July 2010

From the Brown Critique pages

i.
Whispers

Nissim Ezekiel

Nissim Ezekiel
1.
When the day is over,
let it go.
Don’t try and stay awake
to get some more work done.
Flow into the night.

2.
Say No to Positive Thinking
When the evidence is Negative.
That, too, is holy ground.
Walk on it quietly;
don’t moralise, don’t explain it
as the Will of God.

3.
If you can’t sleep,
remain awake peacefully.
In the darkness, be darkness.

4.
Some food is perfect,
needs no sauce,
no comparisons.
Eat, be grateful,
and turn away from it.

5.
In Central Park, New York,
a friend said:
Let’s get out of here,
I heard it’s not safe,
So we got out.
A beautiful place, but not safe;
a human place after all.

6.
How much have I lived!
Whatever I could take, I took –
and it was good.
Now I need
to make it good for others.

7.
In Rotterdam
or some other city
I made friends
(What else could I do?)
with many I met.
They showed me around,
paid for our drinks,
we talked about our lives and things.
Then, of course, the letters,
and, then, of course, the silences.
Only in heaven or hell
are people always together.

8.
From barrenness and boredom
to a revelation
is only one small leap.
If only you prepare for it,
it happens.

9.
What I say to my soul
is not important.
What my soul says to me
lights up the universe.

10.
A good waiter
takes the orders patiently,
and serves what was ordered.
So should the poet
in his invisible café.

11.
Know that you are half-blind,
and clearly see
the simplified act of will.
Then, as in a dream, you see yourself
transformed.
Enact that dream.

12.
Surprise
at the first sprouting
of a white flag
among the pubic hair,
collapses into shame
and humiliation. Blood
protests, erect in rage.
The phallic god
knows neither youth nor age.

13.
Develop subtlety,
then give it up.
You are not what you develop
or give up.
You are only the process
of growing up.

14.
Whatever happens
every day,
the sun shines on you.
Shine back!
Shine back!
Even if only
with a little pocket mirror.

15.
Harsh. Unfair.
Your enemy
is telling you the truth.
Do not turn for comfort
to your faceless friends.
Resist. Defend yourself.
But let your armour
be sackcloth and ashes.

16.
Work twice as hard
as the hardest worker you know.
You may achieve
half as much.
The lowest rung of grace
may still be out of sight.
Remain where you are
with grace.

17.
Son has a new toy,
father has a new idea.
Both are at play.
Son with toy.
Father with idea
watched by mother
who has neither toy or idea.

18.
Imagine you are blind:
go on, imagine it
for a day or even an hour.
You may learn to use your eyes.

19.
Every man is a man of Sorrows,
with the gifts of God.

20.
I have faith in magic:
formulae, incantations, devices,
mystic exercises
and simple hard work.

21.
Who is this
swimming in the ocean of Human Misery?
It’s me.

22.
I believe in Love –
and morning walks.


(jan-mar ’95)

ii.


Encounter
Koyamparambath Satchidanandan

To meet my God
I rode on the buzzing of a bee
and went along the road of the Word,
A roaring black tiger kept me company
That road led me to death in the battlefield.

To meet my God
I got into the vein of a dry leaf
and went along the road of Silence.
A dumb camel kept me company
That road led me to death in the mountain snow.

To meet my God
I rode on the back of a whirlwind
and went along the road of Disorder.
People gave me way in fear
That road led me to death in the deep woods.

To meet my God
I hung on to the gills of an eel
and went into the middle of the sea.
A whale swallowed us
and took us into the underworld.
There, from the barren darkness
Guarded by seven god-men with flaming swords
I heard the cry of God.
I freed him.
Since that day I have been in Hell
not knowing who sent me here:
God, or the god-men?


(apr-jun ’95)


iii.


The Queen’s Fool’s Tale
Milind S. Malshe

Once a fool went all the way
To meet the Queen of London,
And said, “How nice to meet you!”
The queen was kind and said,
“How nice to meet you AGAIN, fool!”

                     So a fool was happy and said,
                    “London seems to be a nice place,
                     Like my own city – OUR own city!
                     Will you take me round?”


                    “Oh!” Said the Queen, – “It’s a cousin city.”
                    (“Post-Colonial Cousins!” Sang a fool)
                    “You are welcome to see it. Take an A to Z,
                     A Time-Out, and a Travel Card! Enjoy yourself!”


So a fool went round and round
In the Tube underground;
He met Freud and Keats at the Hamstead Heath;
He appreciated the Museums and the Galleries,
And empathized with the exhibits.

                   Then the Queen introduced a fool
                   To the Chinese with their sauces
                   And the Cubans with their cocktails:

                   A fool was thrilled to wine and dine
                   With the Irish in the company of their Guiness
                   And felt most honoured to meet
                   Marx outside the British Museum
                   And drink to his health.


A fool tried his best
Not to cling.
He was indeed amazed
That with all the royal obligations to fulfill
The Queen could still carve out
Time and space for a fool.
A fool therefore decided
Not to regret
That he could summon up enough courage
To stand up for a photograph with him.

