I sit on the throne

Hi, I’m a poem, I like to write / right myself

But I’m not / knot a homophone.

Words, you no / know, sit on a shelf

And I sit on the throne / thrown.

As part of a school exercise, Daivik’s class was asked to put together similar sounding words into a sentence of some coherence. He had come up with these lines. I enjoyed the coinage of words and the overall ring they had. I told him that it was beautiful, he gave me a beaming smile, said his teacher thought so too, and went away. 

These words however remained with me. There was something beautiful and abstract in there which I could not quite lay my fingers on. This set me up into a rather enjoyable stream of thoughts. A poem is writing itself, in the process of doing so it is also righting itself, obviously knotting homophones together do not make a poem, if you try that it will end up as a pile of words, which on their own have no place but the shelf, words, whether we know or not, knotted or not, do not make a poem. A poem, when it emerges from these words, takes on the lofty pedestals of the throne, and if it has not rightly righted itself, obviously it gets thrown…could this be what he means? From this pedestal, I was transported to the truly lofty thrones of Subramanya Bharati, and to one of the mightiest of his pedestals, Veenayadi nee enakku. Between the Veena, the instrument, the inert potential, and the fingers that play it, the kinetic, the manifestation, where, exactly, does the music reside? How, really, does a poem, emerge from words, knotted, or not? 

I was thusly immersed when Daivik came back, asking what I was thinking so deeply. “About the beauty of your lines Daivik”, I said. “What about them?”, he asked. “I’m trying to find out what makes them beautiful”. His curiosity was aroused and with a little gleam in the eyes, he asked, “Did you find out?”. “No, Daivik”, I confessed, “I’m not able to”. With a near perfect non-chalance he said, “May be that is what makes it beautiful”, and ran away. 

Lady-Hunter-Tiger

Daivik and me were preparing to watch the Australian Open semis between Federer and Djokovic. I had given sufficient build-up and Daivik was quite gung-ho about it. We were ready before the toss and waiting. The two players were warming up when the referee walked in with a little girl.
"What does she do in the match", asked Daivik. The little girl tossed up a coin for the players to call heads or tails.
"Why does she do that", asked Daivik. "To decide who gets to serve first", I said and went on to explain the idea behind the coin toss. I didn't quite know when to stop and started rambling about the concept of randomness.
He listened quietly for a while and asked, "So, it is like rock-paper-scissors". "Yes, Daivik, that's great. It is very similar", I exclaimed. Daivik got carried away and suggested, "Appa, they can also do Lady-Hunter-Tiger".

This was new for me! "What's that", I asked. Daivik started explaining, "Appa, look, hunter kills the tiger, so he is wins; tiger eats the lady, so tiger wins ", and in the same non-chalant vein added, "lady is powerful than hunter, so lady wins".  I waited for a while for some explanation on the last part, none was forthcoming. I considered this for a second and agreed to its faultless logic.
"So, Appa", Daivik wanted to know, "why don't they do Lady-Hunter-Tiger instead of toss". It was a good question, I had no answer.

But I amused myself for the next several seconds imagining Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic playing Lady-Hunter-Tiger to decide who gets to serve first.