Song of a Mirage Hunter

Staggering in my walk on the highway of life,
I see a clear vision, emboldening my strife:
A city of dream Castles, as romantic, as tall,
The semantics of my life I meant; I impress or I fall!

Little do my unworthy friends realise or decree,
What heights one sees in those Castles of highest degree.
Love, lust, importance and attention : all of these are mine,
Now they are mine and now they aren't; but I really don't mind.

Look at that ol' haggard, calling himself a Wise,
What clue has that laggard, of an ego of my price?
Huh! He mocks my castle as "Material",
And calls me low as "Man"!

f P Economics

What can best pep us up in the middle of writing a lengthy record,at the end of yet another fruitless session of chat or worst case at the brink of a catastrophic exam. A drink of ale? A sip of strong coffee? Or how about fP? fountain Pepsi as the makers call it…as we wait with our fingers crossed for the opening of the fP counters across the college, get ready for an all new spending pattern that can change life, business and habits around this place.

Owing to the marked re-entry of aerated drinks into canteen refrigerators , amidst a babel of health-hazard threats, soft drinks are now the pulse of the burgeoning food industry in this part of the world. Given a permanent thirst we have developed towards it, what can be more indulging than when the drink de coup is sold out at your own lawns! For a long time our hostels needed a place to chill out in the open and a cola-counter comes as a welcome alternative to rust-draped coolers or grave hours shift coffee-shops.

Speaking of fP takes me back to my school days, when notwithstanding an unconditionally low average allowance, kids used to crowd the fP counter waving tokens they just bought for five bucks each. And, on taking a closer look, the fP stall was a stamping ground for every kid during some part of the day. Considering the index of average expense per kid, the sensitivity goes by the festivity in the air. However, fP cost remains a sure share of the allowances pie and consequently the cash cow of every institutional canteen revenue.

The child is the father of the man! And now as we settle into this canteen-snacky-city spending schemes, lets get ready to accept a new lifestyle, dominated by the caffeine-vanilla concoction, requiring much revision in budget, yet so little effort. Not that each one of us wants to treasure a piggy-bank where we put our days savings and bury it deep for posterity to plunder! It’s a matter of personal discipline at the economic front to avoid ‘adding’ sips of cola to the list of expenditures without making ‘regulations’, surging our cost of living out here( Of course from a conservative economists point of view.) Managing the efflux from ones wallet is a scrupulous practice, regardless of what be in store to shell out. As we grow, at the end of our stay in this place, into jobs that load our purses heavily enough, we need to develop a nerve for managing whatever little or big we gather on our roll.

Cutting the long story short, fP is cool, but we don’t need an fP advent to reshape our credit balances, when all we need to do is look back and seal those leaky shell-outs from crippling us into a reverie of addiction, no! not of fP, but of spending!

Silhouettes of a Wild Dream

Dream! For all your life you spend on earth, call those hours you spent on living and reliving your wild imaginations the time you have spent in best contemplation as there is nothing like dreaming that can drive forward the wheels of time, justifying your existence as His most ‘superior creation’. Man scaled his genealogical order not by his strength to jump branches and roots faster than his predator but by foreseeing and preparing for what beseeches him to attain a state he understands as ‘comfort’. And what cements the gap between foreseeing and attaining ‘comfort’ is a dream, an undying spirit to which man adds flesh and bone to reckon what he sees as ‘comfort’.


Harrap was a commoner in a time when stones and dry leaf meant fire and food. While cowering under his leaf-mail in his flooding cave during a storm, Harrap dreamt of an unshakable abode to serve him shelter when he returns from a hunt. The dawn brought him new hope in the form of uprooted trees and strewn foliage and soon Harraps dream took the shape of a hut. His erudite generations put nature to use continuously and soon Harraps kind was gaining dominion over his fellow-creations by simply preparing to face adversity of any kind. Years fled by. Harraps kind was a forty million strong. Each had a lifestyle that was a cumulative image of the dreams of H. and his lineage. Vinci and Carnot were born into such a world demanding immense quantities of almost everything that nature had to offer on a growingly larger scale. They realized that a thick dark fluid substance they called oleum, when sparked produced enough force to drive large wheels; which could bring down large trees, clear large spaces of land and haul large patches of greenery. Man occupied these lands; dreamt of attaining comforts the other Harraps could have evolved and set out in search of his dream. Soon he found that he could make new worlds by simply razing down the existing world and building up as Harrap taught him. Loads of oleum were burnt and mankind flourished as never before.
But most unfortunately, Harrap did not hand down his lineage a sense of knowing the limit of using what one had in store. And another secret man failed to unravel was that of independency from his own creations. As man multiplied, growing over dependant on what he built, two ills cropped and assumed monstrous proportions within quick periods. Shortage and Disease. To combat Disease he created engineered cells and to combat Shortage he engineered Creations cells! Yet man depended on how and what he used and what he used was soon being consumed out of existence.


Not long ago, Dravidarya, Sinoo, Yankee and Rossu; all successes and fiascos of Harraps dream, confessed overtly their inability to face diversity any longer. Dravidarya felled too many trees, drying his biosphere reserves to nothing , while Sinoo’s engineered Cells no longer stalled disease at bay. The disease grew stronger than the Cell. Yankee consumed excessive oleum, running short of which was close to placing him in the times of Harraps discomfortiture. Rossu pointed out that his engineered Creations didn’t give the strength Harrap derived from his hunt. Each
blamed the other of driving their comity of nature out of existence. Yankee cribbed about his handicap in the face of motionless machines while Sinoo ailed over disease
resistant to control. All avoided the thought of a crippled offspring with much ‘material’ around him but little energy to drive neither them nor their own self.
Hamun shook awake from a feverish nightmare. The images of Dravidarya, Rossu et al. pining for life shivered him to his senses and Hamun couldn’t help but despair. But again despair is to the soul what revolution is to the society. It leaves a distinctive dent but provides enough depth to rebound on life’s trampoline inflexions. He looked out of his window. A fresh day ready to be scathed by his puffing engines filled his eyes. The radiant sun shone bright among the clouds. His garden of sunflowers looked at the sun in earnest anticipation. A load of plastic waste awaited disposal at his courtyard entrance. His milkman collected the heifers refuse and drained it into the lawn. Hamun thought of the silhouettes of his wild dream that kept flashing before him. Will the worlds engines run out of steam as they imagined or will he be able to find energy in any of what he just saw outside. Perhaps the sun? Or the extracts from his sunflowers? Perhaps his cows refuse could be the answer or can he light a lamp by burning differently the plastic he was about to discard? Harrap will always have a rightful place in the pantheon of human evolution and was not wrong in felling his trees; neither did Vinci and Carnot blunder by burning oleum. But Hamun cannot afford to err in over felling trees or over burning oleum; neither can he afford to throw his mornings sightings out of hand. It’s time Hamun ‘dreams’ of sources alternate to Harraps!


[Written as an editors’ article for “Signature”, souvenir of “ALCHEMY", Symposium of the Dept. of Chemical Engg. NIT Trichy.]

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