An Olympian Heart

After he turned thirty, without a breakthrough
or a clue to a Nobel-worthy scientific discovery,
without a bestseller book, a Booker or a Pulitzer,
without even a proper job, with uncertainty
as his daily wake-up call and nightmare,
he began to respect the millions: the also-rans,
the have-beens and the almost-theres, the faceless
ants, and the termites in foreign sweatshops.

He spent an entire week making paper planes
from his unpublished research articles
and poems. Mass circulation of his ideas
using aerodynamics cleared his desk,
ever so cluttered like his mind. Imagine
hundreds of equations and verbs swirling
down to earth like his ideas about science,
art and self! Humbled by the sadhu time,

he grumbled first about the lost rhyme
and reason of his curious, lyrical self.
To this day, he had considered delayed
gratification a virtue. Now a voice,
his own, classed him as a bygone dream.
Not every fermentation ends up as wine.
He consoled himself with a serpentine logic
that mediocrity, after a sustained effort

at glory, is thermodynamically the most
favored outcome. He finally forgave
his grandma for saying that grazing goats
educates better than his pricy school's
English rhymes, and tie & coats.
After a half-life of borrowed idioms,
he began seeing his unoriginal affairs
as a destiny of desires forged

by an overhyped education. His toolbox
contains every artifact of acquired fact
and abstract training. Tentatively he prods
on, blowing a longhorn of dote learning,
but now he knows -- creativity is a jackfruit
dessert that not everyone who plants a sapling
gets to taste. To pack his bags and leave
would be an admission of grief or lack of belief

in his talents and the establishment. No,
he must persist, for existence is an act,
and he resents an exact estimation of his self.
He is a mass of clay-dust like everyone else,
and immortality is earned by getting churned
in the random eddies of life. Whoever yearns
and stakes his elemental self into the kiln
called life, burns... but only a fraction return

as gold or God, which the mirror suggests
might not be his fate. After he turned forty,
he learned that forgiving faults and failings
helps in retaining self-respect. Outcomes
reveal neither neglect nor unworthiness, not
always. Disillusioned by persistent biases
that favor white or black sheep in a flock,
egg-laying hens to an egoistic fighter cock,

he forged for himself a featureless dream-bowl,
then threw it away. To beg or canvass for votes,
or use family connections or political ploys he felt
would destroy his last caricatures of self-respect.
But if every man were to forgo his dreams, live on facts,
we would regress into a song-less, unchanging universe.
He knows he must persist, for all existence is an act,
we are merely players and before the hero/villain is revealed,

all actors on stage (and some backstage) are suspect.
One breakthrough it takes to light a lamp or an epigram,
one breakthrough! He could be but one step away from the finish.
They who don't ask will never know if the answer is yes or no.
He refines his act, but he is circumspect. Victors revise
biographies; wipe out the salt of doubts from their cheeks.
Since he knows he could yet write himself into a myth,
he braves the daily grindstones, and hopes, and persists.

--

First published in Muse India, Vol1, Jan-Feb, 2014. 
Version 1, Nov 25-28, 2011; V2: July 2012...

(Hindi Kavita) Anth Mein Tera Kaun Hoga / (with translation) In the end, who shall be your own?

अंत में तेरा कौन होगा?

न प्रीति के प्रसंग होंगे,
न कामना के स्वाद, अंग होंगे,
आराधन, अश्रु नहीं सहारे होंगे,
स्वजन नहीं किनारे होंगे,
न सुरमई सुखद छंद होगा,
न चपल मन का द्वन्द होगा,
जब वृहद् अहम् गौण होगा,
अंत में तेरा कौन होगा ?

(Recited in Annual Harvard Poetry Reading 2011)

The poem has been with me for more than a decade now, and only one question, two lines have remained unchanged "anth mein tera kaun hoga?/ kashubdh prabudh maun hoga" (In the end who shall be your own/ profound, perplexed silence... (will be your own). I read only one stanza in the India Poetry reading at Harvard and I have posted that verse here. The question itself can be only loosely translated and the poem itself is written in Hindi, as it aspires for an Indian's interpretation.

