Monday, December 30, 2013

The pain of a mermaid


A mermaid
I met in the
Busy street
Of Copenhagen,
Looking lovelorn;
You still there?
Waiting for the
Prince?
I ask a bit pained;
 She looks dejected and
Utterly
Shell- shocked,
Against fading light,
And
As the noisy crowds surge around,
It is New Year eve, after all,
And everybody is in a hurry,
And folks are milling impatiently,
Outside large stores for
The multi-coloured
Tempting
Discounted wares,
The pining mermaid,
Invisible to all;
She says,
The poor creature,
Eyes innocent and wide,
I am lost, my dear,
And
Will not be found ever
Till you people,
The human species
Accept me as your own
And,
Not as the
Perpetual  Other.



Delightful Dickens: A preface


Delightful Dickens:  Contemporary responses to an immortal writer
Dickens is delightful. And sublime.
The great novelist can make you cry, smile and move in a strange way no other writer can ever do: Reading Dickens in the year 2012, for instance, is a delightfully moving and sublime experience than it was in a more conservative and laid-back India of late 1980s. What was just Victorian for this Indian college-level reader at that time underwent a strange metamorphosis: the same novels read earlier as part of courses for the undergrad and postgraduate classes in English Studies, came to reveal new dimensions missing in the previous readings of the same hallowed texts. Certain aspects of a serious art-work can be fully understood and appreciated at a certain age, chronological/mental; after gaining a certain level of maturity and solid worldly experiences. Great art refuses to be stale, despite the passage of time, and, multi-layered, it opens up to a critical gaze of a different time that follows. In this sense, it is unique. A classical Homer is as much ours as he was to the Ancients and the antiquity.  One of the features of great art is that it speaks to you and your age. The artist becomes your contemporary and friend. Dickens proves this. His Hard Times, A Christmas Carol, or, The Old Curiosity Shop---just to name a few classics at random--- can converse with you in a most intimate manner. You find these texts embedded with the echoes from your own age. Strange! But true. These three famous novels, stamped with the 18th-century, do carry the historical traces of their age but they also simultaneously contain the seeds of future buried in their formal structures. The serious art works--- visual, textual, audio or in the audio-visual--- have this unique capacity inherent: The ability to see correctly and historically both the past and the present, the continuum leading to the future; a future born out of the dialectics of past/present. It is a Janus-like attribute of art and artist, looking forward and backward from the vantage position of to-day. The talented Dickens is simultaneously both Victorian and non-Victorian in his approach and artistic vision---very much a product of his time, yet a visionary gazing beyond the past/ present into a future still to unfold like a crimson dawn on a high summit. His work feels as fresh as any recent writing of the 21-st century serious art, in terms of their overarching humanistic concerns and moral critique of the rapacious culture of post-industrial, mass society. Artist and art as subversive. Once revisited, these great and supple Dickensian works, in the globalized, privatized but no longer the liberalized times of the grim 2012---following a bitter 2010 and 2011 that saw the rise of  the Arab Spring, riding popular disenchantment and discontent in the Middle East and slow but sure collapse of dictatorships across the nations that once looked invincible due to the stamping out of political dissidence, lack of dialogue, suppression of human rights, profligacy and ruthlessness of the dictators  and a captive military and police as instruments of state oppression; the rise of Occupy Wall Street movement that went international; the increasing use and impact of social media for mobilizing public opinion and organizing people in large numbers in the public squares everywhere from First-World to Third-World nations; the increasing public anger against corruption, greed and ineptitude of the ruling elites; the complete reification of human relations and erosion of moral values in a mass society that encourages blind consumption, and, grave climate changes due to the rapacious system driven by the profit-motive---was an educative experience of high order. Dickens--- very much a precocious child of his age bound by its overall temperament and ruling ethos crystallized in the form of the dominant ideology prevailing at that time--- prove beyond doubt that a great artist can easily transcend the limitations of time, space and ruling world-view by looking into the future and rightly predict the broad contours of the developmental dialectics, historical and interconnected in nature. As an Indian reader, for example, you find these texts resonating with you very strongly. Hard Times is as much a moral indictment of industrial England and its accompanying philosophy of crass utilitarianism, as it is of India, a post-colonial country headed the same way of industrialization and its attendant utilitarian philosophy. India shows an utter disregard for the human values and human development in the process of self-aggrandizement and accumulation of super profits. It exactly mimics and mirrors the negative side of the western growth model first seen in England and later on, in other industrialized nations. There is an uncanny resemblance. What happened in the 18th-century England was occurring again in the 21st-century India. This is a frightening realization for any sensitive soul. If industrialization destroyed rural England and nature by replacing it with Black Country-like centers of unplanned growth, soot-covered, extremely polluted with macabre laws and harsh working conditions in the grey industrial towns, the same set of common ailments was recurring in India of the 1990s, leading to a recession-hit 2010-12. A wider disconnect between rural and urban India; a city-centric developmental model, untamed middle-class consumerism of the western products, aping of  the American