Most farewell poems reach for suitcases, railway platforms or tears. Balachandran V reaches for a menu command. "File – save as – give a name" is how "Random Access Memories" begins its goodbye. The speaker is about to leave, and the flatness of that instruction is the first surprise. Whatever is being left behind is treated as something to store before the machine is switched off. The poem is dated 18.12.2006 and written from Kottayam, so it is reasonable to guess that the folder "C:\ My documents\ Kottayam" holds the place being left. But the speaker hesitates ("or-") and admits to another name "that I decline / To tell you." The poem opens by hiding something.
That secrecy matters, because the central idea is private memory as a treasure. The file sits "behind a password / Which I only know," and will be opened "in a lonely night." Yet the poem also holds two claims in tension. Memories, the speaker says, are "read-only / Unchangeable, inerasable." A few lines later comes the admission that "the system would hang" and "the hard disk is gone." Memory cannot be edited or deleted, but it lives on a machine that can fail. The poem is about loving something permanent while housed in something temporary.
The form suits this plain-spoken sadness. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only short, conversational lines that read like someone thinking aloud at a keyboard. The stanzas are uneven in length, as if the poem were itself a file that grew as the speaker added to it. The tenses shift quietly. The first stanzas use "will" ("I will access the file"), the confidence of someone planning an evening. Then the poem turns to "would" ("the system would hang", "Perhaps he would dump it as junk"), the mood of a possibility the speaker would rather not look at.
The middle stanza is the emotional centre, and its images are small and unshowy: "This flower, that face," a flickering light, "shadows thrown by the moonlight," "that faraway bark of a dog," "that fading noise of a truck." The pointing words "this," "that" and "those" make the scene feel present, as though the speaker were gesturing at it while it happens. The list moves from sight to sound, and the sounds are already leaving: the dog is "faraway," the truck is "fading." Then the poem breaks into near-panic: "This moment – save, save / Save to the file." The doubled "save" sounds like someone tapping a key repeatedly before a crash. The humour of the computer language does not cancel the feeling. It gives it a way to show itself.
The title is a pun. In computing, random access means any item can be reached directly, without playing through everything before it. That is exactly how memory behaves in the poem, since the speaker will "glance through it / At random," drifting from a face to a moonlit shadow. A computer-literate reader might add that RAM, strictly speaking, forgets when the power is cut. Whether or not that was intended, it fits the poem's fear.
The ending changes the poem's direction. The "you" who was refused the secret folder name in the first stanza turns out to be "my love." The file and the beloved merge, and "I shall access you" is both tender and slightly chilling. The Technician who might "re-use / The serviceable parts" or "dump it as junk" is a cold, impersonal figure. Judging by the imagery, it is hard not to hear in him a quiet echo of how a life ends, with the body treated as a machine to be broken down. Even so, the last line, "Till then," is not defeated. It sets a limit on the time available and then promises to use all of it.
The poem's significance lies in how little it strains. The vocabulary of an office computer, with its files, passwords and crashes, was meant for routine work, and here it carries love, loss and mortality. The technology of 2006 may now look dated, but the feeling does not: the urge to keep a moment from slipping away, and the knowledge that the keeper is as fragile as what it keeps.