In English, most of the words are Abrahamnic in their connotation, and often when I seek a Brahminic, a Hindu interpretation, of my own works or of the poetry by Rabindranath Tagore, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Kabir, Tulsidas and my favorite Indian poets, English translations/connotations are inadequate. For example, 'Mana' is often translated as mind, but the word mind is so limited in its meaning. 'Mana' in an Indian sense is a powerful existence that creates and destroys the finite and the infinite, the Hindu Gods exist as Mana creates or perceives them, we act as Mana directs our actions, and Mana lives on even though bodies, cities, civilizations perish. It is the Mana where dualities duel/ debate/ argue ("dvand"). The Mana embraces the dvand, the dualities: material and spiritual, divine and human, Shakti and shiva, Purush and Prakriti, a particle and a wave, matter and mind, the finite atom and the infinite, truth and translation, inspiration and creation, love and illusion, Maya and Satya. In fact, Vivek is the ability to distinguish between the different, divergent, dueling aspects of dualities, and when I use the word in Hindi/Sanskrit, the word itself represents deeper connotations that connect to the debates ( and currents and counter-currents or to the "dvand" we humans have experienced throughout our known and unknown history. In English, Vivek is a just a name, and when words become just nouns without meaning, words loose their correspondence with resonance that is essential for realizing their true meaning, their 'artha', their 'siddhartha'.

In the end, who shall be your own?

No anecdotes of passion,
No organs or flavors of desire,
No solace from tears or prayers,
No beloved on the shores,
No musical joyous verses,
No duels of astir mind,
When the grand ego will be gone,
In the end, who shall be your own?

Kavi-speak: Poetry contests, science awards, scholars & fairness

There are far too many card-carrying poets, scientists, singers, artists; so many that we run like roaches fighting battles over little corners to claim tidbits of glory. I know only a handful of us will matter when we are gone, I will be happy if I am able to produce one poem, one scientific article, one story that would live-on after all my friends and all other traces of me are gone. Time is the only true test of talent, and yes many saplings never grow into the trees they promise to be, but in time, we will neither remember the number of saplings nor who planted them or crushed them, but only the flavor of the fruit (perhaps). Yes, I will like to win a poetry contest, a science award; yes I will like it to be fair; yes I will like to get degrees for free after I have done my share of work and shown my share of intellectual growth and yes I will like to get jobs that value my learning more than my degrees or where I obtained them from; yes I will like to be part of a collective that publishes great scientific/artistic/scholarly material; yes I expect fairness from science, poetry and humanity; yes I am an outlier in most rooms I choose to sit in... yes I know that most of the human enterprises are corrupted by human failings and fallings, and so the only thing I revere, respect, clap for is the rare human who rises beyond human foibles, follies and trifles. But I get to clap very rarely! 

I subscribe to the idea that true scholars are a rare breed. We can only soar as far as our ability and imagination allows us. Perhaps the true seekers of knowledge, wisdom, poetry, truth, beauty will always find a way to reach their ...goal, in spite of critics and competition (or lack of competition). And yes, the ancients say, the path is tortuous/ sharper than the razor's edge (paraphrasing a shaloka from Katha Upanishad &/or a line from Amir Khusrao)... The greatest mistake of our times is the assumption that scholarship can be acquired through college/university degrees and by the virtue of being employed as a critic or a teacher or a writer or a professor or an editor. Many people stand tall in their lifetimes on basis of such fallible assumptions, and after they are gone, their traces disappear from the very pedestals they once graced. Poetry, its writers and readers, will outlive, as always, all the critics, criticisms, politics, and even the languages themselves. I hope and believe the true keepers, seekers, lovers of poetry in every era can/will see beyond the noise, rabble, gibberish... Similarly the only true measure of a scientist is his or her science. In spite of ancestries and nexuses that aid in scientific publishing or in winning awards or in obtaining faculty positions; a thousand slips and a million errors, honest or cleverly-cloaked mistakes and chance or chosen misunderstandings and jungle-like, rabble-rousing, selfish politics that decides who gets what often; the faults of the system that wants to turn every graduate student or a post-doc into a coal-miner, supervised by a professor who works in a similar dark coal-mine half the time and in the other half of the time thinks his/her life is better as he/she has put the coal-mine behind him/her (almost): I believe in spite of an endless list of shortcomings, follies, deceits, conceits, failures, pretenders, in spite of every obstacle, in the end, the experimental fact and theoretical construct that is true, scientifically coherent/cogent/correct and aesthetically pure/pleasing/'close to perfection' will prevail. Maybe the progenitor of the idea will not see its success in his/her lifetime, maybe a pretender will get the credit, maybe the idealist will die poor and disillusioned, but I believe for every million-failed recognitions, there are a few right ones, well-deserved and well-chosen ones. I clap for them!

