Keschuns.

All through my infancy,
And right through childhood,
I read without wondering,
And life was good.

Books of children's adventures
The entire ouevre by Blyton,
All that a child was supposed to read,
I devoured by the literal ton.

School passed by, as did some college,
And I read through all those years
Every kind and every genre,
Page by page, hour by hour

And then one fine day I read,
Without knowing what would happen,
Pirsig's classic - that fine opus,
And lo! the curse was upon us!

For since that fateful day,
Kulkarni started to wonder
And think, while he read -
He'd started to live on more than bread

And questions popped into his head
Answers refused resolutely to enter,
Unbidden the former and unseen the latter,
While Kulkarni went as Mad as a Hatter

Deeply he would think,
With much scratching of the head
But no farther would he get,
Than from where he started

Sartre and Rand, and Spinoza and Russell
Kant, Descartes and Hume
Occidental and Oriental,
Our man was all philosophical

And he'd think about math,
Riemann and Mandelbrot
Bolyai and Newton,
Einstein and Sagan

On and on, in never ending circles
Think and wonder, muse and ponder,
For hours on end, for whole weeks together
Of Questions many, and Answers Infiniter


And then one fine day he gave up,
He said "I don't know the Answer,
Hell, I've no clue about the Question!
42 might as well be the number."

And now the Questions are still there,
And even today, Answers there are none,
But Kulkarni's at peace,
He's become a total Epicurean

The day will come, he is well aware,
When the garb must come off,
There will be a day of awakening,
He will hearken the Sirens who sing,

But till that day of Judgment comes,
Kulkarni lives in peace,
He questions not his philosophy,
Which reads like this:

From the earliest beginnings,
Out to the furtherest ends,
There is nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter, and the love of friends.

The last para ain't by me - the rest of it is.
Blame me not for this - blame it on the man - he awakens slumbering memories of "Questions".
Cheers, brother - and here's to some Epicureangiri in November.