ethos in every aspect, a widening hiatus between the urban poor and the rich and extreme commodification of relations, emotions and human body, among other crippling symptoms, plague our country too. The only difference: We do not have any Dickens to play the role of a conscience-keeper in our own hard times that go sans any moral scruples. If you read closely A Christmas Carol, you find experiencing déjà vu. Scrooge is a real character, still haunting us in one form or the other. With his heart calcified and cadaver appearance, he can be a turn off but a grim figure roaming the country side or slums. Scrooge still lives among us in India and elsewhere, un-transformed and un-redeemed. A frightening sight perhaps for some and a model for others as unfeeling, un-scrupulous being, finding his high in cold metals and coins accumulated in a corner safe or underground vault. Human warmth scares him. So does, a welcoming hearth. The poor are a despised lot, inferiors who deserve their wretched fate. Festivals of love and merriment are to be avoided. For the fictional Scrooge, redemption is possible through love, a re- discovery of and return to community on Christmas Eve. The moral transformation through values like compassion and piety and fellow-feelings revives the dead soul of Scrooge and finally, aided by the ghosts, he feels revived and re-vitalized through his quick return to the basic human values informing a just and equitable society. He is able to re-claim his lost self and basic human essence by realizing their profound value in a crass utilitarian society of self-absorbed profiteers by a super-fast journey of self-discovery whereby he is able to reclaim his better self, lost innocence. In a way, against the religious framework of Christmas---a festival commemorating love, compassion, self-sacrifice and fellow feelings---Dickens unfolds a narrative of redemption for self-centered Scrooges of the world and suggests that the tale, howsoever implausible with its ghosts and all that, is real recipe for human and spiritual re-birth. It offers a genuine solution to the stinking and hated cadavers like Scrooge and hints that their only chance of true redemption as noble and meaningful humans in an unjust society lies in a return to simple humanism and empathy for the poor, the deprived, the downtrodden. It mounts a deep moral critique of a selfish system, exploitative and de-humanizing in its nature. In fact, fiction of Dickens, one way or the other, unveils the ideology of the capitalistic class and shows its true face to a stunned world. He shows, unflinchingly, that such a social system of development and progress is anti-humanist, predatory and ruthless. Although founded on most noble principles of Renaissance humanism, capitalism turns against its foundational principles and ideology and destroys everything in its rapacious pursuit of profit: Nature, human values, communal life-style of villages, harmony between humans and nature and among themselves and nations, and, lastly, human personality itself. Profits and markets are its sole concerns. Everything finer is of no use, if it fails to translate into money and more money. It leaves a destructive trail in its single-minded pursuit of profits. Village economy is destroyed. Villagers are rendered superfluous. Villages, therefore, get abandoned by the marching army of the hungry, unemployed, displaced and uprooted villagers in search of jobs. Cities emerge as the new dark centers of unbridled growth. The slums, the polluting black smoke from tall chimneys, the crime, the prostitution, the thievery, murders, and, brutality await the fresh arrivals from the destroyed villages. It is a bleak world out there for the Olivers of the system. Dickens, like Balzac and Tolstoy, raises some pertinent moral questions about a social formation that started off with the noble aim of changing the static world of feudalism with its liberating rallying cry of equality, liberty and fraternity but lost the human-centered, this-worldly philosophy of liberal bourgeois on the path of consolidating its power over a decaying aristocracy and its outdated world-view of Ptolemy and others. That was historically governed process of change but these conscientious writers in England, France and Russia were appalled by the loss of the original humanist vision of the founding fathers of the Enlightenment. They pointed out, like the Romantic poets, the contradiction between theory and practice of capitalism in its advanced stage. The tragic consequences of such a deliberate and politically-motivated erosion of original liberal- humanism by the triumphant bourgeoisie on the worker, the lowest-denominator of  so-called progress, the real change-agent, their alienation, the suppression and oppression, are all delineated by writers like Dickens and poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Baudelaire, among others. Read the Hard Times again, and deeply, and you will find that it is an Indian or African or Latin-American story told artistically, with profound sympathy for the underdog, in a Victorian setting. It challenges the hegemony of the emerging capitalist class and posits that utilitarianism is a hollow credo of ruthless folks chasing profits like pirates chasing gold-laden ships on the high seas. Any system that excludes large number of hard-working and honest people, discriminates against children, women, old and sick, gypsies, circus artists and artistes in general is bound to be flawed and finally doomed for a violent death. The moral paralysis besetting London is one sure indicator of the rigor mortis about to set in a moribund society obsessed with its profits only. Dickens warns that unless such a rapacious system changes its ways of seeing and feeling, it is going to be dead sooner or later. For redemption, inner transformations are the only way out---by recognizing and feeling one with the toiling humanity. No doubt, Marx loved Dickens for his profound sense of humanism and sympathy for the marginalized figures of such a heartless social system of production---orphans, kids, workers, artistes, women and criminals. They all are permanent victims of such a callous system.

