She is too shy for comfort. At times, I can’t even find a way to start a conversation. At the most, she would nod, maybe a smile in her boldest days. Leaning against the door, gripping hard at the ends of her attire, she would twist the threads in nervousness. I can notice sweat trickle down her forehead, as she talks.
Morning walk
And I wonder:/ These heads popping out, their throbbing figures,/ Are they figment of my imagination?/ Do they gather just to make me realize/ I am no anomaly, a part of them,
Possibly estranged.
Keats' a mirror, Keats' a mirage
Keats the person we know has been pictured through word-of-mouth...it remains amusing to me how an article read on Keats is almost always an article forgotten.
Sourav Ganguly is a threat to cricket writing
Ganguly in inertia for a moment and then his fall, one arm below his body, his cry of agony — provided a poetic moment for the lensmen and T.V audiences, but for us the writers, if we had written, we would have had to do with cliches like ‘aged warrior’ and ‘falling hero’.
The day I came to life
In the hour of midnight, when the Sun was busy preening itself in front of the mirror, and the Moon was preoccupied, flirting with the stars. I finally attained independence (at least that is what I thought) after 9 months in confinement, without any fault of mine.
"In time there was a day that extinguished the last eyes to see Christ; the battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with the death of a man. What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose? The voice of Macedonio Fernández, the image of a red horse in the vacant lot at Serrano and Charcas, a bar of sulphur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?"
— "The Witness" by Jorge Luis Borges (translated by James. E. Irby)
On the second day of the Jaipur Literary Festival, Hindi writer Uday Prakash, at his book reading, explained why there's need for pessimism in literature. On being asked by a listener why his stories often end in despair, he spoke of the "author" being an intersecting point of the sociological aspects of any society. The author is the most marginalised, the lowest of the lowest, or to borrow from Prakash, "a dalit". So the author, an adivasi of his own language, the most powerless of all creatures, inherits the pain from his sufferings and puts them to words. Truth is essential and it is always disturbing, the writer concedes, and so speaks his literature.
The world which Prakash might have been trying to convey through his writing, the world we exist in is closer in semblance to Dystopia than the idea of Utopia that Plato had proposed, for the latter seems far beyond implementation. What Prakash had given an impactful prologue to, materialised into a larger debate the next day, which was also India's republic day.
"Republic of ideas", a session hosted by Urvashi Butalia with Tehelka's editor Tarun Tejpal, historians Patrick French and Richard Sorabji, political critic Ashis Nandy and IBN 7's editor Ashutosh as panelists started with much promise with the discussion being majorly around the idea of an ideal republic — what was conceived and what has been achieved by the Indian constitution in the past sixty years.
French began with how the idea of India of the founding fathers was rather practical and our constitution, however criticised, has no crater-sized potholes. In fact, by allowing things like right to suffrage for every Indian, our decision makers took a step ahead of the much older democracies, like that of France which did not allow its women to vote till 1944. Tejpal added the Hindu Marriage act of 1956, and also cited other legislations being in favour of meliorating the conditions of the oppressed. "The founding fathers of this nation weren't naive idealists. They were visionaries," said Tejpal, "naïve idealists were Hitler, Mao Zedong and Stalin, who, in their bid to create a perfect world, killed thousands of people."
From that statement of Tejpal began a search for imperfection in our perceived Utopias, which eventually ended by gifting this year's JLF its first share of potent controversy, but that came later. Tejpal, addressing Ashutosh who has written a book on the Anna Hazare movement, 13 days that awakened India, pointed out that a sizeable population — be it a panel of five or a rally of five thousand at the Jantar Mantar — does not represent the voice of the nation. Then whose utopia do we fight for?
The monsoon has arrived early, and as my car putters along the bumpy, muddy road, a cow tied to its tether gives me an uninterested glance. Three more bovines sit oblivious on the other side of the road, chewing cud as I pass. I give them about as much thought as they give me. Even the majestic scenery fails to register. I am far too preoccupied. I’m afraid I’ll be late. I’m on my way to meet the actor Akshay Kumar.
When I arrive at our appointment in Tangla, Assam, he greets me, shakes my hand, and before the interview he adjusts himself on a plastic chair, his legs dangling half a foot above the ground.
