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Haruki Murakami said "Death is not the opposite of life but a part of it."    Loss is an inevitable part of life. It could be the loss of a pet, the end of a relationship or loss of a loved one, the loss of a friend, the loss of a child, the loss of a parent or even our health.   No matter the kind of loss, it is never easy. It leaves a yawning crevasse inside our soul. Even if we recover, it's an unfilled pause to our life, a hiatus which often remains one. At such times, to have someone beside us, someone who does not bring words, but just presence, a hardened softness, cool as breeze, with a depth that is not gravitas but air, someone who tells us that all relationships are sand, and finally sand in the wind.   As Rob Liano said - "The sorrow we feel when we lose a loved one is the price we pay to have had them in our lives.”   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on death and the ways we move on -  The Final Goodbye (or Why Lovers Decide to Die Together) An Epitaph Made of Light & Air I Love You Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - The Way to Kataka by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/the-way-to-kataka Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Marriage: it was the end of all illusions and the beginning of philosophy:   marriage was a lesson in impermanence - not an idea, a daily unfolding.   To remain calm in storms not of my making. Dinner is late.       Plans change.           Cushions are moved. I nod, smile, adapt. an ardent disciple of Aurelius.   Closet space shrinks mysteriously. my belongings become philosophical concepts.   Arguments teach a truth: words are insufficient.   “Where do you want to eat?” “Anywhere.” (Anywhere is wrong.) And I discover the absurd as Camus sighs in his grave.   I broach the thesis: “Let’s watch a movie.” I receive the antithesis: “Let’s talk.” And confront the synthesis: talk about why no movie is being watched.   “What did I do wrong?” “I don’t know.” But something is wrong. And thus begins a lifelong inquiry into metaphysics -   what can truly be known?   I examine questions of existentialism: what gives life meaning? Choice?      Duty?          Love?   I lay in bed, see the fan whirl, and ask - what is love, bereft of drama? what is self, when it must bend? what is happiness, when it must be shared?   What, indeed, is life, when it seeks surrender, but masquerades as gift.   Essay: I sometimes feel that a philosopher dissects the deeper meanings of life, only to figure out that it is meaningless.   And invariably, it has to do with human interaction, thought, foibles, decisions, reactions. And within the rigour of its investigation and compulsions is the real time change which humans wrought on each other.   Marriage is the ultimate test of change and resilience. Crafted inside the crucible of love, it continuously tests the human power to forbear, resist, surrender and claim victory in survival.   A less cynical view would view the wedded journey as a partnership which keeps on recalibrating itself until it hits a rhythm and a seamless marching cadence.   In actuality it is a flawed construct, with a societal burden of "till death do us part". Which of course provides a longevity to breeding, rearing and mutual survival, but comes up wanting in providing universal succour.   We are complex creatures. Feeling, hurt, chemistry, comfort, vulnerability, ego, belief, residual memory, remembrance, all swirl inside us like a Milky Way seeking their pre-eminence. And invariably coming up short when sought singularly. Luckily we are social creatures , necessarily living in a world which won't exist if not for cohabitation and coexistence.   Thus ironically, the most successful marriages are the ones which recognise this need and build an ecosystem of relationships rather than one rooted in ownership, bound in jealousy, and closeted in insecurity.   And just this musing is what makes a simple man transition into philosophy.   Unknowingly, a man walks into marriage a simple human being  and walks out wiser.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on marriage and its consequences -  She's a Fierce One, My One Love's Night of the Long Knives How She Knew (that he was unfaithful) Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Rising Sun by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/rising-sun Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

