Shayandas - Shayan Das

Quotes by Shayan Das. Follow my Instagram account for related posts.

Last night I saw a group of friends laughing at the café and ended up smiling myself. The other day, there was a couple kissing under the flicker of streetlight, and I thought to be gentler with me. For when you've been alone for more than half your life, you don't expect to be included or cast your own light; rather, choose to reflect like the moon that never formed a constellation. When you've been on your own, it seems that even the wind that brushes past your skin has a purpose— like a stray dog that thinks every kind hand that offers it food is home. You make two cups of chai every evening and pretend there's someone to converse with, or keep one earphone dangling, hoping someone would care to listen. You keep your cellphone silent not because you're agitated with the numberless messages, but because it hurts less not knowing there isn't one. You mistake your heartbeats for footsteps not because someone's arriving but because you think they must have.

Shayan Das, The Solivagant

The poetic urge to draw an analogy between every one thing with every other thing in the universe.

Shayan Das

Darling, when you look at the moon or count the stars in the night sky, notice the gentle breeze fluttering your hair, the raindrops pattering on the rooftop, or relish the redolent aromas invading your nostrils, do these simple instances not tell you that you can still love things desperately even if you don't own them? That there can be love beyond possession, intervals, and distances—a love that assures that even if we cease to belong to each other, we can still come back as the moon, the stars, the breeze, the raindrops, the aromas and exist to be loved desperately by one another without the apprehension of losing.

Shayan Das

What’s the worst color that was ever invented?

And why do we need to deem something as inferior to make another one look superior? Well, you may argue that's how this world works, right? We reap contentment costing someone else their own joys, see someone garnering milk and honey making someone else poor, and so on and so forth. Back to the track, I consider no colour to be the worst, assuming each one possesses its own intrinsic value and radiates its own distinctive nuance to the palettes of nature. I remember my mother once said to me that there are two kinds of people based on how they perceive beauty. A profusely large number who search for everything in beauty in hopes of finding a home and a far smaller number who search for beauty in everything and find the home naturally. And little did I know, the latter will bring out the poet in me.

Thank you so much for asking. Wish you a great day/evening/night ahead <3

Your self-esteem is a double-edged sword. It all depends on the 'self' of self-esteem whether it'll pull you up from the nadir or push you down from the pinnacle.

Shayan Das

To be criticised demands far more talent than to criticise someone else.

Shayan Das

Trust me, it's not what you've lost that matters, but what you're losing while lamenting over it.

Shayan Das

Valentine's Month Poetry Recommendations 💌

1. Classical (rhymed & metered poetry)

Bright Star by John Keats

To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns

Love's Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley

How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Browning

Amoretti LXXV by Edmund Spenser

When You Are Old by W.B. Yeats

I Loved You First by Christina Rossetti

I Am Not Yours by Sara Teasdale

To My Dear Husband by Anne Bradstreet

I Love You by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Air and Angels by John Donne

Love and Death by Lord Byron

Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal by Tennyson

2. Modernist/Contemporary (free & blank verses)

Love Sonnet XI by Pablo Naruda

Unending Love by Rabindranath Tagore

[i carry your heart with me] by e.e. cummings

Bird-Understander by Craig Arnold

Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath

For Keeps by Joy Harjo

Always For the First Time by Andre Breton

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

Any Lit by Harryette Mullen

To Be In Love by Gwendolyn Brooks

Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy

Desire by Alice Walker

Romantics by Lisel Mueller

Come, And Be My Baby by Maya Angelou

3. Written by Me (personal selection)

Amore Immortale by Shayan Das

Flawed Perfection by Shayan Das

I Love Thee Not by Shayan Das

A Song of Love by Shayan Das

If Only by Shayan Das

End of Eternity by Shayan Das

For My Valentine by Shayan Das

"Your grandfather and I've been together for 56 years", said my grandma one night while showing some tattered photographs from her shabby album. Her eyes sparkled as she went by each page, narrating their first meeting and reliving her girlhood. I picked up one and asked after some time, with a thrill of stupefaction, "What held it, what helped the love between you and Grandpa last so long? ..." "What shall hold love", she chuckled, her eyes still glued on the photographs, as if trying hard to forget about the ephemerality of young romance. "What shall hold love", she continued after a pause, "when love's supposed to hold us? At first, I thought I loved him. Well, I did, perhaps not once but countless times, in a multitude of ways. In fact, he loved me with the same sincerity. But what's more essential is that each time we loved one another, we felt we were loving ourselves. When I trusted him, I felt I was trusting myself; when he promised he would make my dreams come true, he worked all night to make his dreams come true. His pains were my pains, and my insecurities his. When I thought I'd lose him, I felt I'd lose myself; every time he found I was contented, his joys would know no bounds. Throughout our lives, we were busy saving ourselves and ended up protecting each other". 

Shayan Das