Less than ten minutes before the wheels left tarmac,
two hundred and forty-two lives
sat fastened in foetal seats,
tea cooling in plastic cups,
thumbs twitching over glowing screens,
minds rehearsing office slides, forgotten birthdays,
lovers’ texts left on “read.”
No one knew. Not a single soul.
Their names were already trembling
on the lip of silence,
already being whispered
by that most impartial registrar—Death.

Below, on solid ground,
the humdrum went on unbothered—
medical students scribbling dosages
in sterile halls; a nurse munching chips by the stairwell;
a professor grumbling over unpaid grants.
The kind of banal day that never earns poetry—
until it ends in pulverised concrete
and bones like chalk beneath metal.

And all it took—was a glitch perhaps.
A burnt wire. A bolt forgotten.
A breath’s-worth of mechanical betrayal,
and entire galaxies—
entire futures—collapsed into dust.
Just like that.
Without preface. Without justice.

And we? The voyeurs,
the obituary-scrollers and newsfeed-mourners?
We return to our cockfights—
scrapping over flags and fictions,
over castes that claim heaven,
creeds that damn,
borders drawn by drunks on old colonial maps.
We raise walls, chant slogans,
lynch in the name of gods
who have long stopped listening.

We forget that gravity is godless.
That fire has no ideology.
That death does not check your documents—
it cannot pronounce your surname.
You could be rich as the richest man,
or a lad unlawfully dragged by uniformed boots.
It ends the same:
flesh surrenders, eyes stare blankly,
history books close.

What does one say to the mother in Kerala
whose son studying in Kyiv
came home zipped in foreign silence?
Or to the boy in Raqqa
who lost all four limbs,
but not his stammering faith
in the idea of peace?
What does one say to the girl in Gaza
drawing flowers in the rubble
while drones carve thunder in the sky?

We keep saying “never again”
while building higher fences.
We light candles and call it healing.
We post flags in our bios—
a Palestinian one,
then a Ukrainian,
then whatever’s trending next.

But let’s speak plainly:
We are a species drunk on division.
We are magicians of forgetting.
We weep for strangers
only when they burn on camera.
We feel compassion
only when corpses come in clusters.

And yet, every now and then,
death, in all its calm arithmetic,
pulls the rug from beneath us.
It reminds us
that we are not kings of permanence—
we are tenants on borrowed time.

We will all die.
The bigots and the bridge-builders.
The tyrants and the poets.
Those with blue passports
and those without country.
The ones who plant bombs,
and the ones who plant tomatoes.

And when we die,
our bodies will not request
a caste certificate.
They will not need Aadhaar.
They will not demand veneration.
They will rot. Gloriously. Democratically.
They will join the honest loam.

So what, then, is the point
of all this tribal madness?
Why do we lace our short, stupid lives
with so much hatred and hubris?

Isn’t it time we bowed
before our shared frailty?
Isn’t it time we asked—
what if kindness is the only thing
that survives the wreckage?

For in the end,
when the smoke has cleared,
and all that’s left is bone,
you will not know
whether the hand you held in death
believed in your god,
or spoke your language,
or cheered for your side.

You will only know
that it, too, was trying
to hold on.
Just like you.

Some among you may not find your way to poetry with ease or instinct, and so, in the spirit of clarity and fellowship, I have endeavoured to render in prose what I sought to express in verse.

Less than ten minutes before take-off, 242 souls sat strapped into their seats—some sipping tea, others scrolling through their phones, a few perhaps fretting over unfinished work or mundane family squabbles. Not one of them knew they were living their last ordinary moments. Not one had an inkling that their names were already being whispered by death.

And down below, on solid ground, medical students and staff were caught in the most routine of routines—classrooms, corridors, coffee breaks—utterly oblivious to the fact that their lives were about to be obliterated in seconds, without warning, without reason.

All it takes is one unfeeling mechanical failure, and just like that—entire worlds collapse.

Yet we, the rest of us, continue to live under the grand illusion of permanence. We cling to flags, fight over imaginary lines on maps, draw blood over caste, creed, class, skin, and surname—knowing full well that the grave swallows us all the same. Muslim or Christian, rich or poor, Brahmin or Dalit, soldier or civilian—it doesn’t matter to fire or steel or gravity. Death doesn’t check your documents.

We go to war for power, kill for pride, alienate in the name of tradition—and for what? So our names can outlive us in history books written by men just as doomed? All our bigotries, posturing, and tribal loyalties are flattened in the face of a single crash—an indifferent plume of smoke rising from the earth as if to say: None of it mattered.

