Under revision
Offline indefinitely
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Vande Mataram
ANAND MATH
by Bankim Chandra Chatterji
Book Report Submitted by
Vivek Sharma (97365; Gr 1)
Feb 2001, Course taught by Prof Alok Rai
Vande Matram, the mantra, that was destined to inspire millions during India's struggle for freedom was born in Anand Math. Bankim Chandra Chatterji, through this revolutionary masterpiece, created the fuel and fire for Indian National Movement. Anand Math, an extraordinary political fiction, is a transcript of Bankim's genius. His creative flux energised the renaissance in Bengali and Indian literature and cultured the multitudes into a devotional patriotism towards his image of Mother India.
Bankim Chatterjee gave us what Sri Aurobindo has described as the religion of patriotism. Vande Mataram was banned, as was Anandmath. Yet the worship of Mother India or Bharat Mata once instituted was here to stay. Across the Indian political spectrum, regardless of ideological differences, the idea of the sacredness of the Motherland was widely accepted.
Bankim's work is a political drama, a discourse through dialogue, a proposal through paradigm. An epic, a legend, a saga, a history. The romance of Anand Math lies in its emphatic, passionate nature. While the novel was written, a whole nation waited to be born. We read Anand Math knowing the aftermath, hundred years back the novel would have inspired entirely different moods and reactions. (See addendum).
This English translation of Anand Math (the Abbey of Bliss), done by Basanta Koomar Roy, was first published in 1941, during a critical period when the independence movement had to take a decisive stand rejecting foreign rule. Hence, a mysterious physican's suggestion in last chapter of the original that spoke of the English presence as the necessary phase of reform was deleted. Since the original in Bengali is inaccessible to me yet, I am relying on the translation to provide me a picture of Bankim's work. Anand Math has also been an important celluloid success (Released in 1952, starring Prithvi Raj Kapoor, Geeta Bali, Bharat Bhusan, Pradip and Ajit, it was debut movie for Hemant Kumar as Music Director. The inspirational fast paced renderings of Vande Matram by Lata and Hemant and the song Om Jai Jagdish Sahare appeared in this movie).
Anandmath begins at an apocalyptic moment. There is a famine in Bengal—Mahendra Singh, his beautiful wife, Kalyani, and their little daughter Sukumari, are leaving their ancestral home in Padachina to tread the broad road to Calcutta. Though Mahendra is a rich landlord, he and his family are starving. Everywhere men, women, children and cattle are dying of hunger. Famished and angry, the impoverished villagers have taken to dacoity. Yet the tax collectors of the Government are unrelenting. Clearly, the British rule has reduced India to beggary.
Mohendra is separated from his wife and daughter. Mahatma Satya, the master of Anand Math rescues Kalyani and Sukumari from a group of robbers. Anand Math is located in deep forest. Bhavan, on Mahatma's behest, brings Mahendra to the forest. Here Bhavan bursts into the famous song 'Vande Mataram':
"Mother, hail!
Thou with sweet springs flowing,
Thou fair springs bestowing,
Cool with zephyrs blowing,
Green with corn-crops growing,
Mother, hail!"
(Translation by anonmous)
Mahendra, astonished to hear such a song, and wondering what mother stands for remarks, "This refers to a country, and not to a mortal mother." Bhavan then says that Mother India is their Mother, and all other relationships for them are non-existant. Hearing these words, Mahendra too joins the song. He learns that the "Children" (sanyasis of Anand Math) are organising a revolt against the British to free the "Mother India". Later, Mahatma of Anandmath Satya, first shows Mahendra a gigantic, imposing, resplendent image of ancient India. Then he takes him to a second image, where map of India is in tags and tears, and says, 'This is the what our Mother India is today.' A sword hangs over this image, which the Mahatma says represnts that British rule with a sword, and hence India can be freed only by a sword. Lastly he shows him 'a golden India-bright, beautiful, full of glory and dignity.' Satya explains that "this is the Mother as she is destined to be".
Mahendra refuses to take the vow of utter devotion to Mother India, which meant renouncing his wife and child. His wife refusing to be a weakening factor in her husband's discharge of duties poisons herself. Before Mahendra could cremate his wife, he and Mahatma are arrested by the British. Jiban, Mahatma's right hand man, finds Sukumari and entrusts her to the loving care of his sister. In the process, he meets his wife Shanti, who he had vowed not to see before his duty is done and to the atonement of both sins. Bhavan saves the life of Kalyani and becomes entranced by her beauty. Mahendra thinks that is wife is dead, and eventually gets initiated into the order of sanyasis. Children rescue Mahatma and Mahendra from the jail, but are defeated by British forces in a pitched battle, where appears and swords of sanyasis lose to cannons and guns of British.
Shanti, Jiban's wife, was a woman with a difference. She dressed like boys throughout her childhood, and had travelled far and wide with a group of sanyasis. She was both mentally and physically strong and possessed charming features. She too enters the order, dressed as man to be christened Navin. But soon after Mahatma finds out her real identity. She convinces him with her physical strength and demeanour that she would not hamper her husband on his discharge of duties. Mahendra is sent to Padachina, entrusted with the task of building a fort there. Mahatma planned that the fort to act as treasury and factory for manufacturing arms. Shanti is allowed to stay in Anand Math. Her new role both surprises and pleases Jiban, and she keeps him away and alert of his duties.
