A scooter pulls up beside a Mercedes, and the whole poem is already there in that picture. Balachandran V's "The Scheme of Things," dated Trivandrum, 22 October 2009, is about the small, private sting of comparison: standing next to a friend who has become enormously successful, and trying to decide what to feel about it. The speaker never says he is envious. The poem shows it through what he notices, and through what he finally tells himself.
The opening stanzas are a catalogue of mismatched objects. The scooter is "Hardly one-fourth" the length of the car. The friend's Blackberry sits beside a "five-year old Nokia, / Scratched, scarred, and shoddy." That last phrase is the poem's harshest, and its hard *s* and *sc* sounds seem to scrape as the words are spoken. The speaker is judging his own possessions more severely than anyone else does. Even the hug is seen through embarrassment. The friend's "cologne-laced shirt / Wrinkles its nose" at the speaker's "faded cotton." It is the shirt that turns up its nose, not the man, which suggests the snobbery may be something the speaker imagines. The cotton "tries to hide the button-less hole," and the verb *tries* makes the cloth itself ashamed.
The middle of the poem hands the floor to the friend, and the form changes with it. The first three stanzas are neat four-line units, but the stanzas then lengthen as the friend talks. The poem is not mocking him. His vision of a banyan-like tree, with "Ants marching, monkeys jumping / Birds singing / Children playing," is generous, a tree that shelters everyone. His real work echoes that image: five thousand acres of "arid land / Turning it green," and sludge so well treated that it "Lets onions bloom beneath the soil." The speaker lets this list run on, which is a kind of fairness. There is also a quiet irony. The friend grows "organic cotton," and the speaker is wearing cotton that has gone thin. One man makes the material, and the other wears it down to a hole.
Then comes the poem's turning point, only three lines long: "My friend's arm thrown over my shoulder / I remember how I once saved his life / From drowning in the river." There is no comment and no bitterness, and the speaker says nothing aloud. The memory is a private card he holds and does not play. It can be read as a flicker of pride, as a reminder that worth is not measured in crores, or as a small ache that such a debt has been forgotten. The poem wisely refuses to choose. Placing the friend's arm over the speaker's shoulder at that moment adds to the effect. The warmth is real, and so is the gap.
The ending turns to advice. "Osho says do not compare / Accept the you you are." The speaker's reply, "I guess I have to accept," is full of reluctance. Nobody who had truly absorbed the lesson would need to say "I guess." The final image tries to make peace: "Giant Redwoods / And coarse grass as well / Have their own places in the grand scheme of things." The phrase "as well" feels like an afterthought, as though the speaker is slipping himself into the sentence. "Coarse grass" is a modest, self-deprecating picture of himself, but it may also be a quietly hopeful one. Grass is what a stretch of arid land is waiting for. The speaker also calls the friend a redwood, not a banyan, a tree that towers rather than shelters, which may reveal how he feels from the pavement.
The poem is significant for its honesty and restraint. It has no rhyme and no fixed metre, only the unforced rhythm of a man reporting a conversation, which makes its plainness believable. It avoids both easy resentment and easy moral comfort. The friend is good, the speaker is hurt, and the philosophy offered is only half convincing. By ending on the idiom that gives the poem its title, "the grand scheme of things," it leaves us unsure whether the speaker has found peace or is still persuading himself. Most of us would recognise that feeling.