Dickens can leave a subliminal impact, very much like the uplifting encounter with other greats of the novel--- Cervantes, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Zola, Hemingway, Joyce, Mann, Sartre, Camus and Marquez. You feel you are in a different world, yet resembling your very own. They are the summits of the world literature. Dickens can make you cry and laugh, sad and elevated, depressed and uplifted within the same literary space of a novel or short fiction, in a most adroit manner. Very few current Booker-winning authors can achieve this kind of literary feat. His characters are fictional, yet very real for us. His prose might be convoluted in places for some bitter critics but it flows, despite minor impediments in its course; his overall style is vivid, almost cinematic in its breadth and range---it makes us see. That is why many of his picturesque novels have been turned successfully into popular cinema. The characters are full of little oddities and have come to stay in racial consciousness as eccentric but lively figures. He creates a felt world at an epic scale that later novelists could hardly create with the exception of Tolstoy or Mann, in terms of its depth and width. Dickens, due to his direct involvement in community, became a public writer, as against the private writer of the last and current century. This is a major difference. He sings England. And makes the country in transition come alive at that historical juncture. He is a seer. From his vantage position, he can easily survey all the terrain…and beyond. His popularity continues. He is still morally relevant to us like enduring Shakespeare, Lewis Carrol and Cervantes, not necessarily in this order. In terms of moving and defining an age, Dickens is as contemporary as a Hemingway, Marquez, Kafka, Camus and Brecht---the writers who could successfully capture the zeitgeist of the 20th-century, in their own idiosyncratic ways, and leave huge impact via their writings on entire societies. There are dimensions in his oeuvre that clearly anticipate future developments of a society driven by the profits and lacking in serious morals and empathy, compassion and piety--- values as guiding force. He portrays, correctly, the consequences of such a money-obsessed culture---a collapse of moral order; a pauperization emotional, intellectual, human, spiritual. The Absurd of the 20th-century, post-war Europe is, in a way, stark confirmation of such a development.The bleak view of Kafka, Sartre and Camus, along with the abusrdists followed later on by the post-modernists and post-structuralists, highlight the cost of such human impoverishment for a society of consumerists. Dickens' Hard Times, Dombey and Son, among others, portray  such a scary society that subsequent alert readers find reflecting their own times and ethos. Although possibility of moral re-generation and redemption is explicitly offered in the highly instructive tale called A Christmas Carol, the callous ruling elites fail to notice this road-map to the spiritual re-awakening. It took the genius of a Tolstoy to offer the same recipe to an hedonistic society in his Resurrection. Dostoevsky, another writer preoccupied with moral questions in a decadent society on the threshold of change, most authentically shows the crippling effects of such a moribund society on human psyche and with equal force and artistic talent. In An Old Curiosity Shop---one of his most popular novels that created the frenzy seen these days with best-sellers in America like the Potter or the Twilight or the Hunger Games series---the idea is suggested, and later repeated, that innocence has to suffer a tragic fate in a cruel and wicked world. Echoes of Shakespearean tragedies can be distinctly heard in this and other works: Ophelias and Hamlets of the world have to die and Lears to finally go insane, in view of a scheming, violent, greedy, ruthless, morally-defunct and deceptive society chasing power and wealth, as their sole goals, at any cost. It is a heavy cost still being paid by some of us. Incidentally, Chekhov's Ward no Six comes nearest to this tragic moral world-view of these two exceptionally powerful writers.
What makes Dickens tick?
His vantage position in public life, in community. Like a folk artist, he is involved in the life of the community, the way a folk artist is even today. His historical position as an impoverished middle-class boy---due largely to his father's miscalculations and living beyond means like Bassanio and subsequent imprisonment in the debtors' prison; mother insisting on him to earn some money by continue to work in a daily 10-hour shift in a rat-infested dingy and dark blacking factory at the age of 12 and deep sense of betrayal and abandonment that haunted him forever, along with suppressed anger against such type of mother--- led him to understand and appreciate more sympathetically the plight of the deprived and the poor, especially children and women. Later on, Dickens, with heightened sense of social conscience, got himself directly involved in the public life by championing social causes and bringing changes through his writing---very much like to-day's journalists. He relentlessly focussed on social ills afflicting a mercenary society and his writing exposed the complacent middle-class readers to the dark