2 and 2 are five

Dust of the Glorious. I marched where Ganga weeps through waste, Where tricolor dreams rot in haste, My blood boiled like Churchill’s scotch, But cooled in Delhi’s metro watch. I fought with pens in bazaars bare, Echoes of Tharoor in Lucknow air. Shakespeare groaned in chai-stall plays, While Dickens wrote in Bombay's haze. "My country right or wrong" felt thin, When sons of soil sold truth for gin. Plath wept beneath Kashmir’s white sheet, And Rashid sang from Siachen’s beat. written and published by: Vaibhav Vedhase Upadhyay.

“Inkless Republic”   I’ve met gods in secondhand bookstores, watched their sermons drown in footnotes and dew. V.S. Naipaul whispered, “Ruins aren’t history, they’re warnings.” Salman Rushdie lit incense over graveyards of exiled truths. Charles Dickens drank tea with beggars and barons, while Edward Gibbon muttered, “Empires rot from the spine.” Barack Obama, tired but intact, said, “Hope’s a quiet protest, not a campaign.” Friedrich Nietzsche screamed: “Live first. Then dare to think.” Oscar Wilde smirked: “But dress your wounds in wit.” Bertolt Brecht painted famine in shadows and bread, and P.G. Wodehouse wrote laughter like rebellion in bed. Bertrand Russell sat cross-legged, scribbling doubt like scripture. Christopher Hitchens flung gin at God and Oxford. Winston Churchill smoked history into speeches, Shashi Tharoor rewrote it in postcolonial rhythm. Edward Said hummed exile into every verse. Michel Foucault traced power through veins of silence. William Shakespeare stared ...