There are only a handful of American poets who have risen internationally to the level of timeless popularity as Darwish or Neruda or Tagore or Yeats were able to... I am not moved by the poetry written by most of the award-winning poets of the US and elsewhere. Specially US where the publishing, awarding of degrees and awards is systematized; elsewhere the title 'poet' is still synonymous with jobless or writing poetry is not a skill that earns you a penny unless you have risen to a popular appeal which often results in great peril and punishment, less often in a comfortable life. I can easily get killed in India or Middle-East or Africa for writing a line that stand out or stands for or against something, and hence maybe when I write, my life depends on my words or I am writing my life off for I chose the Word above whatever follows the pronouncement! Perhaps a constrained society needs poetry more and perhaps it receives poetry at a greater risk to the writer or the reader, perhaps a freer one allows poetic expression and must to be celebrated for providing greater possibilities, and perhaps great poets live in societies that they create within their inner world more than the world outside, so where they live matters not. There are almost no rock-stars like Einstein ushered on to the world-stage these days. Noble prize winners have their day of reckoning, other award winners get nods from their own select clubs and perhaps some honest recognition there, but again I am not necessarily impressed with a person just because the resume shows a fellowship, a prize, a recognition. There is enough politics in academia, science and art to ensure that nearly every award is issued with a few nods and far too many frowns. Every age and every country has one good poet, one good scientist for every thousand irrelevant ones; maybe in our times, one for every ten thousand bad ones. So yes, most of the poetry is poetry only in the name, most of the published science is science only in the name and would qualify as gibberish if we were to judge it honestly. But there is some science, some poetry that is truly remarkable, and when I see that, I forget everything else -- all despair, aches, tiredness, travails, journeys, searches, hurts, sweat, politics, pettiness, past. When I see that lotus blossom appear, I break into a spontaneous cheer, and the clapping is at that moment the rhythm of my every breath...  

(PS: many of the ideas expressed here emerged as comments on articles in Huffington Post by Anis Shivani and some lines echo my thoughts expressed during discussions with friends like Marc-Antoine Fardin, Mayank Kumar, Renato Dopotelodico, Matija Črne and Bavand Keshavarz to name a few)

Kavi-speak: Indian English is the Real Cheez!

Indian English is the real Cheez!

The word Chizzi held the same joy for me as a kid growing up in India that the word candy or chocolate probably held (or holds) for an American kid. Cheez is a common word in Hindi, (pronounced as chee-jz) and refers to a thing, sometimes to a special treat, (sometimes even to a hottie). Chizzi usually referred to candy or some Indian sweet/dessert like burfi, and still is a word used in my village in the Himalayas. It so happens (says Rushdie in a similar essay on etymology) that the word cheez is derived from the English word cheese. The eighteenth century Indians observed that Europeans (probably French) reserved a relish for cheese unmatched by other food items. Somehow we adopted the word and started referring to special things as cheez, mispronouncing it adequately, to make it sound desi (Indian).

English is full of words from Indian languages that appear in their new "avatar" with new pronunciations and connotations. While we Indians have worshipped the humanized avatars of God Vishnu for thousands of years, the internet has created impersonal avatars of us humans, and most of these new-age avatars are not worth worshipping. But one of the avatars of the Indian God, Jagannath (literal meaning: Lord of the World) is so powerful we have a word juggernaut coined after him. Up until seventeenth century, India contributed nearly a third of world's GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and China contributed a similar share. No wonder then that the word cash has its origins in Sanskrit karsh, a weight equal to 1/4000th of a gram of gold or silver. In Arabian Nights, or in the plays by Sophocles (who wrote three tragedies around the life of King Oedipus) as well as in many other ancient texts, India finds mention time and again for its gold and other riches. After coming to USA, I learned that food cooked with gravy is called an Indian curry: in North and South India, the word curry has specific meanings that are lost in translation.