underbelly of such an industrial progress that excludes, to quote a recent shibboleth, 99% of human population, out of the development process, and, demonizes them in strange ways. The dehumanized criminals, the wandering orphans, the suffering innocents, the brutalized ideal and sensitive men and women, as against a heartless capitalist class of crass individuals aligned with blind ruling class of politicians and parliamentarians populate his wide canvas. In the typical Dickensian world, even hardened criminals, fugitives, robbers---the standard outcasts---are capable of showing more humane virtues than your callous factory-owner. It is an inversion of popular perceptions and utilitarian ideology that deeply suspect such people as threat to system. His pitiless realism, great satire and humour, huge gallery of unforgettable characters, his ability to create scenes of extra-ordinary power and beauty--- all made him a towering public figure. His tours to various cities and regions of England; his constant touch with reading public through serialized publications in weeklies and monthlies, their feedback prompting the writer to alter his artistic plans and public readings---a novelty then, a marketing necessity now---created a larger-than-life persona. He was our first celeb writer; an influential; Only Tolstoy and Hemingway could get so much of public adulation, followed by Marquez. His standing as a tall public figure, a public writer, brought many reforms in legal, jail, education fields and working conditions of the powerless, hungry, displaced and deprived of the industrialized England.
Dickens was their collective and individual voice. Dickens was the sole conscience-keeper of a greedy society. His early grim situation and later volunteer involvement in social life made him a Colossus. His talents make him an Immortal; the One whom age cannot wither, nor custom stale. After him, perhaps with the sole exception of Gorky, no other writer has consciously engaged with social issues, polemicised with the system and brought changes. The novelist who mirrored the industrial England, warts and all, so realistically and precisely through his prose full of real speech of the various social groups, never despaired of life, despite its contradictions and never gave up hope for better change, although this change was to be brought in by a change of conscience and moral transformation of wealthy folks like Scrooge. This is a largely Christian humanism, a religious idea of an equitable and just world ruled by love for fellow beings. In this, Dickens was limited by the ideas of his age. Later on, another giant Tolstoy also talked of the same vision. What is important is that artists like them did talk of a possibility of change, rejecting the status quo openly. The stern writer did not approve of the profligacy of the rich, of the few privileged persons at the cost of others, the lesser mortals and criticized severely the industrialized society of England that had come to decenter the primary player---the common citizen or ordinary individual from the system and robbed the real change agent of the benefits of all socio/economic advantages attending such a historically advanced formation. It was like discussing Hamlet the play, without the Prince of Denmark. Such an exclusive society was not acceptable to Dickens on moral grounds, revealing his genuine humanist-liberal concerns towards the masses toiling hard in the most un-democratic and back-breaking conditions in factories and offices and where failure to pay back the mounting debts meant a term in a horrible prison. Dickens bared all the ills of such a society that was interested in producing mere workers for running their production only. Arts, music, painting, theater, circus---these things were of no value to the new capitalist; only profit, later on, colonies, mattered for him. This one-dimensional growth was not acceptable to the novelist. He suggested through his works that any society inhibiting the overall development of an individual, especially coming from a deprived background, is morally repugnant for any sensitive soul. This is the harshest criticism of capitalism that rode in on the egalitarian ideology in the first place by replacing the feudalism of the dark ages and the absolutism of lords and monarchs. This deep humanism of Dickens still makes him endearing and relevant. Then, there are other qualities, too.   The hugely gifted writer was an innovator too. He used elements from other prevalent traditions of earlier narratives, like ghosts, super-naturalism, romance in order to create a heightened aesthetic effect on his readers. Mixing of satire, caricature, grotesque, humour He also Dickens was the last of the giants and late capitalist age did not have any space for such writers. It needed only little narratives. The age of the master narratives was gone... at least, for the time being. Writers like Dickens were replaced by clever, self-centered wordsmiths producing well-crafted works celebrating the angst, the despair, the depressing, fractured, de-radicalised beings in capable of any human agency in a universe of artificial needs and endless desires manufactured by a smart ad agencies and disseminated by the TV in homes across the world by the manipulative cartels hoping for super-profits.