And when such a tragedy does occur, we weep. We call them “innocent lives lost.” We share posts. We light candles. And then, like clockwork, we go right back to hating, hoarding, dividing—forgetting that the same death waits at our doorstep.

Is this the best of what we are? Must it always take unspeakable grief to remind us of our shared fragility? Must we always need a body count to feel compassion for strangers?

The cruel irony is this: we spend our lives trying to be separate—by borders, beliefs, birthrights—but in death, we are finally, and completely, the same.

There are hours in life—hallowed and hushed—when the world seems not so much to change as to reveal its inner rhyme. One might be strolling through a gallery, the din of the outside world muffled as though by velvet curtains, when suddenly the eye is arrested by a scene of pasture or storm, rendered not in words but in hues. And later still—perhaps days hence—one catches, in the satin lining of a jacket or the tender gradation of a tie, a note of the very same colour-music. Such moments do not thunder into our minds like sermons but arrive quietly, like angels who speak only in silence.

Not long ago, I found myself ensnared in such a moment. I had been contemplating the work of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner—those twin sentinels of the British landscape—when I beheld, in a wholly different cathedral of artistry, the splendid garments of Sir Paul Smith. I was not prepared for the resonance. Indeed, what commerce might the tempestuous Turner have with the tailleur’s tape measure? What pact could exist between the whispering wheatfields of Dedham Vale and a dapper man in Mayfair? But once the connection had arisen in my thoughts, I could not unsee it. It was not fanciful; it was faithful to some deep and hidden truth.

Let us, for a moment, step back and observe what these men have offered. Constable, that patient recorder of skies, gave us the England of the soul—its repose, its melancholy, its hush before rain. Turner, by contrast, flung his soul upon the canvas like a man possessed—his seas roared with judgement, his suns bled with glory. But in each, colour was no mere adornment. It was the very syntax of spirit, the alphabet of mood. Sage and oat and pearl in Constable; flame, rust, and sulphur in Turner.

And then—Paul Smith. With his famed subversion of the predictable, his linings that sing where the suit speaks softly, his stripes which dance without ever leaping into vulgarity—he is not, as some might think, a mere designer of garments. He is a curator of feeling, a composer of cloth, a poet of the palette. In his tailoring, one finds the restraint of Constable’s meadows and the boldness of Turner’s suns, held together by an English wit which refuses to take solemnity too seriously.

Of course, it will be said—rightly—that art and fashion reside in different dominions. The one is meant to endure, the other to evolve. Paintings are entombed in time; suits are lived in, worn, and worn through. But I should like to suggest that the difference is not so wide as it seems. For both painting and dressing arise from the same human impulse: the longing to render the inward visible. Whether one spreads pigment across canvas or stitches silk to wool, one is trying to answer a single question—how shall I show what I feel?

There is, in the best of both disciplines, a refusal to succumb to the ordinary. They elevate it. They baptise it. A Turner sky is not just the weather; it is a theatre for the soul’s ache. A Paul Smith jacket is not merely something to wear; it is something to be. To inhabit his designs is to carry a secret—a flash of coral in a sea of grey, a whisper of rebellion against the tyranny of the drab.

 

It would be mistaken to call this vanity. The peacock and the prophet may both wear colour, but only one uses it to speak truth. Smith, like Turner, is not showing off, but showing forth. His stripes are not ornaments; they are arguments—for joy, for memory, for selfhood in a world increasingly clothed in conformity.

 

And so we come, in the end, to a quiet but vital thought: that colour is not trivial. It is, in fact, theological. In Genesis, God does not merely make the world; He sees that it is good. That act of seeing is not separate from the making. It completes it. In the same way, when we see a well-cut coat in lavender and rose and think, “Ah, Turner,” or “Ah, Constable,” we are not engaging in shallow aestheticism. We are joining a deeper liturgy—the liturgy of recognition, of resonance, of revelation.

 

Let the world keep its boundaries, if it must, between gallery and haberdashery. But let us remember that beauty is no respecter of categories. It slips from oil to silk, from landscape to lapel, asking only that we have eyes to see—and hearts to feel—that even in a jacket, as in a sky, there is room enough for the sublime.

 

 

THE FOURFOLD KEY

SENSES

APPEARANCE

ESSENCE

AND

EXISTENCE

An Essay in the Spirit of Reflection and Revelation

There are, it seems to me, four portals through which the soul peers out upon the world: Senses, Appearance, Essence, and Existence. Each presents a tier of understanding, a rung upon the ladder by which we ascend from mere perception to participation in reality itself. These are not merely categories of thought, but spiritual stations—stages of awakening, each more difficult than the last, and yet more rewarding.

