KATHMANDU

Gaurav Ojha (Kathmandu, Nepal) 

Kathmandu, your moral saint has learned the art of starving 

He takes on impulses of greed with hunger 

However, merchants of medicines are selling

Sickness into health 

Kathmandu, socialism is your delusion, self-interest is reality

Still, a house within your circumference signifies we have made it

Kathmandu, you have no mystics 

Too literal, nothing left of magical or mythical

Your history has crumbled with quakes

Kathmandu, where is your destiny?

New York, Beijing, New Delhi or Sydney

Kathmandu, you resemble your roads

Potholes, cracks and patched-up works

Just as street children smell weird stuff from the plastic bags

For all the puffing that goes

Living in Kathmandu is like dust in and smoke out 

Kathmandu, city of contrarians

Communists are the best practitioners of crony capitalism

Your thinkers think with what has already been thought out

Kathmandu, knows how to get fooled by clowns 

Discussions never end here

No actions, only possibilities, idealisms and imaginations

In Kathmandu, all of us have same old stories  

We have all been deceived  

Kathmandu, knows how to tame the tiger

Turn revolutionaries into rascals

You can shift destiny of tattered slippers into golden shoes 

 But you have trampled many dreams

 Your shadows are taller than your street light

Kathmandu, why does this generation want to leave you?  

You have been compared with all other cities 

Your clock is out of joint

And, the pendulum swings in extremes

Still dragged in the battle of history

You have remained as old liquor in new bottle

Kathmandu, waiting for something new

To copy, duplicate, remix and echo

Kathmandu, you are too fast to embrace fads and fantasies

Too slow to let go of what used to be

Kathmandu your face is restless and confused

In-between everything else, identity crisis

Without living philosophy of its own