Sense of an ending.

[Photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The world is, according to a saying, only the size of each man’s head. Delhi has millions of people, and today in the final day of 2025, each of us millions of citizens must be making sense of the concluding year through our own creative and messy ways. One such citizen is Ronak Singh Bhasin, who came of age in West Delhi’s Hari Nagar. (Years ago, he had an insta handle describing himself as Pagal Kavi, or mad poet, which he jettisoned after outgrowing that persona). To mark the year-end, he has especially composed a poem for us. Ronak suggests that he has been gradually getting wary of this life and all that it has to offer, and that his poem reflects just that sentiment. “I might come across as someone who is depressed, but trust me I am not. I have only realised that laughter precedes crying, and crying follows laughter.” As for the poem’s slightly gloomy nature, surely, dear reader, you will understand that it is ok to feel a bit mournful for the year that is ending. Tomorrow will be the morning of the new year, when it will be time to be again hopeful and happy. Meanwhile, the photo shows the urban reality of our times: a smoggy day-end gathering upon a littered ground in suburban Ghaziabad. Rest in peace, 2025.

Sense of an ending

The wheels churn endlessly,
Time melds into a continuous hum of thousands of tiny sufferings and inconveniences.
Did you try to make a home in what’s seen?
Again, we falter,
Looking always away, never in,
Forgetting that we have no head.
Have you ever seen a decapitated head?
The frayed nerves and macerated skin look like delicate petals of an ornate red flower.
Worry not, because every ending hides in itself the seeds of a perfect beginning.
What was, is already dead.
Here you are now, not you, nor who you were.
I have sickly memories of this dream,
An endless hallucination of trying to possess endless distractions when you can never grab anything.
In a world full of haunting echoes, Where every figure is a mirage,
Every fact is an opinion,
Every appearance is a reflection,
Every reflection, a mere reflection.
Born without pockets—
Yet we compulsively hoard everything we can, including facts
(Isn’t it sad, that we can’t take anything with us, not even facts?)
We begin again, and again, and again,
We never tire of this dream because we are the forgetful fish in a searing pan.
Tossed here again and again,
Fresh, from every womb one can imagine.
Some of us jump back on the pan on our own,
With the memory wiped out, bearing nothing but intention in—
This fog, in this mist, this dew, and this flame.
In this way, we begin at the end,
And begin to end,
Again and again…