The Ascent

For the Students` Union/Council of Wayamba University and for all our juniors

Keep up your good work, young comrades.
Admittedly, we felt smaller and insignificant,
As we stood before the pandal,
The fruit of your collective labour,
For days on end,
And felt kind of envious of you too,
Because you`d done, and perfectly well,
What we`d believed,
To be next to impossible.

Keep up your good work.
In our days, the progressives who led us,
Feigned to engage themselves
In addressing more serious political issues,
Which, according to them,
Left them scant time and little resource,
To do simple beautiful things,
As you`ve done.

Keep up your good work,
Because (I think) it`s infinitely more important,
Than organizing a picket, starting a lecture boycott,
Inciting riots, besieging the Dean`s office,
Or staging a sathyagraha at the gate,
Which, the dumbest passer-by,
Blind to the facts,
Blind to the attendant circumstances,
Would deride or chuckle at.

Keep up your good work,
But away from the power-hungry impostors,
Who pretend themselves
To be firebrand socialists,
Because the pedigree of true socialists is mixed now,
And their ideology adulterate.

Keep up your good work,
And in your mind the fact,
That water can douse the reddest firebrand,
In the blink of an eye,
And that the ideology is no more fixed,
Than a clock`s pendulum.

Keep up your good work.
Deal with the irreconcilables with tact.
Never throw away the hot potatoes
That are otherwise edible.

Keep up your good work.
And avoid invective and sensational polemic,
That rarely pays in the long run.

Keep up your good work,
And learn to tolerate rather than battle.

The wounded world wants no warriors now,
It only needs diplomats.