I sometimes feel we would be better people if we were slaves to love. Not to work for it, not to fantasize about it, not try to record of its wonder - but just to ease into its trust and surrender.   Because the secret of love's power is not its ability to sway but its strength to render vulnerability as an essential ingredient.   It's contrarian in concept - showing your weakness to strengthen your relationship - but that is how love gifts nesting space. We are allowed to show our worst, safe in the belief that we will be accepted, advised, admonished but adored. And in that paradox lies the crux of our ability to survive the worst of what life invariably throws at us.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the beautiful paradoxes of love -  Where We Start & Where We End The Space Between Our Words The Ironies of Love Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - About Moments by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/about-moments Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

The whole process of growing up has an inevitability- and a tragedy - attached to it. A child grows up believing - trusting everything and everyone. An innocence which is endearing - and often encouraged, possibly because of it's anachronism and the fact that an atavistic urge inside us reaches out to something which makes us remember days when we were less cynical, less pessimistic, less prone to mistrust.   But how fast realities catch up.   Our desire, nay, our encouragements for children to grow up to be 'good' human beings, bumps into reality checks. The advice is then tempered with small counsel like - be practical, don't be an innocent, you have to look out for yourself because who else will. In a wildly confusing world, our children end up being human beings who are copycats of others- self absorbed, confused, unreconciled and ultimately neurotic. Innocence - moribund or ignored - seeks its own burial grounds.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the sea and what it does to you -  I Heard the Other Day Kripa (a blessing from a daughter) The Art of Living Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Sea Waves Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/sea-waves Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

I spent three days in Kochi, immersed in the art biennale. And wandering through the lanes, warehouses, waterways, and cafes of the city. The city was alive with art - representations of life, adn its anguish and joy. And hundreds of people from all over immersed in art, as something they now saw as they went to school or office.    I recorded small pieces as I viewed the art, and have put them up here, unedited.    They have the sound of the sea, the cadences of life as it passed even as its representation lay splattered in colour or metal in front of me. I loved doing this live recording of thoughts passing through my mind - sometimes shallow, sometimes deep. But all very me.    Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Sailing through the wide sea by Musiclfiles Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/sailing through the sea Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

It's a startling thought, that someday sometime, there's that final time - and never again - when you will meet someone, hold someone, say that word, share that laughter.   Then how do we know that it is not also the final time when we leave with a sharp word, a fight ending in tears, a time which leaves someone in despair, that final moment when the last memory is of pain given and anguish taken.   Life's profundities are often written in the simplest ways - to be kind, grateful, to listen, to respond gently. Our last memory has to be the one which we can live with without guilt or pain.   Then we can revisit everything which we loved about the one who has left us with gentleness, towards that memory, towards ourselves.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how time takes people away from us -  An Epitaph Made of Light & Air Chemo: as I battle myself When We Were One With The Stars Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Falling Star by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/falling-star Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license  

