1984

It was at night that they came for you, always at night. The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you. Undoubtedly some people did so. But it needed desperate courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and certain poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one's own body.

Suggested Read : George Orwell, 1984

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall

Elephant and ant were petty ego clashing...
Our same old elephant and ant.
Rex the Tyrannosaurus, charged from behind the bushes
and crushed the two mortals in one Jurassic second
Animal media calls it a natural disaster

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In Sixteen Hundred and Forty-Eight
When England suffered the pains of state
The Roundheads lay siege to Colchester town
Where the King's men still fought for the crown
There One-Eyed Thompson stood on the wall
A gunner of deadliest aim of all
From St. Mary's Tower his cannon he fired
Humpty-Dumpty was its name...

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Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Iruvar

In case you don't know tamil, there are subtitles. In case you know, there are subtitles. Even tamilians would need subtitles to make sense of Iruvar. The scene, the script,the background score and the way the camera moves is genuinely admirable. The below scene is considered to be one of the best in Indian cinema *by some*. Scene is explained here. Vairamuthu, Santosh Sivan, A R Rahman, Mohanlal and Mani Ratnam at their best.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Suggested Read : William Butler Yeats

and a great song video to go with, The End by Doors (thanks to Alex)

Nixon

Days after the May4th Ohio college shooting, massive protests broke out across the country's colleges. One hundred thousand students marched on Washington and laid seige to the capital, four hundred and fifty colleges shutdown across the nation. Nixon was moved to Camp David for his own safety. The president spend two sleepless nights there at the very verge of a nervous breakdown. The nation he was presiding over was at war with itself,he decided to reach out to the students. The night he was back in Washington, fourty seven outgoing calls were made by the President. At four o' clock in the morning, the secret service radios hissed "Searchlight is on the lawn", much to surprise of officers on duty that night; 'Searchlight' the code word for Nixon. The Presidential motorcade sped to the Lincoln memorial where the student leaders where keeping vigil. At the Lincoln memorial, Nixon "treated the student leaders to a clumsy and condescending monologue, which he made public in an awkward attempt to display his benevolence". The student leaders did not relent. Nixon was convinced that the students were under external communist influence and decided to gather incriminating intelligence against the anti-war-student-movement through legal or illegal channels - a habit that would bring down his presidency years later.

Vanity, Thy name is...

He is so simple.
His world is so different from mine.
So separate are his dreams and his preferences.
He says very little.
He writes
this morning I saw some lovely flowers
in the lawn and thought of you.
I know I am at that dishevelled stage of life
when my face is not much like any flower.
But I wish
—whatever he says—
I could believe it a while.

Suggested read : Parveen Shakir

Hot Line

How he used to complain to me!
So many people come between us we cannot talk.
In the season’s first rain, first snow,
full-moon nights, evening’s mild fragrance,
morning’s blue cool, how helpless!
How the heart aches!
Today between him and me there is no third.
There can be contact with a slight movement of the hand.
But how many seasons have passed since hearing that voice.
It is not hard for me to call upon him,
but the truth is the voices and the accents do not have the same tones.
The tune is the same but the hearts are not close enough.

Suggested read : Parveen Shakir Translated from the Urdu by Alamgir Hashmi