A fool merely thought
Of the Tower of London.


                One day, the Queen invited a fool to share
                From HER bowl of Chinese soup;
                And then, as per the feminist lie of the land,
                Had no option but to hide behind a despotic fatwa
                Banning speech and forbidding memory.


The Queen had no option
But to hang a fool for HIS prurience.


               A fool wondered how come
               His impeccable reputation had suddenly turned into
               Dubious emotions and unclear sentiments:

               He remembered:
               “It’s a pity I can’t go with him…”
               “It’s a pity, but we’ll soon make good the lapse…”
               All this and much more a fool remembered.
But he forgot he was speaking posthumously,
For a fool had died instantly, incredulously.

                A fool is dead.
                Long live the Queen.

Epitaph: (apologies to E.M. Forster)
“The Queen lied and then a fool died,” is a story.
“The Queen lied, and then a fool died of disbelief,” is a plot.

[An early version of this piece was first presented in the Session for the Overseas Participants at the Cambridge Seminar: 1994, held in July, 1994]

(apr-jun ’97)


iv.


Stray Cats
E. V. Ramakrishnan


They are not exactly homeless,
they are dissidents who have lost their faith
in furnished interiors, morning walks
and the cake and cutlery.
When you have nine lives to live,
you learn to take things in your stride.
You learn to stretch your body
at full length and yawn at domestic
fictions. In the bargain, you become
learned in the art of accenting words.
Domestic cats take the world for granted,
they do not restate the world in their own
words, and have nothing to add when all
is said and done. But stray cats are born
to flout grammar and subvert syntax
and for this reason, they figure in horror
films in the mandatory moment
between the flash of lightening
and the appearance of a ghost.
The light is darkish blue and you see
yourself in the iris of the burning
eye. The horror is in the seeing.
What you see is altered by the act
of seeing. The mystery does not stop
there. The seer is in turn altered by
what he sees. Having known this,
the stray cats jump from roof
to roof in an endless act of
deferring the meaning.
they never go astray. They are
the wandering mendicants of the cat
family who monitor the world from treetops.
They have their weekly meetings in the graveyard.


Then they walk out of the mirror of the sun
and cross the crowded road in a flash,
without being run over by the grammar
of the road. For a shining moment,
they lurk in the light like a giant shadow
of doubt, ill-omens to those who
cannot see beyond the literal.


(jul-sept ’96)


v.

Masochism
Meher Pestonji

Made a god of you

Pretend not to see
the paint, the clay
and the worms that crawl
at your belly.

I know, I see yet
I pretend.

Shadows have no colour

Idols are for masochism.

The only way
to worship
a fire-god
is from a distance;

Or you get burnt.

All gods have clay feet.

If you don’t want
to see them –
keep away!
Each time you meet a god
and see his clay feet;
the search for
another god
begins
So you think I loved you…?

I loved Love.
You were the object
I chose to love it through.

That’s why I idolised you.


[1980]

(oct-dec ’95)


vi.


Prague Memories
Brenda Porster

lying in bed, CNN news
informs the world how
the cowboy who, carelessly, at Cavalese
cut down the lives of twenty people
is innocent. I feel sick,
and think of you
under a soaking rain we see and hear,
learn about deforestation. I think of Pinelli
and you

though there is no sun
the white sharp-edged piazza below the castle
wounds my eyes all the same, vulnerable
you took me all the same and said, nicely,
“for me you are a source of orgasm”

coming down from the castle,
the streets of Mala Strana, strange evil for my ears,
sly smells of burning coal wreathing
coils of borrowed memories
the gleeful kids taking pictures
of themselves, me too, I smile
for the camera.

I share heavy Czech food with my colleague,
a friendly man who believes in miracles, wears
open sandals in winter and thinks of taking vows
(I, too, lifelong sceptic, placed the folded paper
under a stone, begging the rabbi
to give me my desire
back)

alone, I return to see the drawings
of the children of Terezin, allow myself
the banal luxury
of tears

we walk back up the castle,
a watery moon over the Moldow, too lovely,
my stomach carved out by pain

and so I have come to know that
this too can happen that
for one entire week
I did not think of you
every waking moment

the journey home was sleepless,
it snowed in the mountains
hard coming at us and looking out the window
I heard once again the same song
hold on, hold on –
and I do.

[Notes:
1. Last year (1998?) at Cavalese, an Italian ski resort, an American pilot on a NATO training mission flew too low and cut the cable of a ski-lift, plunging over 20 people to their deaths. The pilot was acquitted by an American court at the beginning of March, 1999.
2. Guiseppe Pinelli, an Italian anarchist, fell to his death in December of 1969 from an upper-storey window while being interrogated by the Italian police. Doubts about the real course of events have remained.
3. Mala Strana is one of the most picturesque neighbourhoods of Prague. In Czech the words mean “little city,” but they sound not too different from male strano, which in Italian means, roughly, “strange evil.”
4. At Terezin, a sort of way-station concentration camp in Bohemia where Jews were held before being sent to the extermination camp of Auschwitz, lessons in drawing were held for the children by Friedl Dicker-Brandies, an outstanding woman artist belonging to the Bauhaus movement. Out of about 15,000 children who passed through Terezin, only 100 came back. The Jewish Museum of Prague has published a very moving collection of the drawings and poems produced by these children, entitled in English: “I Have Not Seen a Butterfly around Here.”]

