Forty five minutes

of yoga after got knows how long.

Why did I ever stop?

Shrikant Verma's Magadh

My review of Shrikant Verma's Magadh, in a new translation by Rahul Soni, appeared yesterday in The Sunday Guardian.
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Magadh

Srikant Verma, translated by Rahul Soni

Almost Island. Pp.157. Rs. 399.

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The Hindi poet Srikant Verma wrote Magadh over two years: 1979 and 1984. For this work he was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award posthumously in 1987.

A cursory search on Google throws up several translations of the work, not just into English but also into Bengali and Gujarati. Rahul Soni’s translation, therefore, is not the first one. A journal that Soni himself co-edits, Pratilipi, has translations of two poems from Magadh by the poet Vijay Dharwadkar.

Comparing that translation with Soni’s it becomes clear that there is something unique about the project that Soni has undertaken over the last half decade: in his translator’s note, Soni describes his process as a movement from ‘free renderings’ to ‘a stricter more faithful method’ in order to ‘mirror its simple, crystalline vocabulary’.

The vocabulary and syntax is the first striking thing about Magadh. A child could read these poems more easily than they could any lesson set them in their second language course. But this simplicity is just a distraction. Verma, like the Vetal that the speaker of the ‘Invocation’ claims to be, is a master of misdirection. The poems may appear to be simple but they hide serious conundrums behind the paradoxes, repetitions and rhymes, between the deliberate statement-and-restatement and the rhetorical questions that Verma employs.

In many of the poems in Magadh, people are leaving or returning to cities. They are giving up their right to call one city their own while they live in another. They experience a divided sense of self and loyalty when they move between cities. And roads to and from cities seem to have a life and a destiny all their own. The pivotal question of the collection is, ‘Horseman/ where does this road go?’ but the traveller often cannot stay for an answer, cannot accept the one he is given or cannot interpret it to his satisfaction.

Read together, read as a whole, the accumulated effect of these poems put the reader in a state of deep confusion that can only be called existential. What do the names of these ancient cities matter to us, who cannot easily identify Magadh, Kosala or Ujjaini on a map? The speaker in the poem ‘Hastinapur’ speaks our mind for us when he says, ‘Consider/ a person/ left all alone – / why should he care when the Mahabharata was fought?’

In Magadh, the speakers – though they are sometimes guides or travellers – are often insiders or people loyal to those in power. In one poem, the speaker says, ‘Kosal is a republic in my imagination/ The people of Kosal are not happy/ because Kosal is a republic only in the imagination’. The tiny, subtle shift from one person’s imagined republic to a general, abstract idea of a republic that has not materialised, is a clever one.

As an insider himself – Srikant Verma began his political career with the Congress (I) first as spokesman, then as the General Secretary and finally was elected to the Rajya Sabha – Verma knows the value of mythologising the political and of making it ahistorical and for all time. A person left alone may not care when the Mahabharata was fought, but as no one knew better than Verma, a person is rarely left all alone and must therefore care about Hastinapur, Magadh, Kalinga – about all these other cities to which there are no roads.

Verma saw politics from close quarters and his experience of it is expressed in often disquieting ways in these poems. In ‘Interference’, the lines ‘peace must remain in Magadh’, ‘Order must remain in Magadh’ and ‘What will people say’, create a sense of unease that recall an earlier poem, ‘Wailing from the Inner Chambers’, that ends with these lines:

When

everyone

behaves

themselves,

when

everyone

thinks before

they speak,

why these tirades?

Find out.

Suddenly, the words’ find out’ take on a more sinister tone, its intent less benevolent and concerned and more punitive. It is hard not to remember that some of these poems were composed in the years following the Emergency.

Which brings me to the only quibble I have with this translation: I would have welcomed a little more context with regard to the composition of these poems. The Foreword by Ashok Vajpeyi discusses Verma’s involvement in politics and Soni himself mentions, but leaves unexplained, the intriguing fact that these poems were composed five years apart: some in 1979 but most in 1984.

Why did Verma let these poems be for all those years? What made him return to the earlier poems and give them their current shape with newer poems? An historical account of how Magadh came to be would have satisfied my curiosity with regard to the two dates 1979 and 1984. It is clear that the Emergency has something to do with the tone of some of the poems, but when in ’84 were the other poems written? Before Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination or after? Or both before and after?