The famine ends, but in absence of living population, dense forests replace the erstwhile villages. Children are able to entice many hundred followers into their order. The Children slowly start to gain strength, and defeat British forces in many minor clashes, looting their arms and treasuries. Bhavan falls in love with Kalyani, and is willing to break all his vows to make her his wife. Kalyani shoes him away and he realises that death was his only his atonement.
The British, under the command of Captain Thomas, attack the children. After a hard-pitched battle, the Children humble the British. The British were about to win, when seventeen cannons from Padachina arrive well in time at the battlefield turning the tide in favor of the Children. Bhavan dies in this battle. Kalyani, Sukumari and Mahendra, and Jiban and Shanti all happily reunite at the fort of Padachina. The British, once humbled, now relaunched a strategic offensive against the Children under the command of Major Edwards. The British are again defeated, Jiban fights like a superhero, fighting alone, when his compatriots desert him, succumbs to multiple injuries and is lost in heaps of dead in battlefield. Shanti finds him, a mysterious Mahatma heals him and disappears. Jiban role in Service of Mother ends with this sacrifice. A revived Jiban and Shanti walk away hand in hand. Singing Vande Mataram, they soon disappear out of sight.
Vande Mataram had hence become the national anthem during the struggle for freedom. The fact that Rabindranath Tagore's Jana Gana Mana replaced it after independence, as a concession to Muslim susceptibilities, highlights the nature of the freedom movement. Anadmath has inspired both the nationalists and the fundamentalists. Bankim synthesized the Western secular concept of nationalism with the tradition and needs of Hindus even if he was thinking in terms of Bengal and not India when he wrote. He enunciated a specific relationship between culture and power, that certain cultural values are more advantageous than others in the pursuance of power. Since these attributes are not congenital characteristics, but the product of cultural conditioning, they can be developed through the cultivation of appropriate national-cultural values. To this merit he aroused the cultural and idealogical identity of Indians, majority of them being Hindus. In this respect, I believe that whatever comparisons are there between the Hindu goddesses (Durga, Kali, Lakhshmi or Saraswati) with mother India, they are meant to enspirit the Indian soul with a devotion towards the diefied country.
Such a deification of the country as we know was to inspire many millions of Indians throughout the freedom struggle. Aurobindo himself considered to be a prophet of Indian nationalism, during his revolutionary phase wanted a Bharat Mata Mandir to be established in every province of India. These temples were to be the nucleus of revolutionaries who like Bankim's sanyasis would dedicate their lives to the freedom of the country. Thus the Indian revolutionaries, who were an important part of the struggle for freedom, also derived their inspiration from spirituality and religious sources. Of course such patriotism, taken to its extreme, may breed chauvinistic nationalism.
Analysing the causes of India's prolonged subjugation as a nation, Bankim rejected the orientalist construct that this subjugation stemmed from Indian's lack of physical strength and courage and that the gentleness of the Hindu sprang from his emasculation. Bankim rather attributed this long history of subjugation to their lack of natural desire for liberty. Indians have never felt a compelling desire for their own liberty nor have they ever fought for it. Bankim held that Hindu society's subjection was owing to the lack of solidarity in their midst. The Hindu attitude towards power is undermined and weakened by its religio-cultural emphasis on vairagya (renunciation and other-worldliness) and niyati (fatalism). Thus Bankim's explanation of the causes of India's subjection is not in terms of material and physical strength but is rather in terms of culture. More specifically it is an explanation which owe's its genesis to cultural differences -- that while some cultural attributes make some civilisations particularly equipped for power, other opposite and specific attributes make the Indians notoriously negligent towards the same. This, in brief, is contemporary Hindu nationalism's basic premise concerning culture and power and this premise is repeatedly evident in its mobilizational literature, verbal ideological discourse, and through their ephemera which loosely translated would read as follows:
Your Hindu blood has gone cold, it is no less cold than ice
Sons of brave Shivaji are your hands bereft of power
Awake! Arise! you are born of lionesses; You have to wear the Saffron Headband,
Swear by the son of Kaushaliya and resolve to build the temple there,
He who comes as Ravana will die an untimely death,
The temple will now be built there where Shri Ram was born !
According to Bhavan's book, Vande Mataram by Moni Bagchee, (pg . 66), ``Bankin Chandra composed the song in an inspired moment, Rabindranath sang it by setting a tune to it and it was left to the genius of Aurobindo to interpret the deeper meaning of the song out of which India received the philosophy of new Nationalism.'' Shri Aurobindo's birthday was also on 15th of August.
Translation by Shri Aurobindo Ghose
Mother, I bow to thee!
Rich with thy hurrying streams,
bright with orchard gleams,
Cool with thy winds of delight,
Dark fields waving
Mother of might,
Mother free.
Glory of moonlight dreams,
Over thy branches and lordly streams,
Clad in thy blossoming trees,
Mother, giver of ease
Laughing low and sweet!