Imagine now a solitary traveller entering a great, primeval forest just before dawn. It is not merely a forest of trees but one of mystery—a church of living things, older than language, deeper than thought. He does not know yet what he seeks. He only knows he must begin.

I. The Senses: The Doorway of First Sight

We begin, as all creatures must, with the senses—the instruments of touch, sound, sight, taste, and smell. They are the scouts of the soul, gathering the raw data of reality. Yet they are easily deceived, not by falsehood, but by limitation. The eye sees the rose’s red, the ear hears the wind’s hush, but neither knows the rose nor the wind. We do not see things as they are, but as we are taught to see them. We look at the sky, and say “blue,” never asking what it is we name, or why it moves us.

The senses, then, are faithful but simple-hearted servants. Like children watching a play, they know the motion but not the meaning.

So the traveller steps into the woods. He notices the dew-laced leaves, the rustle of birds, the tang of sap and loam in the air. His eyes catch flashes of colour—mossy green, foxglove purple, bark brown. But it is all sensation. The forest is beautiful, but dumb to him. He sees, but does not yet behold.

II. Appearance: The Cloak of the Familiar

From the senses arises appearance—that great masquerade of the visible world. Here the mind overlays memory and habit onto sensation, weaving names and expectations over the assortment of experience. We are trained to recognise “tree,” “mountain,” “face”—and so we cease to behold them.

Appearance is reality in costume. It is the surface of things, the pageantry of nature dressed in categories. But the danger here is subtle: the more we recognise, the less we see. We become blind to the mystery precisely because it has a name.

To see beyond appearance is not to deny it, but to unlearn our reflex to label, and learn again how to wonder.

The traveller begins to name things: oak, fern, thrush, path. He draws upon maps and memory. The forest becomes familiar—perhaps too familiar. He believes he knows it now, but in truth, he has clothed the unknown in garments of assumption. He does not see the forest, only the idea of it. He has mistaken the mask for the face.

III. Essence: The Sight of the Soul

Essence is what remains when all labels fall away. It is the soul’s sight—deeper than the senses, truer than appearances. Essence is not what a thing looks like, but what it is. To perceive essence is to gaze not upon a flame, but upon fire itself; not merely to see a man, but to sense the weight of his becoming.

This sight is not acquired by effort, but by surrender. One must learn to look not for utility, not for mastery, not even for meaning, but for the thing itself. Only then does the veil lift.

The artist who sketches light, the poet who listens to silence, the lover who knows the beloved not by features but by presence—all these have glimpsed essence.

Now the traveller grows still. He ceases to name and begins to listen—not to birdsong alone, but to the silence beneath it. He kneels by a stream and does not call it “water.” He lets it speak for itself. And in that moment, the forest opens. Not outwardly, but inwardly. The trees become not trees, but presences. He no longer walks through the woods; he walks with them.

IV. Existence: The Great Mystery Itself

And finally, we come to existence—the strange and staggering truth that anything is at all. Existence is not a property of things; it is the miracle behind them. Why should there be stars rather than none? Why the soft procession of seasons, the aching beauty of music, the cry of a newborn?

Existence is not something the intellect can seize; it is something the soul must kneel before. It is the heartbeat of God beneath the silence of all things.

Here, at last, the senses bow, appearance dissolves, and essence gives way to awe.

And the traveller, at last, enters a glade unlike the others. It is no different, and yet it is. The light falls here in a way it does nowhere else. He feels not just the presence of things, but the weight of being itself. He understands nothing and yet understands all. Tears come—not from sadness, but from the sheer, wordless mercy of the moment. The forest has become a temple. He has passed from seeing it to being seen by it.

The Whole: To See with Different Eyes

These four—Senses, Appearance, Essence, and Existence—are not enemies, but steps on a stair, each lifting us closer to the Real. The tragedy of modern man is not that he lacks sight, but that he stops at the second rung. He sees the world as a catalogue, not a cathedral.

To see aright is to look at everything and see—not merely with the eyes, but with the heart, the mind, and that still place in us where truth lives unnamed.

It begins with a question: what am I seeing? But it ends in a revelation: it is not I who sees, but I who am seen.

And the traveller, now changed, returns from the forest. But he carries it with him. Not the image of its trees or trails, but the sacred knowledge that there is more in the world than the world. He sees the familiar differently now. The cup, the face, the sky—all pulse with presence. He has walked through the woods of the world and found, at last, the wonder of simply being.