Without this necessary context, the poems remain caught in a mythical mayajaal, whereas it seems to me that Verma’s poems are directed as sharply towards the present as they are to the distant past.

In all other ways, this translation is impeccable. Soni’s immersion in the text has resulted in a pared down, burnished rendition of Verma’s cycle of poems. His care with line breaks, his use of words chosen not just for meaning but sound, argue for a kind of rigour that is very welcome. Soni’s Note on the translation is a gem of precision and clarity, and completely free of any displays of pomposity.

As with Adil Jussawalla’s collection, Trying to Say Goodbye, also brought out by Almost Island, much care has been taken over the design of the book. The poems in Hindi and the translations on the facing page move together, nearly perfectly line by line. Going by the quality of paper and size of book, it would seem that Almost Island is going for a specific ‘look’ for their poetry collections and that – if it means that there will be more poetry in the months to come – can only be good news.
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In other news, I had recently reviewed two of Anand Thakore's books - Elephant Bathing and Mughal Sequence - for Biblio. It's not one of the free articles, so if you want to read it, you'd have to buy it and I don't even know why I'm telling you this, but just thought I'd put it out there.
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Also, this continued absence from the net is very addictive and I just can't seem to drag myself back. What to do? (I say it as if it's a bad thing).

 

So BuSTiD

I'm sorry but one of the great things about having watched a lousy film is catching up with all the snark afterwards. It's palate-cleansing and I'm not sure why I'm apologising.

Yes, this is still about the Star Trek film.

On to the Exhibits:

1. We need FAQs, right? Of course we do; it's only...logical.

And why did Spock have to go with the bomb to set it off? Are you telling me in the 23^rd century that people don’t have a way to detonate bombs remotely? That’s stupid.

Well —

And why the fuck is the Enterprise just carrying around a cold fusion suitcase bomb anyways?

Look, you’re getting very upset, and this is just the first scene of the movie.

...

Why was Khan floating in space?

Actually, this Khan has the same origin as the original Khan; he’s a genetically engineered warrior, created for the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s. He ruled part of Asia befor —

Wait, what? The Eugenics Wars of the 1990s?

Yes. 

We didn’t have any Eugenics Wars in the 1990s, unless you count Dawson’s Creek.

Yeah, but Gene Roddenberry didn’t know that when he created Khan in 1967.

But we do, because it’s 2013.

But it’s canon! Don’t you like canon?

I like it when it doesn’t get stupid. And why the hell would Abrams and crew stick to Khan’s origin timeline, even though it makes zero sense, but also suddenly change him to a white dude? That’s cherry-picking the stupidest parts of canon and non-canon!

I don’t know. I think it’s nice that in this day and age, a white male can still be cast as an Indian played by a Mexican. White men really have come a long way!

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Ideally, this should be the point where we whiz past Exhibit 2 to Exhibit 3 (or, I should just shift Exhibit 3 and make it Exhibit 2, but I won't), but let me build suspense the JJ Abrams way, okay? It might get me a job in Hollywood some day. So...

2. In which Josh Horowitz asks the writer of STiD, Damon Lindelof, some questions and many mails are exchanged.

From: Josh Horowitz
To: Damon Lindelof
Sent: Sat, May 11, 2013 2:58 pm

Damon,

Here we go again. Thanks for subjecting yourself to my nerdy inquiries once again. {readcted because blahblah} Congratulations.

OK, down to the nitty gritty. I feel like I have to start with the biggest mystery/conversation that's surrounded the film from the get go. Why is Alice Eve in her underwear at one point? Oh and also, let's discuss your villain.

Yeah, I'm not waiting around for that re-run, but of course you guys have to go read.

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Finally! Exhibit 3! The one you've I've been waiting for!

Via Aisha.

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I think I may finally be done with this Star Trek.

The Spaniard at Seven

You know that Calvin & Hobbes strip where he's trying his pathetic hand at doing push-ups and after three he starts to count what it feels like and not what it is? That's what seven years on this blog feels like - it feels like a round dozen or perhaps a baker's dozen.

My poor blog. If it had feelings, it would feel like an unwanted child [Richie Havens, 'Freedom’]. I can't even conjure up some fantastical number to describe the number of years it feels like since I began this blog? It has to be a paltry dozen?

