War of the Roses

By Sinchan Chatterjee

Often without rhyme and sometimes even without reason, these poems seek to capture the sameness in the pattern of lives we live everywhere, throughout time and space, and attempt to effectively articulate the anguish born from the mad desire of every rose for peace, love and permanence in a fast-changing world plagued by the thorns of greed and chaos.
But above all else, the book is intended to be a question, to every reader who cares enough to listen, for every ear that hears the groans of a mute planet, and every soul that sees through its entrapment in a blind world.
It is a question the book itself could not answer, much less the writer."

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Point Six Technologies Pvt Ltd
• Release date: Mar 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9789390040056

Sinchan Chatterjee

"Sinchan, currently pursuing his Masters in English Literature from Jadavpur University, is a past pupil of the Department of English at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata. His debut collection of stories, titled ‘In Search of a Story’ was published in 2016, and his second book of poems titled ‘Plato in a Metro’ will be published by Writers Workshop.Guilty when he writes only for himself and conceited when he believes his writing has the power to stir some feeling in an external reader and therefore must be published for some greater good, Sinchan wishes to make out of his life a vacation he can spend eternally looming around in a Nowhere land, with no addresses, numbers, people or words or sounds."

Book preview

Yawn

Drowsing in the corner seat

In a sea of human crowd,

The mother pats her son’s head,

Tilting it gently, so it leans

On her shoulder.

Yawning herself,

She smooths his hair

With the softest comb of her palm,

And sends him away –

Far off

Into a silent world

That smells of roses.

The Truck

A truck

With the two wheels

Stuck into the mud

Struggling to

Find its way out.

Heavy, old, exhausted,

All it needed was a little push.

Last time I checked the place,

The truck was gone.

The only thing left behind was

Dried up marks

Of tired tyres,

Evidence of a noisy battle.

If the truck could,

With all that weight,

Then so can you.

The Future is an MCQ

"I saw the best minds of my generation

Destroyed by Multiple Choice Questions"

–Fallen Ginsberg.

Four roads diverged on a yellow sheet of paper

And I, scared of negative marking,

Could not take either.

Machines were not designed to scan human aspirations

Or sweating-like-pigs-under-the-umbrella mothers

And fathers squatting like hawkers on sidewalks

Waiting to sell themselves,

They watch as their children draw out their ID cards

Proving their identity as an aspirant loser --

Each child in a striped collared shirt

With IDs hanging from his throat

Like ties that bind the peg to the goat.

Each Unique ID separated by an arbitrary last digit.

They march in like an army,

Except they're all each other's enemy.

In the race to the rare prized spot,

One must leave all else behind --

Shut their eyes to the world

And peer through a piercing in the key-hole

And make Multiple Choice Questions their Universe.

Only those make it who believe

Nothing else exists outside of Questions and Answers.

At the door

They search all over his body

Like a criminal.

Watch, removed.

Water bottle dropped.

Ring not allowed.

He tries to smuggle in the amulet

On his arm under the shroud of his shirt

But the metal detector screams alarm

They strip him of his last hope

They slowly snap the final feeble thread

That sealed his bond with God.

No chits and papers?

Found guiltless, almost naked except for clothes, he is

waved in

To the herd, the flock of scholars who jump and bleat

on

Their ignorant way to the slaughterhouse.

The wait is over.

The screen flashes like a lightning

The thunder says nothing.

You may start, a voice