Content, that poor old species generated to satisfy skills and talents and considered a form of ‘expression’, is totally endangered today.

Forces of different magnitudes are screwing Content ‘left’, ‘right’, and ‘centre’ and not allowing it to be.

In the content-amplified digital world, you might think, what the fog! content is absolutely the king/queen or, for that matter, the centre of the centreless world.

Aha aha, everything but, it is totally ruined by the Toms, Dicks, Janes, and Harrys who create it. Animated, visual, and textual, all types of Content is under attack.

With social media, everyone today is a writer – from an eighty-year-old grandma to a toddler and everyone in between. Too much information rued Duran Duran in the nineties and today we are infomaniacs. Quantity kills quality or perhaps it has already half-killed it. 

Apart from social media, the traditional media is not behind, albeit ahead of all, spawning Content at an unbelievable speed and raking in wealth in international currencies. 

Moreover, there are one thousand two hundred different camps yelling until their genitals ache that a certain type of Content which they endorse is in fact The real McCoy. These indulgent voices can even change the perspective of discerning individuals. Real content is now rare, and its simulations are satisfying to the majority. Real content is endangered. 

What do you do? And you better start swimmin’, or you’ll sink like a stone? LOL. Join them, because you can’t beat them, and keep believing that you joined just for survival but in your heart of hearts you know the real deal? Keep observing! 

Kinda like
Translated from Marathi by the poet

Kinda like
the whiff
of a Mallu household
specific
permeating
deep coffee

Kinda like
a lustrous leafy
kumbilappam
stringy chewing gum
fermented fixation
in dumbstruck trees

Kinda like
a Pringles chip
saddle-shaped
salted
burst of flavour
nonsensical crunch
slobbering psychedelic

Kinda like
a sadya meal
in a Mallu joint
engulfed Malabar of
dusky ambience
simulacrum of backwaters
a tea estate
in untiring hands

Kinda like
the halwa shops
outside Guruvayur Devaswom
an Adivasi installation
in a local mall
an Indo-Chinese food cart
opposite a local mall
the familiar whiff,
kasturi
in the navel,
specific