This is a slim volume of tributes to a great master from whom we can still learn a lot. It is deliberately kept slim---small is beautiful and everything is getting smaller in nano-age---as large scholarly tomes are getting out of fashion in an age of attention-deficit.All the tributes are invited. This is an anthology with a difference. Here you find primarily a cast of writers engaging with Dickens. Of course, majority are teachers---common trait of writers everywhere---who have elected to be writers in order to seek and create worlds of beauty through their writings---poetic or prose. All of them are by now well-known, thanks to social media. It is as writers and poets that they are tributing the Victorian novelist from their current location in time and space in the 21st-century. Their essays and poems reflect a rare quality of lyricism; their terms of engagement are also poetic. That quality makes this anthology totally different from your regular cut-n-dried academic criticism. Here, some of the finest writers/poets/editors are talking to Charles Dickens, and, Dickens, with them.
Even poems have been included in this flexi-format---appreciation is more intense and rare, if it floes full from a poet's heart.
 Canadian poet/ avid reader Gary Robinson, in his idiosyncratic way, does a reading of Dickens’s A Child’s History of England, a 400-page work. Gary jots down his impressions and views of Dickens in a diary- entry form of writing, still much popular for having a direct dialogue with the reader and more intimate than any other mode of narration. Besides, it can provide access to the mind of the writer in an immediate way. This reveals Dickens at his acerbic best, while re-counting the history of England and its monarchy---some of them very autocratic in nature. The germs of his deep humanism can be clearly seen in this work. Gary makes it current as well---by his cryptic commentary on it. Indian creative and critical essays, too, follow some rare dimensions of the novelist par excellence. Critic Arvind talks of alienation of the major characters in Oliver Twist but does not stop there. He talks of connections, too. In this thoughtful essay, Arvind echoes the true grit of some of the characters and their desire to overcome the feeling of being separate by fighting it out in their lives in an exploitative social system. Arvind manages to find a correct positive message in the famous novel and says we have to deal with alienation in positive manner; Banibrata explores the true delightful nature of Dickens in his well-researched piece by quoting extensively from some of the enduring Dickensian novels that still delight us in this century. Neeru takes up the Indian love affair with Dickens, as the themes raised by the novelist still haunt the nation, despite independence from the Raj. The kind of identification with the Dickensian themes and his humane outlook make him a favourite author for the readers here; Jaba delineates the subaltern concerns in Oliver Twist, a novel that presents realistically the bleak London of the floatsome jettisoned by the money-driven society---the outcasts and the oppressed, sans any voice, hence, subaltern--- in a convincing manner, thus proving the contention that great writers perform the task of oracles for ensuing ages and generations of readers; Kalpna examines the Great Expectations from a left position and traces the conflicting relationship between bourgeois and proletariat in that famous novel, sounding a bit cynical like the Frankfurt School  of Marxism in her analysis of the current proletarian scene; Shaleen revisits Hard Times and highlights the symbolism of the novel that exposes the industrialization as a merciless system of exploitation of the less fortunate, a system