Name no name.
You know who was good, who was better
You have built your verdicts carefully,
stacked them like clean bricks
against someone else’s rubble.

But look.

The crow on the summer-hot verandah,
afflicted with thirst and weariness,
needed a moment of your attention.
You were scrolling your phone.
The man surrounded by the crowd’s lies
needed one voice ,just one
to say: I know this man.
You remembered, suddenly,
all your own sins.
So you said nothing.
And your silence
was the rope.

This cognition forgets so easily.
How many battles are won and lost
within;
each moment a small war,
each hesitation a casualty.
When silence is required, you roar.
When a voice is needed,
silence reigns.
You are your own worst siege.

Is delaying compassion worth it?
Count the cost–
the slackening of spirit,
the collapsing of homes and hearts,
the shattering of dreams,
the end of lives;
all because someone
had better things to do
than be human
for one moment.

Compassion is expensive.
So you kept it.
Saved it.
Waited for a better occasion.
The occasion never came.
Or it came
and you were busy
being right.

Copyright to Jamil_Ahmed_Azad

Food has become ideology.
Faith has become performance.
Identity has become surveillance.

Neighbours who once exchanged biryani and sweets
now exchange suspicion like currency,
spend it freely,
grow rich on it.

Every festival, a rehearsal for riot.
Places of worship of each kind, each creed, each community,
not a house of God
but a pending score.
Every interfaith friendship, interrogated.
Every tragedy, communalised
before it is even understood,
then handed over
as raw material
for tonight’s prime time rage.

Hatred is not new.
Hatred we can survive.

What we cannot survive
is hatred made comfortable.
Made ordinary.
Made fun.

The anchor grins.
The studio audience roars.
The algorithm feeds.
The neighbourhood burns.

And somewhere a man
scrolls past the smoke,
double-taps the outrage,
and sleeps soundly,
a citizen in good standing.

But somewhere else
a woman crosses the street
to knock on her neighbour’s door
with a bowl of something warm.
No speech.
No declaration.
No camera.
Just food that is still food between us.
Just a door that is still a door between us.
She says nothing,
and unsays everything
they spent years teaching us to fear.

Copyright to Jamil_Ahmed_Azad

Copyright to Jamil_ Ahmed_Azad

Copyright to Jamil_Ahmed_Azad

Father is not just a six-lettered word.
All his life he centres on his family,
on his children —
fights the world, starves,
deprives himself of sleep, of rest,
builds a utopian setting for the children
with sweat and blood,
grilled and burnt
by the dystopian oddities of the world outside.

All this —
until the children grow up.
Until they become man and woman,
begin to understand the complexities
of life, of the world —
and then
that father becomes a being
of very little understanding.
He is ignored.
He becomes a man of substandard.

I do.
We do.
Consciously and unconsciously.

And when I realise
that I too do the same at times —
I fall apart.
My heart cries.

He becomes a lone wolf.
We never understand
that he needs attention,
that he needs our undivided,
pristine, untouched time —
Is that a colossal thing he seeks?

I am a father too.
My son is young.
We think he does not understand.
We think he does not notice.
We think he does not feel.
Tomorrow he will grow up.

Will there be the same cycle?
Will I become
that lone wolf
he walks past
without turning?

And if I do —
will he too fall apart
when he finally realises?
Or will the cycle
simply
continue?

Copyright to Jamil_ahmed_azad

A funeral is no tragedy,
not foreboding, not a wound —
as long as it is of others,
as long as it is not in your room.

We refresh the feed.

168 schoolgirls bombed.
Scroll.
A civilian building, a drone.
34 killed.
Scroll.
A hospital bombed.
Scroll.

Children carried in arms
that are also broken.
Scroll.

People rejoicing
over the closure of a medical college.
Scroll.

A person lynched.
Scroll.
A man killed his entire family.
Scroll.
A woman killed herself and her children.
Scroll.

A student at a premium institute
hanged himself.
Scroll.

A medico ended her life —
bullied long enough
that living stopped making sense.
Scroll.

And somewhere in a grand building
a man in a spotless white
gives sermons of progress
to a room full of applause.

A man in shining armour
laughs at the killings
with a swelling pride
he boasts of it,
counts the dead like a scorecard,
like a harvest,
like proof of something.

We have named our weapons
after birds, after gods,
after the very winds
that carry the ash away.

That low
humanity has stooped
and called the stooping progress,
and given it a patent.

The dead have
no blue tick,
no follower count worth mourning,
no algorithm that favours their grief.

They have
no camera at the rubble,
at the broken bones and ribs,
no correspondent on the ground,
no breaking news that breaks
for those who have no oil, no gold, no uranium.

They have
no vote, no strategic value,
no prime time, no panel discussion.

They spoke once loudly
in the only language left to them,
the language of falling,
and we turned down the volume
and called it distant conflict.

They were killed in the wrong narrative.
Now only the wind carries them,
and the wind has no subscribers.

A funeral is no tragedy
when the dead have no channel,
no language we have chosen to learn.

They are statistics
until they are a door you know,
a name you have spoken aloud,
a smell you remember.

And by then
we have already scrolled
to the next innovation.

and they are nothing now
but collateral damage.

Copyright to jamil_ahmed_azad

I am to tell you a tale.
A real one.
No allegory, neither metaphor or metonymy.

Sit here.
Don’t make noise.
Turn off your phone’s notifications.
Just for while.
Yes. Great!
You are a good human.

So, yes! We are not all same.
Just not at all.
Look at Jack!
He is tempted by wit and intelligence.
Rationality keeps him sane and sober.

But there is one problem.
He asks questions, jsut too many.
There is a bigger problem.
Can you guess?

Okay! I will tell you.
He is in land of nonsense.
A place where logic vanishes.
And questioning is banned.

Once he questions about the status quo.
A police of wolves chase him down
For daring to think and ask for the truth.

Little did he know. He is in a land;
Where truth is blurred
And answers are forbidden.

The jaded Jack before he gives up.
He runs through the labyrinth
Of lies, deceit and stately machinations.

I forgot to tell you about Jill.
This man always chills.
She thinks her world is an elyseum.

In this land, there is a statesman.
He promises a Utopia with a sly hand.
Jill believes his rhetoric.
And calls him a king.

A blasphemy is charged if anyone questions.
Accolades here, accolades there.
But to meet his needs Jill has no bills.

Jack is lost still in this madness.
In search of truth, he incessantly roams.
Will he ever reach his home?

Copyright to jey-blah-blah