Yes, but a Baker’s Dozen! Thirteen! That’s respectable? Life-altering even?

When I was 12, I wanted desperately to turn 13 as if that birthday was a Rubicon I would cross triumphantly into near-adulthood. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened. I am remembering those years because El Cid will be thirteen soon, and unlike me he doesn’t care one way or another. He’s a more evolved human being than I ever was.

Me, I was the kind of kid people write teen books for: poseur wannabe, confused as heck and both snobbish & desperately wanting to be as effortlessly settled in my own skin as my peer group appeared to be. It seemed to me then that when I turned thirteen, I would mysteriously understand everything in my world that seemed so mixed-up and incomprehensible.

Where I am today feels a little like how I felt then – a state of mind in which I think a year or a certain date will somehow transform my life and make clear my muddied molasses mind. Amber and waiting.

I should be reading poetry, philosophy; I should be watching my own mind. Instead I look for something I cannot find, in teen books. If I was really thirteen I know for certain I wouldn’t touch that shit with the hooked end of a twenty-foot crane. But now I read teen books compulsively, so many of them that I can’t remember who wrote them or what they were about. Details remain but mostly they’re poorly written attempts by adults who try to talk like the teens they no longer are and perhaps never were. When they get turned into movies based on the book, they’re, shockingly, even worse. Who would have thought a bad teen book would be better than the movie?

Why am I doing this to myself? It’s a sinkhole out of which I should be clawing myself out inch by inch. I think perhaps I am looking for a way in to my son’s mind which, truth be told, is nothing like the vocabulary-challenged blank slates that some writers think teenagers are.

 – Harsh. That was harsh, Space Bar.

– You think? Wait. Let me produce evidence.

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You know what? I was going to produce evidence. I swear. I even took out the book and re-read passages of it but if a quick re-read wasn’t bad enough, the thought of typing up all the rubbish gave me the heebie-jeebies. So you’ll have to take my word for it that the last teen book I read was awful.

[Basically, a girl is made to kiss a boy she kind of likes but she kisses him against her will. Later, when they talk about it, he pretty much says to her that when girls say ‘no’ they mean ‘yes’. And though she tells him she doesn’t know what kind of girls he knows (a pretty lame response, but perhaps she was in shock? I would have been.) by the end of their – what was it? a date? It might have been – she’s swooning all over him again. And that’s just one small incident in a book filled with....gah! I can’t even talk about it.]

This is not to say that all of teen books are bad; they may not be Catcher in the Rye, but they fleetingly catch something real, the good ones. It’s just, I really ought to be doing other things with my time.

Like writing.

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Which brings me to this blog.

I don’t know what to do with it any more. I keep it like a name I can’t imagine changing but when I say it out loud, it doesn’t feel like my name.

I guess it’ll be here, I will be here, providing poems and excerpts from books which people will come looking for at a later date. One day – perhaps by next year – it’ll have something to say for itself.

Perhaps this is a pre-adolescent and necessary moodiness.

But as always, however rubbish the contents of this blog and however capricious my responses, thank you for reading.

Celebrating a 100 years of....Talkies?

I hesitate to interrupt the beautiful silence here, but since I have had Thoughts after a long time and about cinema after an even longer time, I thought I should get let them out in case of system overload.

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Indian cinema celebrated its centenary on 3rd May this year. What it marked was the centenary of the release of Dadasaheb Phalke's Raja Harischandra, which is as good a place as any to mark a beginning. Naturally, there have been special issues and programmes and things and they have been the usual mixed bag of celebration, nostalgia and some good writing.

In the middle of all this, there is Bombay Talkies. 

It is a compendium of four unlinked short films by four different directors and you can google anything you want to know about it. This post is about the state of my mind after watching it last night.

(There were aunties who came inlate - while the title song was on - and congratulated themselves for being on time. 'That is a matter of opinion,' I muttered under my breath but the auntie next to me was busy talking on her phone. During the interval, one of the said, 'How do they allow this kind of thing? Do you want to leave? We can leave if you want. It's up to you.' The phone aunty got up and left. The other one followed and tread on my toes while doing so.)