Mother I kiss thy feet,
Speaker sweet and low!
Mother, to thee I bow.
Who hath said thou art weak in thy lands,
When the sword flesh out in the seventy million hands
And seventy million voices roar
Thy dreadful name from shore to shore?
With many strengths who art mighty and stored,
To thee I call Mother and Lord!
Though who savest, arise and save!
To her I cry who ever her foeman drove
Back from plain and Sea
And shook herself free.
Thou art wisdom, thou art law,
Thou art heart, our soul, our breath
Though art love divine, the awe
In our hearts that conquers death.
Thine the strength that nervs the arm,
Thine the beauty, thine the charm.
Every image made divine
In our temples is but thine.
Thou art Durga, Lady and Queen,
With her hands that strike and her swords of sheen,
Thou art Lakshmi lotus-throned,
And the Muse a hundred-toned,
Pure and perfect without peer,
Mother lend thine ear,
Rich with thy hurrying streams,
Bright with thy orchard gleems,
Dark of hue O candid-fair
In thy soul, with jewelled hair
And thy glorious smile divine,
Lovilest of all earthly lands,
Showering wealth from well-stored hands!
Mother, mother mine!
Mother sweet, I bow to thee,
Mother great and free!
Reference
http://sanskrit.gde.to/all_txt/vande.txt
by Bankim Chandra Chatterji
Book Report Submitted by
Vivek Sharma (97365; Gr 1)
Feb 2001, Course taught by Prof Alok Rai
Vande Matram, the mantra, that was destined to inspire millions during India's struggle for freedom was born in Anand Math. Bankim Chandra Chatterji, through this revolutionary masterpiece, created the fuel and fire for Indian National Movement. Anand Math, an extraordinary political fiction, is a transcript of Bankim's genius. His creative flux energised the renaissance in Bengali and Indian literature and cultured the multitudes into a devotional patriotism towards his image of Mother India.
Bankim Chatterjee gave us what Sri Aurobindo has described as the religion of patriotism. Vande Mataram was banned, as was Anandmath. Yet the worship of Mother India or Bharat Mata once instituted was here to stay. Across the Indian political spectrum, regardless of ideological differences, the idea of the sacredness of the Motherland was widely accepted.
Bankim's work is a political drama, a discourse through dialogue, a proposal through paradigm. An epic, a legend, a saga, a history. The romance of Anand Math lies in its emphatic, passionate nature. While the novel was written, a whole nation waited to be born. We read Anand Math knowing the aftermath, hundred years back the novel would have inspired entirely different moods and reactions. (See addendum).
This English translation of Anand Math (the Abbey of Bliss), done by Basanta Koomar Roy, was first published in 1941, during a critical period when the independence movement had to take a decisive stand rejecting foreign rule. Hence, a mysterious physican's suggestion in last chapter of the original that spoke of the English presence as the necessary phase of reform was deleted. Since the original in Bengali is inaccessible to me yet, I am relying on the translation to provide me a picture of Bankim's work. Anand Math has also been an important celluloid success (Released in 1952, starring Prithvi Raj Kapoor, Geeta Bali, Bharat Bhusan, Pradip and Ajit, it was debut movie for Hemant Kumar as Music Director. The inspirational fast paced renderings of Vande Matram by Lata and Hemant and the song Om Jai Jagdish Sahare appeared in this movie).
Anandmath begins at an apocalyptic moment. There is a famine in Bengal—Mahendra Singh, his beautiful wife, Kalyani, and their little daughter Sukumari, are leaving their ancestral home in Padachina to tread the broad road to Calcutta. Though Mahendra is a rich landlord, he and his family are starving. Everywhere men, women, children and cattle are dying of hunger. Famished and angry, the impoverished villagers have taken to dacoity. Yet the tax collectors of the Government are unrelenting. Clearly, the British rule has reduced India to beggary.
Mohendra is separated from his wife and daughter. Mahatma Satya, the master of Anand Math rescues Kalyani and Sukumari from a group of robbers. Anand Math is located in deep forest. Bhavan, on Mahatma's behest, brings Mahendra to the forest. Here Bhavan bursts into the famous song 'Vande Mataram':
"Mother, hail!
Thou with sweet springs flowing,
Thou fair springs bestowing,
Cool with zephyrs blowing,
Green with corn-crops growing,
Mother, hail!"
(Translation by anonmous)
Mahendra, astonished to hear such a song, and wondering what mother stands for remarks, "This refers to a country, and not to a mortal mother." Bhavan then says that Mother India is their Mother, and all other relationships for them are non-existant. Hearing these words, Mahendra too joins the song. He learns that the "Children" (sanyasis of Anand Math) are organising a revolt against the British to free the "Mother India". Later, Mahatma of Anandmath Satya, first shows Mahendra a gigantic, imposing, resplendent image of ancient India. Then he takes him to a second image, where map of India is in tags and tears, and says, 'This is the what our Mother India is today.' A sword hangs over this image, which the Mahatma says represnts that British rule with a sword, and hence India can be freed only by a sword. Lastly he shows him 'a golden India-bright, beautiful, full of glory and dignity.' Satya explains that "this is the Mother as she is destined to be".
