Shon Mehta

Once there was a man. He did everything right. He ate right. He walked right. He talked right. He wore the right clothes. But he wore his shoes wrong. He wore the right shoe on his left foot, and the left shoe on his right foot. People feared he would fall, but he never did. They asked, "Why do you wear your shoes that way?" He never answered. He only smiled. Years passed, and he was no more. People forgot how kindly he spoke. They forgot how honestly he lived. They forgot how helpful he was. But they always remembered that he wore his shoes wrong. —— Reflection: What "wrong shoes" are you wearing that make others uncomfortable simply because they challenge convention? —— Author’s Note — The Origin of the Poem: Originally drafted in 2018, this poem was last edited in a Google Keep note on January 2, 2019. It sat there for seven years, waiting for its ending. Now, it is finally complete. —- The Man Who Wore His Shoes Wrong Collection: The Uncharted Mind Author: Shon ...

A person may live their whole life without God, without religion, without kneeling, without the joining of hands. They may trust only reason, and reason serves them faithfully for a time. Everything has its cause, every feeling can be explained by biology and circumstance. The brain arranges the world into neat compartments, supported by scientific explanation. Then comes that moment for which no rationalisation can prepare us. The moment when every certainty falls silent. You find yourself utterly alone—not just without companions, but abandoned even by the arguments that once sustained you. Your reason has not betrayed you,  it still explains everything. It can tell you why you suffer, why the universe owes you nothing, why despair is perfectly consistent with reality. It is all coherent and true. But in that terrible moment, truth is not enough. It does not sit beside you in the moment of absolute loneliness, nor does it comfort you when you have said a final goodbye to your lov...

The Governor of Trishala was by all accounts a decent man. Though he never visited the poor, they were always in his thoughts and prayers. When the poor's plight was read aloud to him, he often sighed and tapped his forehead, for their suffering genuinely touched him. The people of the Lower Town, where these poor resided, called him the first caring governor. The Lower Town had a network of canals, which had become blocked due to poor upkeep. Every rainy season, when these blocked canals flooded, fever swept amid the poor who lived beside these canals. "To fight this," the caring governor declared, "we must record and compensate for every suffering. No victim, however small, shall go unnoticed." And so, he established a Grand Archive of Suffering. The Grand Archive employed a thousand scribes, each assigned to a poor family in the Lower Town. For months, these scribes documented every cough, every sleepless night, every life lost to fever. Vast ledgers ranked s...

Ularad was a man of simple means, yet he walked with the gait of a king. For fifteen years, his status in his tiny village was anchored to a single afternoon on the road to Sonira. Everyone knew the story. They repeated it often. The great Royal Scholar -- advisor to the Emperor of Jivavarta, a man spoken of as though wisdom itself had chosen him as its vessel -- had tumbled, absurdly and without ceremony, face-first into the mud. There had been a fallen cart, a broken axle, and a moment when greatness had been rendered helpless, ridiculous, and almost human. And then there was Ularad, a man so ordinary that no one had ever thought to notice him before that day. He had stepped forward to help. He had pulled the scholar from the mud. Thereafter, in the village, Ularad was no longer merely Ularad. He was "The Man Who Lifted the Wise." The title was probably given in jest, but in time gave value to his otherwise insignificant existence. So, when word arrived that the great Schol...