First off, general puzzlement: I know the Hindi film industry likes to pretend it's the only one around, even while they help themselves to story-and-plotlines from Telugu, Tamil and Korean films; but surely Bombay Talkies could have found directors who were not only mainstream/semi-mainstream Hindi film makers?

Also, Talkies. Someone needs to work on their titling skills, because as code it's inaccurate if somewhat efficient. Harischandra was silent and the studios were still some time in the future.

Thus my general discontent about the nature of this celebration on film: narrow, short-sighted and - for a celebration - minimally aware of its own history.

But the films themselves were fairly enjoyable, if uneven.

I was thinking about what the filmmakers were saying about Cinema-with-a-capital-C beyond the stories themselves, as they must have been because otherwise why bother to string four diploma-length films together, right?

So, in order of appearance:

Karan Johar: Karan Johar is such an insider that he doesn't even need to think about what cinema is. Because - isn't it obvious? - what he does is cinema and why is even a question? We celebrate a 100 years by making more of the kind of film that brought us upto this point.

If there's anything larger he's saying about cinema it is, possibly, that film music is cinema's umbilical cord and tells a kind of truth that transcends all the lies we tell ourselves and let our stories tell us.

(Yeah...that's farfetched. No it isn't. Yes it is. N- Whatever.)

That said, though he's no Wong Kar-Wai, his film had a few genuinely heart-stopping moments. Pity he let the last five minutes of his film slip away from him.

Dibakar Banerjee: There are big stories in small things. That's DB's definition of cinema. Or at least, his definition has sympathies with Ray's vision because he chose to film a Satyajit Ray story.

Zoya Akhtar: Tell 'em what they wanna hear. Hers is the least interesting and most cynically

blasé of the lot. 

Like Johar's film, hers is the work of an insider who is attempting to view the world of cinema through the eyes of an outsider or a misfit. But when you think of all the misfits and outsiders and deadbeats who made even mainstream Hindi cinema (never mind all the other kinds of cinema in whatever language) the memorable thing is is, it made me feel slightly ill to hear that what we need to do to make it is follow our dreams, nurture them in secret (and pray to Katrina Kaif dolls).

Anurag Kashyap: Cinema is misdirection and (a satisfying and necessary) illusion. Of the four, it is perhaps Kashyap who put any kind of thought at all into why he was a part of this exercise and for me that raised his film above the others.

It was clear that while KJ and ZA are one kind of filmmaker, DB and AK are another. These last two, being outsiders to the industry but who are beginning to slide their way in, are less concerned about the truth-telling and lie-nurturing nature of cinema. They don't care if cinema is about truth or lies; what they care about is, that whatever it is, it has the capacity to nourish small and real lives like any great art. 

And that is why we obssess about the movies even today, a 100 years on. Even when we download them carelessly onto our computers, and experience them as a solitary pleasure instead of communal festivity, cinema can attach us in precisely the same way it did a hundred years ago. And at least half of Bombay Talkies celebrates this.

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Oh wait. I'm not done. I feel I must congratulate the Censor Board for this piece of cleverness.

[Apologies about picture quality. Bad phone camera and bad light.]

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Wait. I'm still not done. 

I want sympathy and alcohol because I watched Star Trek Into Darkness. In IMAX 3D. The sight of Benedict Cumberbatch weeping in rage and sorrow over one half of an IMAX screen (in 3D!) still gives me nightmares. And I still have a half-crush on the man (at least, on his voice). 

Basically, JJ Abrams has watched [Spoiler Alert!] The Wrath of Khan and has scavenged dialogues wholesale over both his films in the reboot. That's not entirely a problem; what is, is that despite its cheesey sets and costumes, the earlier film was the better one. 

**Spoiler Alert**

Plus the racefail of having Cumberbatch play [the even more namefail] Khan Noonien Singh. (Seriously, Hollywood. Get your act together.) 

And he's So. Deadly. Serious. Gah!

The best part of the film for me was when Kirk is so frustrated with Spock that he expresses a desire, to Uhura, to yank Spock's bangs (not at all innuendously). 'I know he's your boyfriend,' Kirk says, 'but.' Uhura says she knows how Kirk feels. And then Kirk has this priceless dialogue:

"Wait. You guys are fighting??! Oh my God! I can't even imagine what that's like!"