Mahendra refuses to take the vow of utter devotion to Mother India, which meant renouncing his wife and child. His wife refusing to be a weakening factor in her husband's discharge of duties poisons herself. Before Mahendra could cremate his wife, he and Mahatma are arrested by the British. Jiban, Mahatma's right hand man, finds Sukumari and entrusts her to the loving care of his sister. In the process, he meets his wife Shanti, who he had vowed not to see before his duty is done and to the atonement of both sins. Bhavan saves the life of Kalyani and becomes entranced by her beauty. Mahendra thinks that is wife is dead, and eventually gets initiated into the order of sanyasis. Children rescue Mahatma and Mahendra from the jail, but are defeated by British forces in a pitched battle, where appears and swords of sanyasis lose to cannons and guns of British.
Shanti, Jiban's wife, was a woman with a difference. She dressed like boys throughout her childhood, and had travelled far and wide with a group of sanyasis. She was both mentally and physically strong and possessed charming features. She too enters the order, dressed as man to be christened Navin. But soon after Mahatma finds out her real identity. She convinces him with her physical strength and demeanour that she would not hamper her husband on his discharge of duties. Mahendra is sent to Padachina, entrusted with the task of building a fort there. Mahatma planned that the fort to act as treasury and factory for manufacturing arms. Shanti is allowed to stay in Anand Math. Her new role both surprises and pleases Jiban, and she keeps him away and alert of his duties.
The famine ends, but in absence of living population, dense forests replace the erstwhile villages. Children are able to entice many hundred followers into their order. The Children slowly start to gain strength, and defeat British forces in many minor clashes, looting their arms and treasuries. Bhavan falls in love with Kalyani, and is willing to break all his vows to make her his wife. Kalyani shoes him away and he realises that death was his only his atonement.
The British, under the command of Captain Thomas, attack the children. After a hard-pitched battle, the Children humble the British. The British were about to win, when seventeen cannons from Padachina arrive well in time at the battlefield turning the tide in favor of the Children. Bhavan dies in this battle. Kalyani, Sukumari and Mahendra, and Jiban and Shanti all happily reunite at the fort of Padachina. The British, once humbled, now relaunched a strategic offensive against the Children under the command of Major Edwards. The British are again defeated, Jiban fights like a superhero, fighting alone, when his compatriots desert him, succumbs to multiple injuries and is lost in heaps of dead in battlefield. Shanti finds him, a mysterious Mahatma heals him and disappears. Jiban role in Service of Mother ends with this sacrifice. A revived Jiban and Shanti walk away hand in hand. Singing Vande Mataram, they soon disappear out of sight.
Vande Mataram had hence become the national anthem during the struggle for freedom. The fact that Rabindranath Tagore's Jana Gana Mana replaced it after independence, as a concession to Muslim susceptibilities, highlights the nature of the freedom movement. Anadmath has inspired both the nationalists and the fundamentalists. Bankim synthesized the Western secular concept of nationalism with the tradition and needs of Hindus even if he was thinking in terms of Bengal and not India when he wrote. He enunciated a specific relationship between culture and power, that certain cultural values are more advantageous than others in the pursuance of power. Since these attributes are not congenital characteristics, but the product of cultural conditioning, they can be developed through the cultivation of appropriate national-cultural values. To this merit he aroused the cultural and idealogical identity of Indians, majority of them being Hindus. In this respect, I believe that whatever comparisons are there between the Hindu goddesses (Durga, Kali, Lakhshmi or Saraswati) with mother India, they are meant to enspirit the Indian soul with a devotion towards the diefied country.
Such a deification of the country as we know was to inspire many millions of Indians throughout the freedom struggle. Aurobindo himself considered to be a prophet of Indian nationalism, during his revolutionary phase wanted a Bharat Mata Mandir to be established in every province of India. These temples were to be the nucleus of revolutionaries who like Bankim's sanyasis would dedicate their lives to the freedom of the country. Thus the Indian revolutionaries, who were an important part of the struggle for freedom, also derived their inspiration from spirituality and religious sources. Of course such patriotism, taken to its extreme, may breed chauvinistic nationalism.
Analysing the causes of India's prolonged subjugation as a nation, Bankim rejected the orientalist construct that this subjugation stemmed from Indian's lack of physical strength and courage and that the gentleness of the Hindu sprang from his emasculation. Bankim rather attributed this long history of subjugation to their lack of natural desire for liberty. Indians have never felt a compelling desire for their own liberty nor have they ever fought for it. Bankim held that Hindu society's subjection was owing to the lack of solidarity in their midst. The Hindu attitude towards power is undermined and weakened by its religio-cultural emphasis on vairagya (renunciation and other-worldliness) and niyati (fatalism). Thus Bankim's explanation of the causes of India's subjection is not in terms of material and physical strength but is rather in terms of culture. More specifically it is an explanation which owe's its genesis to cultural differences -- that while some cultural attributes make some civilisations particularly equipped for power, other opposite and specific attributes make the Indians notoriously negligent towards the same. This, in brief, is contemporary Hindu nationalism's basic premise concerning culture and power and this premise is repeatedly evident in its mobilizational literature, verbal ideological discourse, and through their ephemera which loosely translated would read as follows:
Your Hindu blood has gone cold, it is no less cold than ice
Sons of brave Shivaji are your hands bereft of power
Awake! Arise! you are born of lionesses; You have to wear the Saffron Headband,
Swear by the son of Kaushaliya and resolve to build the temple there,
He who comes as Ravana will die an untimely death,
The temple will now be built there where Shri Ram was born !
