Ode on a Gulmohar Tree

Thou still unravish'd stand on MG Road
Thou foster-child of the PWD
Sylvan historian, who canst recollect
A flowery tale more sweetly than the rhymes of humans
What leaf-fringed smoke haunts about thy shape
Of older trees felled in thy wake
In Kempegowda or the dales of Cubbon?
What men or gods are these? What scooters loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What bellows and honks? What wild scrambling?

Ah, sorrowful, sorrowful boughs! that will soon shed
Your leaves, and ever bid the Spring adieu;
While disquiet ensue in your place...
For ever clanking and singing ‘toot, toot’.
More happy people! more happy, happy people!
For ever running and ever to be on the go,
For ever panting, and for ever working;
All breathing human poison from above,
That leaves a heart sorrowful and empty,
A burning forehead, a parched tongue,
and memories of a green promenade.

It used to be a nerve-racking results show. Not any more. Sanjaya Malakar has made it to the final 7. Not for singing though, for just being a nice boy. Every mama watching American Idol (except the other contestants' mamas) feels like patting him on the head and presenting him with a lollypop after he weeds his way through yet another song-slaughter. Just one look at those wimpy brown eyes, it seems, is enough to get the inscrutable American public to pound their phones like crazy for the greater good of 'Sanjahya'.
After throwing dirt in the judges eyes and watching casuality after casuality leave the show in tears, he has simpered and whimpered but stuck like cement to the show. You can bet your guineas safely on the kid with the horrible voice.
Lakisha may belt it out like Aretha Franklin and Melinda Doolittle is still the winner in a sane man's world but American Idol is in a warp universe- The universe of Sanjaya Malakar, where Simon Cowell's once-upon-a-time pithy comments count for scrap. And powerful singing and sparkling personalities are nothing if not dust to be trampled upon by the pretty feet of Sanjaya Malakar.
hehehe...