To me that, and the scene with Kirk, Spock and Uhura in a pod, going to meet the Klingons, was worth the price of the ticket.

On Gustave Dudamel

Via Supriya Nair, this wonderful essay:

ON AUGUST 23rd 2007, the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper not known for its hyperbolic tendencies, ran a breathless headline wondering: "Was this the greatest Prom of all time?" Footage from the concert in question, showing Dudamel and the Bolívars performing "Mambo!" from Leonard Bernstein’s "West Side Story", has since been viewed nearly half a million times on YouTube. The teenaged players, to the stunned delight of a 5,000-strong audience at the Royal Albert Hall in London, ditch their dinner jackets for tracksuit tops in the colours of the Venezuelan flag, jump to their feet, fool about with their instruments and generally give the impression that playing in a symphony orchestra is the greatest gig imaginable.

Among those who received a link to that video was Jamie Bernstein, daughter of Leonard. "I clicked on it thinking, 'oh, this is one of those Facebook things' and just fell into my screen," she says when we meet in New York. "I thought, 'who are these people, where is this energy coming from?' I never thought I would again have those chills in a concert that I used to get watching my Dad conduct. And then I thought, 'where is my Dad to see it all, because this is everything he ever meant.'

"He would have gone down there, to Venezuela, in a shot. He would have crushed every rib in Gustavo’s body with the hug, and he would have been in awe of Maestro Abreu. He would have been beside himself with excitement." Soon after viewing the viral clip, Jamie herself headed down to Caracas—"because I started finding out about El Sistema and I thought, 'this is way too good to be true'."

As always, posted here for sharing & storage purposes.

W.H.Auden: 'This Lunar Beauty'

Because yesterday's full, spring moon, buttery disc that it was. Also, because this is a poem that should be read aloud and I've been looking at poems for too long now. Delighted also, at it's slow increase, so lunar. Time is inches, yes; but also lines.

This Lunar Beauty
W.H.Auden

This lunar beauty
Has no history
Is complete and early;
If beauty later
Bear any feature
It had a lover
And is another.

This like a dream
Keeps other time
And daytime is
The loss of this;
For time is inches
And the heart's changes
Where ghost has haunted
Lost and wanted.

But this was never
A ghost's endeavour
Nor finished this,
Was ghost at ease;
And till it pass
Love shall not near
The sweetness here
Nor sorrow take
His endless look.

Review: Wild Girls Wicked Words

This short review appeared in Mint last week. I've had massive power outages and connectivity problems, so haven't posted this until now.

I really should write or keep the longer versions of reviews to put on the blog. I had a lot more to say about this book, but I edited it down and didn't keep the longer review.

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Wild Girls Wicked Words: Poems of Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathi & Sukirtharani

Edited & Translated by Lakshmi Holmström

Kalachuvadu Publications [Sangam House]. Rs. 295. Pp: 230

Every year, around 8 March the world sketches a tribute to women. Each year the gestures seem more hollow and meaningless, a gimmick to sell anything from facials and makeovers to health-checks and insurance. At least since the Delhi rape, it has become clear that far from achieving equality, women in India face even more challenges than the popular narrative would have us believe.

A whole decade ago in Tamil Nadu, there was widespread outrage in literary circles at the publication of Kutti Revathi’s book of poems, Mulaigal (Breasts). Around the same time, other women poets, Malathi Maithri, Salma and Sukirtharani were also publishing poems that spoke about the bodies and desires of women and about wanting a space to call their own. Whatever pious noises about violence against women we are hearing now, things were different in 2003. Back then, these women received death threats and, as Lakshmi Holmström recounts in the introduction to this volume, one film lyricist even said they “should be lined up on Mount Road in Chennai, doused with kerosene oil and burnt alive.”

Ah, that trusty debating strategy used by men in times of social upheaval: kerosene (See also: acid).

That these women continued to write undeterred by threats says much more for their individual courage and perseverance than it does for society as a whole. In the decade since, each of these four women have published more collections of poems and have continued to write about whatever they wanted to, regardless of the compulsions of their private or public lives.

Wild Girls Wicked Words, translated and edited by Holmström, ironically references the indignation of the literary establishment in Tamil Nadu. It is a bilingual collection of selected poems that, while still being appetisers, are substantial enough to give the reader an idea of the kind of poetry these women write, with biographical notes to provide context.