of wealth production that coverts men into machines and destroys their basic dignity and core human self; Sudhir feels that Indian sensibility can be found in Dickens and he is like an avatar to fight the ugliness of his age and reform the society by crusading against the evils---a new direction for any future study of the writer; Shubha focuses on children coping their way up in a miserable Victorian society and fighting for dignity and survival in that bleak world by talking of some of the celebrated short stories of the master, an aspect that is not much covered in recent criticism of the great Victorian story-teller and needs more study; Sangeeta talks of Little Dorrit, a short fiction, from a feminist perspective and shows how women were asked to conform to Victorian notions of ideal woman and made to sacrifice for the sake of family, a sacrifice often overlooked and forgotten by the selfish members; Sunil underlines the doubleness of serious artists and their works by placing Hard Times in contemporary political, cultural, literary contexts and establishing the transcendental nature of such classics that belong to an early age, yet possess the wonderful artistic capacity to converse with us intimately. The poetry section comes alive with lyrical tributes by some of the leading poets: Laura Bailey; Prem Katoch; Madhumita Ghosh; Ampat Koshy; Amitabh V. Dwivedi; Jaydeep Sarangi and Ram Sharma---prolific quality poets making waves through their poetry on international stage as well. 
The section on poetry is followed by a stunning series of artwork on Dickensian broad themes by hugely talented Era Tak, a young painter and poet, well-known for her works in visual and verbal media here and abroad. Amitabh too sketches two of his poems inspired by the famous characters of the Victorian novelist's work, rendering them very vivid for the reader.
A literary dialogue between writers Sunil and Jaydeep further explores the rich legacy of the novelist par excellence for the contemporary bi-lingual audiences in a post-colonial, globalized world and the impact of the Victorian on us, across the gulf of the intervening time that separates him from us, but his humanist concerns, paradoxically, transcend these temporal-spatial barriers and turn him, again, into a seer, visionary, capable of addressing our own anxieties and concerns, and his message very fresh and highly relevant to succeeding ages---a timelessness granted to great and serious autonomous arts, only. Short fiction by Sunil again explores some of the issues raised in the book are further explored in a creative manner and the manner in which Dickens haunts global imaginations across various artistic media.
This is a unique poetic/prose/visual high-quality tribute--- very talented and reputed poets/painters paying their appreciation in verse form to a very productive and respected novelist in a prose anthology but like Dickens, we believe in breaking conventions in this cross-over collection. The primary objective is to understand a genius, a master narrator from our vantage position of time and space and underline his relevance to the variety of the post-modern/post-colonial audiences everywhere, located in a homogenizing and largely globalized culture of instant forgetfulness, shifting brand loyalties and constant pursuits of newer sensations and more money. Human is no more individual but a mass consumer only with standardized responses, desires and common dreams. Hedonism is the new religion for the mobile middle-classes globally and societies---third-or-first-world---are open markets plagued by corporate wars for super profits. Dickens manages to speak to such a mass audience through movies, TV series and regular reprints, is sheer amazing fact of great import!

