ABOUT THE POEM: This piece is the unfiltered self-portrait of Ronie “Ronie Dinosaur,” a man who spent 758 days in an Indian de-addiction rehab centre surviving on a daily ration of just 400 grams of whole-wheat flour (atta). Stripped of money, drugs, freedom, and distractions, he turned extreme deprivation into a crucible: forging an iron philosophy and a superhuman physique while most inmates broke. He emerged with a radical inversion of the usual scarcity lesson. Where others finally idolise money, Ronie declared himself infinitely more valuable beyond any currency. Four times in life he has fallen into addiction and chaos; this was the fourth and final descent—and the definitive resurrection. The text also confronts his complicated history with paid sex: refusing to dehumanise the women, yet refusing to absolve himself. He insists the customer is the true whore, admits his loneliness drove him more than lust, and reveals he rarely completed transactions once real pain surfaced. Ultimately, it is a declaration that his core—defiant, disciplined, untouchable—was never created by struggle; struggle only revealed the legend that was already roaring inside him, even when he had money and power in engineering college. This is Ronie Dinosaur announcing he has come back from the dead for the last time.In extreme scarcity, when every distraction is stripped away, most people finally see money’s power and run after it like starved dogs.
I did the opposite.
That emptiness became my forge. A dinosaur among snakes-hunger, greed, lust, cheapness, helplessness-I refused to beg. I refused to worship money. Instead of learning tucchapana (how petty and insignificant material things truly are), I learned a fiercer truth: I am worth infinitely more than any coin or chapati ever placed on any plate.
For 758 days in rehab, I begged from no one. No one gave me anything. I survived on nothing but 400 grams of atta per day. With iron discipline I kept the philosopher in me alive and turned my body into a weapon-gradually building to about 3,000 squats three times during that period and 1,500 knuckle pushups, once doing 620 in thirty minutes.
The world keeps trying to teach me how great it is. I still don’t see it, and I no longer care. I will live the rest of my life exactly as I decided in that rehab cell.
I call a call girl a girl. No one becomes a whore in my mouth-though I know exactly what a whore is. A call girl is not a whore; she is simply horny and also chooses to accept money for the act. Yet I never grant myself the luxury of pretending I am not a randa by evaluation, because the customer is the male whore. Still, shallow as that defense may sound today, I never completed the transaction as a customer. Many times I sent them away unpaid after they confessed their pain-one even saying, “I’m on my period but I need the money.” Most of the time, nothing happened at all. Even my first visit to a brothel wasn’t for flesh; I went craving female company. They were happy holding currency notes, and I just wanted to hold someone’s hand.
In the end, mud is mud. Whoever stands in it gets dirty. It doesn’t matter whose mud it is. Life gives you choices, and the decision is yours-but the core of you is already written. It’s like quantum entanglement: nothing is mechanically predetermined, yet everything unfolds from the nature you were born with. You discover your character only when you struggle, as if opening a sealed envelope. It may seem like you’re actively making decisions, but you’re only revealing the ones that were waiting inside you.
You cannot find truth outside until you have first spoken it-without flinching-to yourself.
Who am I?
I am the dinosaur who refused to evolve into a monster.
I am the one who turned carbohydrates, flour, and lonely days of nothing into unbreakable bone, unbendable mind, and a heart that will never again kneel to the world’s cheap lessons.
I am Ronie.
Ronie Dinosaur.
This is my fourth death and my final resurrection.
I have fallen four times, and risen four times.
And Ronie was never born in scarcity-he was already roaring in the engineering college corridors when I had power, and later in life when I had money, when I could have made the blunders men expect of themselves.
I never did.
Ronie never did.
Ronie is not a survivor.
Ronie is a legend that was always there, waiting for the world to burn so he could step out of the smoke untouched.
This version does not whisper my truth.
It roars from the mountaintop, and the mountain itself is on its knees.