The poems are about the things you might expect – the bodies of women, the relationship of women with their lovers, their children; and about landscape, so intimately tied to the idea of poetry in Tamil literature since the earliest Sangam poetry. But the originality of the ideas and images and tonal variety give these poems depth and edge, making one pause often to absorb and re-read a line.

The first poem, ‘She who threads the skies’ by Malathi Maithri, begins thus: “As the sky fills/the empty shell/after a bird has hatched,/ so desire fills everything.”

These women are unafraid both of desire and of declaring it. “I watched over them in amazement”, Kutti Revathi says simply in her poem ‘Breasts’. In another poem about meeting her lover, she invokes one of Sangam poetry’s most famous lines: “red earth and pouring rain”.

Indeed, for all the contemporary cadences of their poetry, these poets are often in dialogue with the tradition of Tamil poetry; sometimes, as in Malathi’s or Sukirtharani’s poems, they are sardonic; but these poets see themselves as writers who are intimately tied to both place and language. Unsurprisingly, therefore, a portion of the poems in this collection are about Sri Lanka and more specifically about the civil war. These poems are poignant and anguished but are never mere harangues.

Sukirtharani’s poetry is perhaps the most stark and angry of the four, standing as it does at the intersection of Dalit and feminist writing. In her poem ‘Translating her’, she says:

They ask me what the song means/ prying, eager, as if checking out/ the sex of a newly born./ I translate her poverty/  the hunger she eats,/  the hunger she expels

Salma’s experiences as a Muslim, a woman writing in secret and wanting to explore both solitude and selfhood (thanimai/thanmai) are better known via her novel The Hour Past Midnight, which takes its title from the poem ‘A midnight tale’, collected here. Images of confinement act as counterpoint to the imagined peace of a simple solitude. But sitting at the edges of domesticity is a chilling truth:

In this universe/ there may be many creatures/ alone with their prey/ living amicably together/ leading pleasant lives. (‘An evening, another evening’)

‘Language must be redeemed from the grave of its own inadequacy’, declared Malathi Maithri in 2001. This collection demonstrates that this is being done, both with passion and craft.

Vasudha Nagaraj talk on the Justice Verma Committee Report

Though the Justice Verma Committee Report [pdf] (which, last I heard, the Ministry of Home Affairs had taken off their website) came out in January this year - just under a month after the Delhi rape - the thing everyone is watching is the wilfully obstuse Ordinance that the GoI might pass any day now.

Regardless, what the Committee did was remarkable.

So, for this month's talk in the Goethe Zentrum's monthly Lecture Series, they've invited AP High Court advocate, and activist Vasudha Nagaraj to tease out the implications of the Report as well as talk about the govt. Ordinance on Sexual Assault.

Date & Time: Wednesday 13 March. 6.30pm.
Location: Goethe Zentrum, Journalist Colony, Road No. 3, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad.

It's going to be a bit strange, but I'll be reading some of my poems before the talk.

Do come if you can.

Every single leaf

One new neighbour has just cut down a peltophorum because it ruins the view of her shiny new house with the weird landscaping and All! Glass! exterior. Another tree nearby has had branches cut off to make way for a pole that will have their personal transformer perched on it.

At other times we have heard other neighbours complain that:

1) The trees shed too many leaves and their servants (yes) complain about having to keep sweeping.

2) The trees cut off all the sun. Apparently this is a bad thing.

3) There's no place to park because of trees on the pavement.

I'm actually surprised that they don't cut down trees during Diwali, because, you know, rockets.

Meanwhile, spring continues. The Tabibuia have flamed their yellow and are shedding. The figs have come and gone. The pungamaram's tender green is everywhere. The badam has finished with the red and has settled into summer's bright green. The rain trees still drop long seed pods that always, always, embed themselves into the softening tar on the road which, given the state of it, is an improvement.

Soon, even the leaves that so annoy our neighbours will cease to fall, though every cut branch and trunk will continue to put out shoots.

Clearly this last is something our neighbours will not stand for. Hence this:

Completely besides the point that this tree was outside a GHMC park and it wasn't for any of the people around here to burn it down.

I don't want to move. I'm wondering how I can persuade my neighbours that the desert - any desert - is the best place for them.