Animals hunt to fill their stomachs. Humans do so for power and greed. And when they possess weapons of destruction, they think themselves to be invincible.   It's easy to say it's primordial, part of the ancient blood running in our veins, but it's also civilizational. Of having - or not having - a spiritual foundation, a religion which teaches inclusion and diversity, and not harp on a supreme monotheism.   The urge to convert, failing which to conquer, is the legacy of our flawed religious leaders, who were products of their time, and constructed manuals chocobloc with their fears, flaws and aneurysms of the times.   And they forced humanity to see divine in the monstrous.   And the moral underpinnings of every endeavour thus became vitiated and compromised.   And when men gave into their basest inclinations to acquire and rule, to preen and show, all hell broke loose. Under the guise of righteousness, they found justification to bring destruction, mayhem, deaths.   Alas, that is the legacy we will leave behind on this earth, which some day or the other we are bound to destroy - the proverbial cutting the branch on which we sit. Because with hubris comes the suicidal instinct, of so-called glory above all else, justification above logic, of allowing ourselves to be destroyed as collateral damage just to prove a point of our invincibility.   A simple fact. There's never going to be peace on this earth. Men, religion and hubris will justify every vile crime done against humankind on this earth. Till we are all wiped off.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the miseries and damage of war -  Sounds of the Living and the Dead For Anyone Who Bleeds Will We Ever Trust the Skies Again Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Evacuation by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/evacuation Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Words are all what we have, to conjoin or to distance each other, what can make the difference between making a bridge to cross differences, or to find dissonance to deepen chasms. Who are we if not the stray remark which hurt or the heartfelt apology which redeemed. Love finds its bedrock in the glad word: beyond the body pheromones is the reality of the feeling, the thought enunciated in ways which lays bare the truths of a person.   We are known (and too often judged) by what we say, because that is what mirrors our innermost beings, because that is what gets people to recognize what we feel, what we think, what the truths of our being are.   What else is there? How else can we tell someone we agree with them, that what we think is what is, that we can think the way we can think, that the depths in our beings is greater than what is ostensibly visible. That we like someone, that we sense a chemistry, that, yes, we may be in love.   But love, ah. That can have its own language.   Because so much of our relationship is not only what is said, but also how it is said. The innocuous remark with a particular tone, an expressionless declaration, a stray sentence, a throwaway statement, a simple reply laden with feeling.   Yes. The language of expression and silence and adoration which comes out of a person's very being - in the eyes, in touch, in the presence and in the absence. How, only too often, in love, words fail, but even then the message gets conveyed. Because, sometimes - only sometimes - wordlessness is the most powerful language possible. Being in love does put paradoxes into perspective, and well.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the slow charm of love -  Let Me Sit Beside You, Quietly When We Know Love as Found It Takes Time for Love to Find Comfort Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - About Moments by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/about-moments Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Relationships take time. Even 'love at first sight' is a construct only, finding immediate challenge in the crucible of real life. I know couples who have gone around for years, but find they scarcely know each other within the first week of married life.   The interesting dynamic is the setup provided by love. It could work in two dynamically different directions. It could make you accept what really comes your way with generosity and a desire to work through the unexpected discoveries in a person. The other extreme would be the crashing of expectations, and understating that what-you-thought-&-what-you-got were such such incredibly different things - to be jettisoned immediately.   Such does life give - and we choose to give away.   We need to understand that ties are always brittle to begin with. There's trust to be built, there's vulnerability to be shown, there are defeats to be accepted along with victories which need to be celebrated. In our attempt to be what we've shown ourselves to be, we should not forget that impressions cut both ways - and truths are often more charming than cultivated lies. We WANT our partners to be mere mortals living and breathing heartbreak, distress, irrationality, madness, quirkiness, and everything else which makes us human.   If within those realities, we are not accepted, maybe there is something else in store, someone else to grow with out there, who would enrich our lives in immeasurable ways.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how loves gives comfort -  I Think I Can be an Adventure WIth You When We Know Love As Found Just be Air Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Epic Intro 2017 by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/epic-intro-2017 Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

The charm and beguile of life is that it throws the unexpected with such unerring regularity.   We start something with an intent. But the universe has other ideas. We strive for bliss in flight and fall in love with the grizzly earth.  So much of what enriches our lives is the unexpected turn we took, the yes we said reluctantly, the adventure which emerges when we step out in the middle of a dull day.   We merely want to seduce someone and we unexpectedly fall in love. We want to escape tedium and we find meaning. We enter with curiosity and leave with a cornucopia of riches. We are kind and make lifelong bonds. We wake up early with deep reluctance and find the most glorious sunrise of the year.   So much of our life is the misadventure, the wrong turn, the searing confession, the moment of vulnerability. And the whole world opens up. All that is required is chutzpah, intent, the ability to look life in the eyes with brazen honesty and say "this is me, flawed yet beautiful, selfish but kind, always open, always learning, always ready."   And the universe just whisks us away, into its limitless mysteries.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how love evolves in beautiful ways -  Aaschi Bringing THe Storm Home I Never Wanted Parts of You Which Were Easy Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - When Life is Beautiful by Kalak Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/when-life-is-beautiful Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