According to Bhavan's book, Vande Mataram by Moni Bagchee, (pg . 66), ``Bankin Chandra composed the song in an inspired moment, Rabindranath sang it by setting a tune to it and it was left to the genius of Aurobindo to interpret the deeper meaning of the song out of which India received the philosophy of new Nationalism.'' Shri Aurobindo's birthday was also on 15th of August.
Translation by Shri Aurobindo Ghose
Mother, I bow to thee!
Rich with thy hurrying streams,
bright with orchard gleams,
Cool with thy winds of delight,
Dark fields waving
Mother of might,
Mother free.
Glory of moonlight dreams,
Over thy branches and lordly streams,
Clad in thy blossoming trees,
Mother, giver of ease
Laughing low and sweet!
Mother I kiss thy feet,
Speaker sweet and low!
Mother, to thee I bow.
Who hath said thou art weak in thy lands,
When the sword flesh out in the seventy million hands
And seventy million voices roar
Thy dreadful name from shore to shore?
With many strengths who art mighty and stored,
To thee I call Mother and Lord!
Though who savest, arise and save!
To her I cry who ever her foeman drove
Back from plain and Sea
And shook herself free.
Thou art wisdom, thou art law,
Thou art heart, our soul, our breath
Though art love divine, the awe
In our hearts that conquers death.
Thine the strength that nervs the arm,
Thine the beauty, thine the charm.
Every image made divine
In our temples is but thine.
Thou art Durga, Lady and Queen,
With her hands that strike and her swords of sheen,
Thou art Lakshmi lotus-throned,
And the Muse a hundred-toned,
Pure and perfect without peer,
Mother lend thine ear,
Rich with thy hurrying streams,
Bright with thy orchard gleems,
Dark of hue O candid-fair
In thy soul, with jewelled hair
And thy glorious smile divine,
Lovilest of all earthly lands,
Showering wealth from well-stored hands!
Mother, mother mine!
Mother sweet, I bow to thee,
Mother great and free!
Reference
http://sanskrit.gde.to/all_txt/vande.txt
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Ek nanha daanth (translation of A little tooth by Thomas Lux)
एक नन्हा दाँत
तुम्हारी बिटिया उगाती है इक दाँत, फिर दो
और चार, और पाँच, फिर चाहती है कुछ माँस
सीधे हड्डी से. अब सब
ख़तम: वो सीखेगी चाँद शब्द, वो लूडक आएगी
प्यार में किसी नालायाक, निरे मुरख के, कोई मृिदुभाषी
कारावास के पटल पर और तुम
तुम्हारी पत्नी, होंगे बुरे, बेइज़्ज़त, और नहीं
कोई पछतावा. तुमने किया, तुमने चाहा, तुम्हारे पैर
सूज गाये हैं साँझ है बड़ी हो गयी है तुम्हारी बेटी.
Ek nanha daanth
Tumhaari bitiya ugaati hai ikk daanth, fir doe
aur chaar, aur paanch, fir chahaati hai kuchh maans
seedhay haddi se. Ab sab
khatam: woh seekhaygi chand shabd, woh ludak-aegi
pyaar mein kisi nalayak, niray murakh ke, koi mridubhaashi
kaaravaas ke pathh par. Aur tum
tumhaari patni, honge burray, be-izzatt, aur nahin
koi pachhtaava. Tumne kiya, tumne chaahaa, tumhaare pairr
sooj gaye hain. Saanjh hai. Barri ho gayee tumhari beti.
Translator: Vivek
A little tooth *
by Thomas Lux
Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all
over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,
your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.
****
* From New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995, published by Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
****
Critiques welcome
तुम्हारी बिटिया उगाती है इक दाँत, फिर दो
और चार, और पाँच, फिर चाहती है कुछ माँस
सीधे हड्डी से. अब सब
ख़तम: वो सीखेगी चाँद शब्द, वो लूडक आएगी
प्यार में किसी नालायाक, निरे मुरख के, कोई मृिदुभाषी
कारावास के पटल पर और तुम
तुम्हारी पत्नी, होंगे बुरे, बेइज़्ज़त, और नहीं
कोई पछतावा. तुमने किया, तुमने चाहा, तुम्हारे पैर
सूज गाये हैं साँझ है बड़ी हो गयी है तुम्हारी बेटी.
