we realize the destruction that unthinking inflicts
That results in guilt, anxiety, psychological conflicts?
Conceptualize and define goodness and badness,
Learn to differentiate sanity and madness,
Keep asking “why?”, release the knots of mind:
There is no limit to what we can then find.
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