I reach the summit.   Not inch by inch—no, I arrive in a flood. Talent spills out of me. Love follows, tidal and unquestioning. Directors orbit me like obedient moons; they cannot imagine a world without my sound. I do not merely compose music—I alter its grammar. I am told I am a miracle. I begin to agree.   This is where it breaks.   Because admiration, once mistaken for destiny, hardens into entitlement. I begin to believe the applause is owed, not earned. That the place I clawed my way to is permanent, immune to time, taste, or doubt. I convince myself I can offer anything—anything at all—and the world must bow and call it genius. If it doesn’t, the fault lies with the world. They don’t understand music. They don’t understand me.   Power arrives quietly. I let it.   I summon directors and leave them waiting in the dark, hours stretching thin, just to feel my own gravity. I choose sacred backdrops for first meetings, mistaking symbolism for sanctity. I give indifferent music to a good film and dismiss its failure as “divisive,” because nothing I touch is allowed to be mediocre—only misunderstood.   Lines I never meant to draw begin to appear everywhere.   Faith, identity, difference—these become instruments too, played without care. When someone enters my home carrying another god, another grammar of devotion, the air tightens. Symbols are stripped, not violently, but casually. As if it is obvious, as if it is necessary. As if genius grants permission.   My arrogance is no longer an accident. It is deliberate. Curated. Non-negotiable.   I do not spare those who built me. The directors who trusted me when I was still a question mark. The collaborators who believed music was a conversation, not a sermon. One by one, they drift away—not in protest, but in fatigue. Projects thin out. Invitations dry up.   And the music—ah, the music.   It stumbles. It repeats itself. It loses hunger. But how would I know? I am sealed inside a fog of my own praise, a mausoleum of old triumphs. Self-awareness was buried years ago, quietly, without ceremony.   So when the world starts turning elsewhere—towards younger, leaner, less reverential talent—I am stunned. Betrayed. How dare they move on from me?   Then comes the mirror I choose because it flatters my wounds. The foreign interviewer. The sympathetic gaze. The easy narrative. I explain my fading relevance with a single, convenient sentence: it isn’t decline, it’s persecution. Not exhaustion, but exclusion. The industry, I say, is communal. I am being punished for who I am.   I believe this because it costs me nothing. It asks nothing of my craft, my humility, my failures.   And even when someone who has known me—who has admired me—looks at me and says, almost gently, almost in disbelief, “My god, I never even realised you were Muslim,” the truth still does not land. Because by then I am too deep inside my grievance to hear anything else.   I mistake isolation for martyrdom.   I retreat into the smallest room imaginable: the ghetto of my own frustration. Religion, the last refuge of the unimaginative and the cornered, becomes my alibi.   What I do not see—what I may never see—is the scale of the loss.   The hearts that once beat in time with my music and now feel nothing. The silence in concert halls where tickets were bought with devotion and abandoned with disappointment. The audience that did not turn hostile—they simply stopped coming.   That is the true heartbreak.   Not that I fell. But that I never understood why.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on failures & hypocrisies of people  -  Mr Hoskote, have you visited Kashmir recently? Of Failing & Falling Will We Ever Trust the Skies Again Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Relaxing Piano Improvisation by Alexander Nakarada Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/relaxing-piano-improvisation Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