Ek nanha daanth
Tumhaari bitiya ugaati hai ikk daanth, fir doe
aur chaar, aur paanch, fir chahaati hai kuchh maans
seedhay haddi se. Ab sab
khatam: woh seekhaygi chand shabd, woh ludak-aegi
pyaar mein kisi nalayak, niray murakh ke, koi mridubhaashi
kaaravaas ke pathh par. Aur tum
tumhaari patni, honge burray, be-izzatt, aur nahin
koi pachhtaava. Tumne kiya, tumne chaahaa, tumhaare pairr
sooj gaye hain. Saanjh hai. Barri ho gayee tumhari beti.
Translator: Vivek
A little tooth *
by Thomas Lux
Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all
over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,
your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.
****
* From New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995, published by Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
****
Critiques welcome
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Monday, February 13, 2006
Random Graduate Student thoughts on Love And Everything
A harmless question, that one must ask himself everytime he gets fired or fried. When other people ask me "Whats up?" or "Whats happening", my reflex answer is "Nothing much". The answer does not seem to go down all to well with my boss as well as my parents. Like everyone else in the universe, they want me to graduate, get a life, a wife and fat salary. I am not sure how much a wife helps, for I have seen friends with pangs of guilt while doing their usual procastinations, and the burden of "Whats going on" usually grows in a way that they need to graduate at the end of a nine month term. Of course, everyone except the graduate student is unhappy with the way it ends, because it is only after writing the epic thesis, that he understands who and what the story was all about. What you relish as an afterthought is sometimes a smile on your lip, but mostly it is a lump in your throat. A lump in the throat: Shaadi ka ladoo (the Candy of Marriage); a lump in the throat: Haphazardly finished thesis.
It is NOT the Tale of Two Lumps (and I am no Dickens either). We have a continuum of lumps, where graduate students do a Brownian motion, hopping from one lump to another. I am developing a good understanding of dynamics in complex fluids by looking at how my fellow students and I behave. Invariably, someone somewhere waits for you (to trap you, but of course, you can't tell the millions who believe there is someone somewhere that all this is a marketing gimmick, what will all these Valentine Day salesman and shoppers do if only they knew!)
Lets assume that everyone knew that someone somewhere is a marketing gimmick. Will this make the world a better place? According to the widely known (well EVEN you know them now) and unpublished thoughts of Vivek Sharma, "The human society without the attraction of someone somewhere would be like universe without gravity. The attraction keeps us together, but the presence of lumps, bumps, thumps, centrifugal force created when love turns you into a satellite about the planet of your interest, hypocrisy, regional and religious EXCUSES, the linearity of time that makes all wonderful options too old or too young for us, BOREDOM, geometrical differences and even digestive troubles, the presence of aforementioned things and a few more that my collegues will come up with to show they can also think and talk in lumpy language, all these things ensure world goes on."
Digestive troubles implies all the conversations that cannot be swallowed or digested easily. The paramount abundance of gossip is like the prevelance of junk food and spam mail, these three form the trinity of elements that are driving the modern society forward. Forward to NUThood. The Queen of United Kingdom of Sensationalia offered me NUThood once, and I could have accepted it but I couldn't beause of the geopolitical reasons. Geo as I cannot just drive into Sensationalia (using that car, of course not), Political as I believe in this age of DEMONcracy, the idea of having Queens and NUThood is as poignant as having Shakespeare on earth again, asked to create rewrite everything in Modern English (sans thou, sans thee, sans speaketh).
A ROLLING STONE gathers no moss. But A ROLLING STONE gathers money. I am going to rewrite idioms, for they are outdated. It is better to have loved and lost, then to have never loved is a gimmick of some loser which seems to be overused in our society. (Some people substitute loved by fucked and grin from ear to ear, but I tell them their thinking is equally fucked up). Ah! The banality of it all: the pink flush on the cheek, the shy, stolen slances, the holding of those incredibly beautiful hands and then (read really fast and loud what follows) the first fiesty kiss that was to be implanted on hand or forehead or cheek but somehow missed these tragets and landed up like an alien spaceship on the glorious terrain of endless ecstasy and then withdrawal where the heart is in a burning flame that can be quenched only by another explosion where two bodies entwined each other by mathematically intractible topologies ruin each other. Atomic fusion has already been mastered by the genetic programming of our hungry, craving cells, and they asked me why I am being so MUSHY and why my words are now like whsipers which hope to fall on an ear or two or it does not even matter how many, for they come and go like seasons and when they are there the spring is there too, and they leave like fall with my yellow hopes dancing to the autumn wind till it is all covered by the shroud of snow, and this is the melting snow that you see, I am ready for the spring again, and of course, I will tell you what made me mushy, its the melting snow. Oh! The banality of it all. Damn! I miss it now.
I was ruined that day my dear, when you filled me with so much passion that all I could utter, sounded like croaks, there were lumps inside bigger than those toads and I turned into a Prince with your kiss and embrace and the neighbouring dog barked his heart out for somehow magically, like in Bollywood movies, an orchestra played Take my Breath away out of the tune and it turned out that it was my apartment-mates who had taken out their rusted hands to JAZZ up the environment with tunes that were in sync with the visionary effect of VODKA, they sang with more relish and harmony out of tune than they ever did while they sang Happy Birthday tunes to wish their lost hopes who placed cakes bought by one of these in the mouths of the opportunist alternative who stepped closer at the right moment and to make it most beautisul asked my apartmentmate in question to click a KODAK MOMENT for later lamentations. You filled me with so much passion that thinking of it now throws me into a world of Rushdie and Marquez, and my thoughts appear in my heart like the poems of Neruda singling you out for my precious dedication (and you here refers to any YOU, who SPRINGS me out of the mush of this molten snow, for tears that I shed for a one you this winter have frozen with the coldness of that heart).
