Reflections

…Liquid Poetry…

I pass by Powai Lake twice every day.  About two kilometres worth journey of thinking with the eyes. The lake is a lovely metaphor.

On ordinary mornings, the lake looks like an ordinary lake, proclaiming its ordinariness to the ordinary world passing by it. It says, “Just like any other lake, I’m deep, I’m watery, I support life within and without myself, I’m sensitive to the wind and break into little waves when excited.”

Some other mornings, the lake is a polished mirror, truthfully reflecting everything, big and small, red, white and green, that stands by it. On other mornings, it only provides a vague reflection.
Sometimes aluminium grey, sometimes burnished steel, sometimes bronze...

On cool evenings, the lake makes trysts with little winged cherubs and their bows-and-arrows, who come seeking to nestle in its dark blanket.

On cloudy-rainy August mornings, the lake takes on the look of hard smooth steel. But look closely! The smoothness is only because of a uniform tumult on the surface. The liquid fury of the rain has forced the ordinary lake to turn into the extraordinary. The lake is merely shaped by stormy circumstances.

Once the rains recede in September, the clouds still linger, threatening to relapse any moment into lashing rain. The lake lies tense, silently and alertly reflecting the sky above - a stationary sea of grey concrete, so determinedly strong and solid that you could drive a car over it.

Eventually, the clouds tire of waiting to disturb the concrete lake and they retreat, but the lake still appears hardened and rough outside. It appears still and lonely, making the observer feel like Neil Armstrong might have before his one small step.

…Dreaming...

Interpreting the surface of the lake is subject to the whims of the dreamer. One wonders what it is hiding in its depths?

Is it ultimate peace lying in there? Still and silent as the anonymous grave of a soldier who gave up his life, but lost the war?

Or is it bubbling with energy - a world alive with colourful fins and powerful froth-less currents?

A watery civilisation?

Is it a grotto of great grotesque fish and fearsome fanged snakes slithering in slimy green-blue darkness?

Or is it a blissful musical underwater place for rhythmic meditation?

The poetic mind imagines and glorifies… Until the summer arrives and the harsh sun reveals the bed of the lake.

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All I can see in the heart of the lake is an ugly wasteland. Barren, diseased, empty and dying inside. The lake. The very being that made me poetic.

…Wake up. Wake up.