In brief, it is a heart-felt, sincere, trans-national multi-media tribute to a master painter of human nature and nature, blessed with a heightened sense of history, prepared by Life itself in its crucible to enable to play a greater role in the arena of arts. Please, enjoy the appreciation done by some of the best creative minds in these pages. And re-discover Dickens as a friend, guide and seer for the high-tech, new-age netizens, navigating strange worlds in the cyberspace. As a high star, he will illuminate your path and guide you to your destination, entertaining you as a pal, in this long and arduous life-journey.
Happy reading!

Friday, December 6, 2013

Serotonin


Serotonin
You are to me;
Whenever around,
Your quiet presence
Cheers me up,
Even if I am
In the dumps
Due to urban isolation;
Your bright smile lights up
Some obscure regions
Inside brain and
A clogged heart,
And happiness
Begins flowing,
In great abundance,
Flooding all the inner voids.


Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Expectation


An evening
Awaits gingerly,
Like an old mother
Cooped up in a cluttered
Corner of a 1 BHK flat,
Eager and expecting ---
For a fleeting glance
To confirm
Their short
Gloomy existence
In a crowded
Mad South Asian city
Chasing wealth, power and glam,
Equally transient like seasons,
Days
And nights.



Saturday, November 30, 2013

You survive to tell truths: Rob Harle poem


You die once
A survivor tells the bitter truths;
There is slow erosion
A gradual chipping away
Of body by time,
That we all know,
Body fades not the spirit,
The latter survives the vicissitudes
Of life, to document epiphanies of world,
You die but once, remaining days are for artistic truths;
A tree chopped by great artistic hands
Fell on a head, injured spine and
Split the head and partial
Paralysis followed,
But indomitable Rob survived near-death
Loss of voice and movement of
Arm---crucial things for an artist,
Living in the lush Nimbin Valley with artist-wife Sandra,
Watching an ancient volcano,
The wooded hills and the rain forest nearby,
---A daily meditation and mystic experience---
Soothes and heals fissures inflicted by
Civilization mores and art-gallery circus
Where Monet or Dali are commodified pictures
For the liberal banker and the investor;
The artist gets back his voice and movement of arm---
To express the sheer delight of life and living among trees and objects,
From stone sculptures to melody of venerated poetry,
Transition is quick and philosophical,
Stone the earthy objects defy mortality
And survive harsh or cold climes,
They are little statements of hope
Cast by nature in granite,
From archetypal curves of a river
Twisting at the sudden bend to
That of a rising wave to a conical leaf high,
Rob Harley finds shapes everywhere
That are sacred and seen by the
Primal eyes and earlier seers,
And re- connects with the soul of an old land
Once walked by the original inhabitants
Now called the Aboriginals by the settlers;
The deep spiritual dimension ---
Expressed eminently in words/lyrics
That lift the veil on the painted face
Of greed and corruption and blind power,
And his literary gestures, bold and audacious,
Reveal cures for malady grim and rotten,
Created by a ruling selfish elite.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Interview

An exciting conversation with Rob Harle who interviewed me on wide-ranging topics:
http://www.boloji.com/index.cfm?md=Content&sd=Articles&ArticleID=15062

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Daughters


The rich souls
Encased
In tender forms
Brimming with
Silent love,
And gentle care;
Daughters
Are that lonely
Slender tree blooming
In a vast plain
Providing cooling wind
And tiny but welcome shade
On a blazing afternoon;
They are an
Oasis in a scorching desert,
For the lost wayfarers
And exhausted caravans;
The daughters are
The Immortal
Ophelia,
Miranda,
Portia
And
Cordelia
To their fathers
Coming with
Various shades of gray;
Daughters
Are the unseen
Fragrant flowers,
Champa, Golden Champa
Or Magnolia
That bring alive
Dead hearts
And dead homes
With lingering scent!
Daughters
Sadly
Are most endangered species
In a feudal sub-continent
And elsewhere,
Treated as chattel,
Murdered in wombs,
Raped in homes or streets
By their own or the goons.
The innocents
Still considered as the
 Devi-incarnates,
These hapless
Little Goddesses
Need to be fiercely
Protected and guarded
By all of us!
(On Daughters’ Day: A tribute)


Sunday, September 15, 2013

Stars


On dark nights
Lost in alien
Lands,
In the midst of
Hugging shadows
And mysterious howls
Coming from desolate
Wilds,
The brave adventurer plods on,
Under a star-lit sky;
You,
 The glittering
Heavenly bodies
Guide the wayfarers
Both on the hill
Or in the vale
To their destinations sought;
The twinkling stars
Merrily
Spread cheers
Among lonely hearts,
Tossing on cold beds,
Their bright lights in a
Vast infinity called a sky,
Tucked with a bright disc
Humans call the moon,
Create a marvelous scene:
Diamonds in the sky,
Illuminating space,
And a waxing/waning moon
Produce nightly
Multi-hued light-patterns,
Laser, low-intensity
Or a stellar haze
Emitted by the clusters
Glowing in the sky,
A stunning visual show
Not replicated anywhere on the
Earth, by human hands,
The tender milky light
Dispersed,
Balms the fevered
Urban minds,
Obsessed with Sensex
And stock exchange.