Ah! Of course, all this is manifestation of my stealing the time away from the purpose of my life, which is not just procreation by the way, but a two hundred page document for the moment (besides 400 page novel and 100 poems I will finish while thinking about 200 page THESIS), the document I must conjure to GET out of here. My friends have often told me that I have no difficulty in doing so, for they truly trust in my talent for making a molehill in the moutain of possibilities. I suspect I will get a lot of fanmail for glamorizing Graduate Students by writing this piece, but well, trust me these are my own personal, though random, thoughts, and my research has revealed that the features displayed by the experimental data documented here, have some universal features, and my work presented here will lay the foundation for hitherto poorly understood working of the graduatestudentmind. We touched upon the questions of Love and Everthing as well, but it is crystal clear now that the presence of randomness and uncertainity (their product is PLanck's constant raised to power Planck's constant), the presence of these two in minds of women, and the Aaf Bau Principle that prevents having more than two in one story, will always lead to lumpy graduate students, who will finish writing their THESIS, after they finish their blogs and most probably after this season of MUSH.
by Vivek Sharma
Flaunting, without accepting , NUThood of UK of Sensationalia
Random Spokesperson for LUMPY Graduate Students
DEMONcrat Street, Land of MUSH
Procastinating 24 7 365
It is NOT the Tale of Two Lumps (and I am no Dickens either). We have a continuum of lumps, where graduate students do a Brownian motion, hopping from one lump to another. I am developing a good understanding of dynamics in complex fluids by looking at how my fellow students and I behave. Invariably, someone somewhere waits for you (to trap you, but of course, you can't tell the millions who believe there is someone somewhere that all this is a marketing gimmick, what will all these Valentine Day salesman and shoppers do if only they knew!)
Lets assume that everyone knew that someone somewhere is a marketing gimmick. Will this make the world a better place? According to the widely known (well EVEN you know them now) and unpublished thoughts of Vivek Sharma, "The human society without the attraction of someone somewhere would be like universe without gravity. The attraction keeps us together, but the presence of lumps, bumps, thumps, centrifugal force created when love turns you into a satellite about the planet of your interest, hypocrisy, regional and religious EXCUSES, the linearity of time that makes all wonderful options too old or too young for us, BOREDOM, geometrical differences and even digestive troubles, the presence of aforementioned things and a few more that my collegues will come up with to show they can also think and talk in lumpy language, all these things ensure world goes on."
Digestive troubles implies all the conversations that cannot be swallowed or digested easily. The paramount abundance of gossip is like the prevelance of junk food and spam mail, these three form the trinity of elements that are driving the modern society forward. Forward to NUThood. The Queen of United Kingdom of Sensationalia offered me NUThood once, and I could have accepted it but I couldn't beause of the geopolitical reasons. Geo as I cannot just drive into Sensationalia (using that car, of course not), Political as I believe in this age of DEMONcracy, the idea of having Queens and NUThood is as poignant as having Shakespeare on earth again, asked to create rewrite everything in Modern English (sans thou, sans thee, sans speaketh).
A ROLLING STONE gathers no moss. But A ROLLING STONE gathers money. I am going to rewrite idioms, for they are outdated. It is better to have loved and lost, then to have never loved is a gimmick of some loser which seems to be overused in our society. (Some people substitute loved by fucked and grin from ear to ear, but I tell them their thinking is equally fucked up). Ah! The banality of it all: the pink flush on the cheek, the shy, stolen slances, the holding of those incredibly beautiful hands and then (read really fast and loud what follows) the first fiesty kiss that was to be implanted on hand or forehead or cheek but somehow missed these tragets and landed up like an alien spaceship on the glorious terrain of endless ecstasy and then withdrawal where the heart is in a burning flame that can be quenched only by another explosion where two bodies entwined each other by mathematically intractible topologies ruin each other. Atomic fusion has already been mastered by the genetic programming of our hungry, craving cells, and they asked me why I am being so MUSHY and why my words are now like whsipers which hope to fall on an ear or two or it does not even matter how many, for they come and go like seasons and when they are there the spring is there too, and they leave like fall with my yellow hopes dancing to the autumn wind till it is all covered by the shroud of snow, and this is the melting snow that you see, I am ready for the spring again, and of course, I will tell you what made me mushy, its the melting snow. Oh! The banality of it all. Damn! I miss it now.