We have to step out of our lives to see what is in the great beyond. Often just outside our gated communities are worlds we know nothing of, lives being lived in ways which we cannot conceive of. Rich, varied, textured, tumultuous. Often beautiful because they are unfiltered and often bleed; frightening because they are so raw.   When we encounter these lives, these stories,  we are aghast at their truths and trajectories. They are so rich in their lived-in textures that our own lives seem bland and empty.   That's why I love talking to strangers. For their tales and their lives. Each person is a universe, a cornucopia of dreams and desires, often of unrelenting courage, often of failure, anguish and hope.   We are woven together through our common place on earth. However much we might think ourselves as special, we are purveyors of the same resources, prisoners to the same gravities, trying to make our lives out of what we have been bequeathed, trying to make more out of what we've got.   And when we do this interaction, we are twice blessed - one, when we give the grace of understanding the other, and when we lay ourselves open and vulnerable with own stories.   We all want to do well. We all want to do better. But when someone shares tales and hope with us, we are part of the same family of humankind.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how a life is made of so many beautiful things -  Lemonade at the End of a Buzzing Day Just Be Air Stealing Beauty Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Winterland by Frank Schroeter Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/winterland Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Why don't we have honest conversations with the ones we love the most? Why don't we listen - really listen - without comments, without reply, without retort - when they attempt to tell us what hurts, where it hurts, and how the hurt devastates them.   So much of the pain we cause, and we feel, is avoidable. Not because we don't tell enough - but because we don't listen enough. The smallest of things becomes intractable, our understanding of what things mean have no relationship to what it actually meant. We don't clarify, we conclude, and are damned for it.   Bridges which connect love become chasms, and we stand at both ends and wonder - what happened, how did two beautiful people find their worst selves in the relationship which mattered the most.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the dissonance in relationships  -  A Love Letter from a Frustrated Husband to an Exasperated wife A Primer on How to Deal With (Being) Hurt Lovers Who Synchronise (& those who don't) Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts'  Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Sehnsucht by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/sehnsucht Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Poems have a way of showing truths and making us recognize what we are often blind to - that the best we have is adequate and the worst we think we are can also be beautiful. There is so much we lose out to life because of our fears - of what we think we are, of what others might think we are, of what the world thinks when we fail.   The sad truth is - nobody cares. Everybody is immersed in their own stories, and beyond a flurry of gossip, have scarcely any mind space for anybody else.   Only the ones who care for us, are the ones who feel for us, in ways which are genuine and true and beautiful.   And when they hold us close, in spite (and often because) of what we are, we become the beauty they see in us, we are rendered marvellous, we see the infinite in ourselves because that is the core of us - the boundless possibility, the opening of a flower inside us, the feeling of being with the divine, of being blessed.   And all because someone found us worthy of time, of attention. Of a sliver of love. Maybe a poem.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on how we blossom into the person we should be -  Lemonade at the End of a Buzzing Day I Have Watched You Make the Ordinary Holy When We Know Love as Found Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Feelings 2 by Frank Schroeter Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/feelings-2 Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license  

As new year eves crack our worlds open into two - a past and a future - albeit as tenuous in concept as they come, deep inside we know the celebrations - like those we do for birthdays - is just messaging of mortality for all things we hold dear.   And embedded within that reality is our realization that the experiences and relationships we live and seek and want to linger in are what sustains and gives meaning to our breath, the limited number that we have.   The songs we hear together, the storms we take shelter from, the books we cry together to, the traumas we live together through. Life's fullness manifests itself in our life through our shared experiences. Moments ripen into full fruits when we experience them as summer, letting its warmth flood us into sweet submission.   Our lives our only half of their possibility if we consider the indulgences which enrich our lives as ordinary. Or things in passing. The kisses we steal, the hands we hold in the dark, the crook of our arms we give for rest, are more precious to remembrance when we look back than any tinsel star or success in passing. Public adulation is the worst. It engulfs us without redemption, leaving us hungrier for being there, and empty when it passes away.   I'm quite sure god lives his life through what we do. And I think the sensory is what he would remember, the unexpected adventure, the advent of serenity because we chose to do nothing one winter morning but sit with our ageing father to look out onto the changing skies.   If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the beauty of things pass -  When I Hear The Whistle of a Passing Train One Summer Rediscovering Heaven Subscribe to my newsletter 'The Uncuts' Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup. Get in touch with me on [email protected]   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Liberty Quest by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/en/song/liberty-quest Licence:  https://filmmusic.io/standard-license