Words travel across cultures more easily than humans do, and certainly if you speak any languages other than English, you will compile a similar long-list of borrowed words. To say Indian English is the real cheez though is to also recognize that English speaking/reading Indians exceed the combined strength of English speakers in the United Kingdom and the United States. By our sheer number, Indians may well begun to own the English language, and maybe some old Indian words (and associated cultural heritage) will then return to us. For example, pajama was a common garment in India (and I hear also in our sister nation of Persia or Iran), before the British trousers triumphed over it. Now pyjamas have returned and are sold in their expensive avatars in India! Bungalow used to be a house made in Bangla (Bengali) style; modern Indians make bungalows thinking they are building houses that are in some western, 'modern' style. To tie in Hindi is bandhna and in English, we end up with the fashionable bandana. As a child I would find khaat in villages, sometimes khatiya, but now everyone uses beds, though cot is now an established word in the English language.  

When Indian exported Panchtantra fables that inspired Aesop and later La Fontaine to compose their own versions, we helped to create the word jackal, a derivative of Sanskrit shringaal. The word mugger (who attacks stealthily) is derived from Sanskrit word for crocodile, makar and probably the fables caried this word across too. When you hear about mugging next time, think of a crocodile. Yes, even the jungle out there is from Hindi/Srinkrit word.  Lac and lacquer both come from Hindi laakh (Sanskrit laksh), and we Indians import lacquer paints these days. The rock band Nirvana used a common word from Indian philosophy/ religions that means "blowing out" (in sense of becoming absolutely free from cycle of life and death; for example, Buddha got Nirvana). Unfortunately, the Sanskrit words Arya and Swastika have become associated with Nazis (who used both words sacrilegiously: the explanation itself requires another article). One day, we Indians will reclaim these two words in English language, make them shed their worst Western connotations and restore their original meanings of "urbane" and "associated with good". My favorite anglicized word is Shampoo, which comes from the Hindi word champu (Sanskrit champna meaning kneading). We Indians make fun of friends who use excessive hair-oil by calling them champu teli, the phrase that could mean "shampoo-oily" or maybe "shampooed oil-maker". Many Indians who use shampoo believing it is a new age cheez would be bemused by this etymology, but will remember kneading while shampooing.  Let me end this short piece on another sweet note. While I enjoyed chizzi, which was not cheesy, my friends in US and UK ate candy, which comes from the word khand that means sugar in Sanskrit.

(Inspired by Borges & Ved Vyas)

Kavi-speak: On arranging a poet's work chronologically

A writer's inner world is often different from the outside world, and poems bring forth only clues from that inner world. The inner world is influenced by the events in the outside world, but the influence can be quite limited if the poet choses to fashion an inner world that is the most comforting for his self, maybe the most inspiring for his creativity. A  poem is a snapshot of a shadow, and to judge a person or his times or influences from that snapshot of a shadow is quite an imaginative task. A poet writes of separation though his beloved sleep next to him, and of embraces when there is no hope to meet the beloved, and sometimes it matters not if the neighborhood is rioting or if the outside world is falling apart.

As a poet ages, he understands the meaning of words better for the meaning now echoes a larger variety of sentiments, experiences and knowledge acquired through reading / living/ writing. But the poems themselves are a string of apt jewels or flowers, and the poems strung with proper jewels or flowers can be great even if they were strung together by a novice. A wiser, older poet might know the value of spending more energy or care in stringing more potent verses, but intention and ability of a poet are not enough to get the best work written. I suppose all poets live in this fear that they might never write a poem better than their favorite last one (or the favored last one); or they might not survive long enough to write the verses that have inevitability, originality, music and meaning to become immortalized in their language and even better, human history & literature.

(In response to a discussion about the value in arranging works of Mir Taqi Mir chronologically.)