I was ruined that day my dear, when you filled me with so much passion that all I could utter, sounded like croaks, there were lumps inside bigger than those toads and I turned into a Prince with your kiss and embrace and the neighbouring dog barked his heart out for somehow magically, like in Bollywood movies, an orchestra played Take my Breath away out of the tune and it turned out that it was my apartment-mates who had taken out their rusted hands to JAZZ up the environment with tunes that were in sync with the visionary effect of VODKA, they sang with more relish and harmony out of tune than they ever did while they sang Happy Birthday tunes to wish their lost hopes who placed cakes bought by one of these in the mouths of the opportunist alternative who stepped closer at the right moment and to make it most beautisul asked my apartmentmate in question to click a KODAK MOMENT for later lamentations. You filled me with so much passion that thinking of it now throws me into a world of Rushdie and Marquez, and my thoughts appear in my heart like the poems of Neruda singling you out for my precious dedication (and you here refers to any YOU, who SPRINGS me out of the mush of this molten snow, for tears that I shed for a one you this winter have frozen with the coldness of that heart).
Ah! Of course, all this is manifestation of my stealing the time away from the purpose of my life, which is not just procreation by the way, but a two hundred page document for the moment (besides 400 page novel and 100 poems I will finish while thinking about 200 page THESIS), the document I must conjure to GET out of here. My friends have often told me that I have no difficulty in doing so, for they truly trust in my talent for making a molehill in the moutain of possibilities. I suspect I will get a lot of fanmail for glamorizing Graduate Students by writing this piece, but well, trust me these are my own personal, though random, thoughts, and my research has revealed that the features displayed by the experimental data documented here, have some universal features, and my work presented here will lay the foundation for hitherto poorly understood working of the graduatestudentmind. We touched upon the questions of Love and Everthing as well, but it is crystal clear now that the presence of randomness and uncertainity (their product is PLanck's constant raised to power Planck's constant), the presence of these two in minds of women, and the Aaf Bau Principle that prevents having more than two in one story, will always lead to lumpy graduate students, who will finish writing their THESIS, after they finish their blogs and most probably after this season of MUSH.
by Vivek Sharma
Flaunting, without accepting , NUThood of UK of Sensationalia
Random Spokesperson for LUMPY Graduate Students
DEMONcrat Street, Land of MUSH
Procastinating 24 7 365
Sunday, February 05, 2006
Pigeon Love
My heart is a cooing pigeon
My words, wings flapped to lurch
I desire to beak, my love
Nestle with you, o feathertouch.
Don't flutter your wings so fast, mister
Save your swoops, glides and gush
I am a freebird and quite like it
Flings I'll love, but there's no rush.
O white white dove, what art thou inspire
One chirp from you, unfurls paeans of desire
Just perch with me sometimes, lets fly together
Over the sprawling gardens, in this nice weather.
O how can I trust thee, thy ashen self
If your baggage is loaded, with motives stealth
And wonder what fleeting ideas will form
In their hearts, for whom, later I may long.
O high flying princess of blue skies
Your purity cannot be put to doubt
I promise platonic companionship, joys
Pleasantaries you must not do without.
O flatterer you amuse me (make me blush)
You may sing serenades, but don't expect much
Whatever you indulge in, you do at your own accord
I don't need or want you (I say for the record).
My dearest, your flight is a dance
Your curves, the summers of romance
I know you've told me no before
But I must know if is altered your stance.
You said you'd be just a friend
And I so depended upon your word
O charmer, this is it, don't see me again
I should have known, it would turn so absurd!
Hush my sweetest, don't wail so bitter
I am only a bird, I need to twitter
I have feelings, that fly their own routes
You are so beautiful that pining always sprouts.
Enough of your cooing, all cajoling, now begone
I was much better off, just being all alone
You made me smile, but at the expense of much grief
Henceforth we part, go fly beyond Edens of makebelief.
Jan 07, 2006
4 pm, Starbucks
Atlanta GA
My words, wings flapped to lurch
I desire to beak, my love
Nestle with you, o feathertouch.
Don't flutter your wings so fast, mister
Save your swoops, glides and gush
I am a freebird and quite like it
Flings I'll love, but there's no rush.
O white white dove, what art thou inspire
One chirp from you, unfurls paeans of desire
Just perch with me sometimes, lets fly together
Over the sprawling gardens, in this nice weather.
O how can I trust thee, thy ashen self
If your baggage is loaded, with motives stealth
And wonder what fleeting ideas will form
In their hearts, for whom, later I may long.
O high flying princess of blue skies
Your purity cannot be put to doubt
I promise platonic companionship, joys
Pleasantaries you must not do without.
O flatterer you amuse me (make me blush)
You may sing serenades, but don't expect much
Whatever you indulge in, you do at your own accord
I don't need or want you (I say for the record).
My dearest, your flight is a dance
Your curves, the summers of romance
I know you've told me no before
But I must know if is altered your stance.
You said you'd be just a friend
And I so depended upon your word
O charmer, this is it, don't see me again
I should have known, it would turn so absurd!
Hush my sweetest, don't wail so bitter
I am only a bird, I need to twitter
I have feelings, that fly their own routes
You are so beautiful that pining always sprouts.
Enough of your cooing, all cajoling, now begone
I was much better off, just being all alone
You made me smile, but at the expense of much grief
Henceforth we part, go fly beyond Edens of makebelief.
Jan 07, 2006
4 pm, Starbucks
Atlanta GA
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