Everything the Stranger Saw

FolkPunjab shared a wonderful song based on Shiv Kumar Batalvi's Punjabi poem "Panchi Ho Javan" or "Wish I could be a bird."



Here's a translation of the original poem:

I wish that I could be a bird
That I could fly, and sing,
That I could touch untouchable peaks,
Forget the roads of this world,
And never return.

I would take luxurious baths;
Drink water in long sips.
By the shore of a great lake,
I would sing a broken song.

I would go sit in a flowering wilderness
To gulp the perfumed breeze.
Warm the peaks of mountains,
Numbed by centuries of freezing cold,
With a tight embrace.

I wish I could be a bird.

My nest would be among the mulberry trees,
On in the caper, the mesquite or the cypress.
In the cold eastern wind,
The jeweled branches would bend
As if playing, swaying,
With their hair flying in the wind.

One day, there would be such a storm
That all the twigs would scatter.
Nestless, I shall become.
Spend my life intoxicated with the nectar of sorrow.

I wish I could be a bird.

(Translation credit: http://www.apnaorg.com/suman/batalvi_poems.html)

Without hope,

Right at the Western edge of the University of Missouri campus, Greektown erupted in celebrations shortly before midnight on May 1. The celebrations started less than an hour after U.S. President Barack Obama had issued a statement confirming that a U.S. security team had killed Al Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, in the city of Abbottabad, Pakistan.

People cheered, shouted slogans, and sang the national anthem - some of them patriotically clad in the U.S. national flag. There were similar celebrations outside the White House in Washington, D.C., as well as in the Times Square in New York. At the site of the 9/11 attacks in lower Manhattan, crowds gathered near the memorial to celebrate and shout "NYC! USA!" at the top of their lungs. However, I had not anticipated such fervor in Columbia, Missouri.



Emotions were running high, no doubt.

I don't know how personally these cheering crowds were attached to the war on terrorism. Perhaps some of them, if not all, knew someone or the other in the U.S. forces fighting in Afghanistan currently. Perhaps, they or someone they knew had lost a dear one in the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11. Nonetheless, their celebrations were symbolic. They were cheering a victory in their country's long and expensive war that they could all claim as their own. I wasn't there actually so I couldn't interview anyone to get a definitive reaction. However, it is my assumption that most of them really didn't know about the actual on-ground conditions in war-torn Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. Almost ten years after the siege on Afghanistan began, the deadly drone attacks and the suicide bomb blasts are only a problem faced by people living in that part of the world, not so much by U.S. residents. The celebrating hordes, for example, might not be aware of a bomb explosion in a Pakistani city that took four lives just a few hours after news of Osama's death broke, in what could be an immediate reaction to Osama's killing.

I was reorganizing my photo albums on my laptop, yesterday, when I came across this photo I had taken in St. Louis last year.



It was Thanksgiving Day, and I landed at St. Louis Airport from Las Vegas in the morning. The bus that was going to take me back to Columbia, Mo., was supposed to leave in the afternoon from Downtown, St. Louis. So, I decided to take the Metrolink to the city center and hang out there till my departure time.

But, the weather gods had other plans.

As soon as I left the Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, it started to pour down heavily. The temperature dropped to 20 F, and every time the train stopped at a station, the doors opened to fill the compartment with a chilling wind. After a ride of around thirty minutes through some really interestingly decrepit places, I got off at the Arch-Laclede's Station. The rain was too heavy at that time, and like I said before, I was on my way back from Vegas, so I only had a light jacket on. It was literally freezing. But, the idiot that I am, I decided to brave the elements and walk in the rain to look around for a coffee shop. Much to my dismay, everything was closed. Everything.

And then it dawned upon me. It was Thanksgiving Day. A national holiday! What in the world was I thinking before?

So, drenched from head to toe, I returned back to the covered safe haven of the Arch-Laclede's Metrolink station, which is situated on the lower deck of the nineteenth-century Eads bridge. The historical bridge that crosses the St. Louis riverfront (of the Mississippi) to the East and connects Missouri to Illinois. There, I waited for fifteen minutes or so for the next train back to the airport. It was during this wait that I took the photo. I just felt it was a really nice frame. The Gateway Arch stands to the South of the station and can be seen through its many old brick arches.

The wet concrete floor of the Gateway Arch parking lot in the photo, the forlorn autumn trees and the grey, cloudy sky in the background are all vivid reminders of that cold, wet and foggy St. Louis morning and everything else that went terribly wrong afterward.

Yes, the day went from bad to worse when three hours later I rode the train from the Airport again, this time to the Union Station. It started to snow on the way. In severe snowfall, I walked six blocks from the train station to where the bus was stationed on Market Street. Later, just after ten minutes into hitting the road, the windshield vipers of the bus gave way. The driver refused to take a risk and returned back to the stop. After his attempts to fix the electronic system of the bus failed, he asked the company to send a new bus. It took five more hours for that new bus to arrive. All in all, it was a day to forget, but this photo just brings everything back. Perhaps in a good way, since I survived the onslaught of that day's weather to reminisce about the frigid experience from the warm confines of my apartment.