Monday, September 9, 2013

When Silent Days Communicate


Silent Days. Jaydeep Sarangi. Allahabad: Cyberwit.Net. 2013. ISBN: 978-81-8253-396-7. Pp68. Price: Rs. 200/-. Print.
Reviewed by Sunil Sharma
There are times when days fall silent and they speak through a vibrating silence---like a cell-phone kept on silent mode but vibrating at the incoming calls. It is up to the receiver to accept the call/s or reject them, depending on the context and the caller ID. In case of a poet---especially versatile Jaydeep sarangi with increasing global visibility and credibility as a thinker-poet and critic---the temptation to let go by such silent alerts is difficult and despite being busy with a thousand of mundane jobs that we all are condemned to execute Sisyphus-like in our post-modern, one-dimensional, everyday existence on a degrading planet, we latch on to such fleeting moments and snatches of conversations. Jaydeep Sarangi ---JS to close friends---does that precisely. Working multiple roles as an essayist, critic, editor, traveller, writer, poet, reviewer, interviewer, teacher, mentor and friend, the man from Dublong to Beas does another literary feat at a high-altitude and conducts us to a rarefied field---perhaps at 50, 000-feet above earth-level where sound-barriers are breached by a soaring mind of a poet in a trance and entering a different realm visited by the early Greeks and Shakespeare, among a notable number of astral visitors from the terra firma---of communing with life! His slim collection called teasingly Silent days captures the days falling silent and interacting with a hungry poetic soul in a gentle absence---the verbal lack. The clarifying non-verbal spaces were/ are glimpsed by the meditating monks. He plumbs and probes those inner depths of everyday realities, the angst of our middle-class urban existence, the value of non-verbal communication, delight of pursuing arts and the overall meaning of being alive in a stressful moment of history searching for ideals, and brings up pearls from such expeditions to those dim regions.
His messianic role of a reader/poet is summed up in these elegant lines:
 My Dream
It is my dream,
My hungry heart can swallow
The whole world
Of poems and rhymes.

I can arrange the dreams
Of Indian youth
In indigenous ink,
A narrative that lay bare to readers,
I do not know how what you feel
And what makes you weep.
I only reconstruct your stories
And flimsy history. (P. 18)

Here you can hear a post-colonial critic of repute translating the dynamics of that complex of ideas into a flow simple, yet powerful, like the waves of the Beas. The role of a poet is also carefully undermined by claiming the inability/unwillingness to know the reasons for the alienation of Indian youth and a claim to represent their pain/angst/anger causing tears from a cultivated distance through re-constructions of flimsy history. The coinage of the term indigenous ink is striking---IWE (Indian Writing in English) ---is doing that only: Crafting, re-creating, re-imagining/re-presenting Indian experience in an alien medium, a colonial language lovingly preserved and promoted in a big way in a free country, as a heirloom. This kind of subtle de-construction and critique can come from a powerful mind engaged with theory at the highest plane only and you get reminded of Eliot as a poet-critic.
Look at these lines:
I Am
It is the old attire, I touch with a pen.
Sweet song enthralls
My flesh.
And the seed speaks through the iron gates. (P. 19)

Here, the native/alien binary is hinted and re-formulated expertly in a new combination, recalling the famous Barthesian assertion that all writing ultimately becomes a rich tissue of quotations, a thing that refers back to others in a kind of intertextuality, in an age of intersecting intellectual grids and borderless conversations and exchange of trans-national ideas. Writing in another language is an eclectic act in itself and very delicate one. Native experiences and heritage get expressed in anther idiom and JS, an expert craftsman, does that act with the élan of a connoisseur.
This poignant line from Silent Days again mirrors the mood of the poet in a poise of mental alertness, trying to catch the weightless atoms/impressions falling on his lyrical Richter scale and the writer faithfully recording them for posterity:  
‘You are passing through a phase; silent days.’ (P. 26)

While reading these poems, I felt like travelling back to a country road that I often take to my office in suburban Mumbai. It is a long winding road nestling among trees and cutting through a small river gurgling its way to sea. It lies stretched between two national highways and is a short-cut. While travelling through this green zone I understand the meaning of inner/outer solitude for a fevered urban mind. For the ‘natives’ living there in the little villages in the shadows of hills, it is a natural state of being. For an ‘alien/outsider’, it is a transient state of rare silence that soothes so much---like the aanchal of an old mother. JS is successful in re-creating that elusive mood, that mysterious moment, that strange tranquility you feel while going on a country road or watching a sun-up or a Gauguin, up close. He catches the strains that can be heard only when days suddenly become quiet and one goes inside one’s personality to fathom the inner riches stored for us all. His poems inaugurate a New Movement in IWE.
A major poet is born!
Silent Days vociferously proclaim the arrival of a genius!