(oct ‘99 ‘Nostalgia’)


vii.


School
Salvador Ortiz-Carbonerez


Miguelin started school at Dona Rosita’s. She was fifty or more, and looked like a tree owl, but nice custard pie.

“Now this is an intelligent child,” she would half-speak and half-sigh at large, her voice riding up and down the syllables like inflated cushions “but naughty!” and she seemed to whistle from her perch and behind her spectacles her big eyes shone.

The town schooling took place in her own house right by the church. The largest room was disguised as a classroom. Variously sized tables masqueraded as desks, cane-topped and basket weave nestling under thick trre-trunk-like monsters of solid mahogany and dark, heavy wooden carved legs rested plumply on the floor beside thin, reedy bamboo stick-legs.

A monstrously long and rectangular, worn blackboard with the original wood showing through decorated an entire wall. The inevitable crucifix hung overshadowing everything and everyone conspicuously out of reach.

This comprised the basic equipment; as for the children, they ranged variously in age from four to about thirteen. Reading and writing were taught. The rudiments of numbers and their mysterious ways; scraps of geography and the muddles and mistakes of history – something about Columbus, the Catholic Kings of Spain, the colonies of former days….

But what was most to Dona Rosita’s taste was religion.

Miguelin didn’t take it to it at all. He’d rather stay at home any day and play in the attic. So, logically enough, he escaped often and most effectively.
With his large bag of books, paper and implements, he meekly trotted off to a daily grilling over the fires of knowledge stoked by the indefatigable Dona Rosita. And why was this?

It may in part have been due to his new girlfriend Julieta. She flew into his life as a fantasy picture at school, and at home in the house on the hill.

“Why are you back then… what’s up today?” They asked when he trailed home.
All his hooky proved a fitting trial for Dona Rosita, who patiently endured to the last vagary after fancy, on account of his gae.

There were days, however (o black-letter days) when no wriggling out of the situations was possible. He was firmly marched to school and ceremoniously handed over like a much disputed gift, grimacing, all stiff and willful.

So he had to find a way to get round this now. He hid in a large cupboard in Dona Rosita’s kitchen, instead of haring off as normally. She was baffled expecting flight and searched and searched and searched for quite a while with no results. Leisurely he emerged, surveyed the ground, and, – bolted out of the door she had left open behind her. Once clear, he strolled on home.

“Tie him to a chair-leg,” said Grandmother, in exasperation.

Dona Rosita did just that. Scuppered with the belt of this apron!
As time went on, the little daytime lodger got used to being there and even made himself like going there, as children do, putting interest into what is essentially a dull situation. In his second year he was never missing; nobody need frog-march him into class any more. Blandly obedient, the devil lurked within biding his time.
One day while on a forage indoors he found a huge fat round jar of cherries soaked in brandy. What a find! Delighted, he smuggled it into the attic, after some strenuous heaving and jangling of spoons, whispered advice, and stifled laughter.

“What now?” Said Miguelin.

“Give them to the chickens” proposed the thoughtful Julieta.

So they rained them down into the yard and soon a feast was in progress below.
Meanwhile, the fumes were penetrating the sensibilities of the other occupants of the house. The deafening cackle of staggering and drunken chickens became muffled and curiously nervous, spasmodic, finally soundless altogether, then following general collapse, sideways and in slow motion, as if torpedoed. Bags of dusty feathers littered the yard and somnolent squawking occasionally were heard. The turkeys took longer and pendulised their articulated necks vigorously, undecided as to weather they were on their feet or their feet on them.

Grandmother got the shock of her life at feeding-time. She couldn’t figure it out at all.

She called Natalia out for the vet.

The vet came and roared with laughter.

“Elisa, this hen is drunk as a lord.”

“What! And how? And who – ” Suspicion and investigation tallying with the incriminating evidence of uneaten cherries, the guilty couple had to turn Queen’s evidence.

Meanwhile, the rumpus in the yard continued…


(jan-mar ’96)


viii.


On the Page of My Diary
Navamalati Chakraborty


You helped me to find myself
amidst the thicket of man and customs.
I slipped at times on indelible thoughts
on blank faces like paper kites
on a September sky.
Acrid smoke billowed from honking cars
like flies in jam, in a traffic jam;
in their endless procession like black ants
on their set path before winter.


I tear out the bleeding roots of their secrets
their lives entangled on strings of human limitations.
Like grimacing mutes they hid their pain.
Words and silences worked upon them subtly
in their oyster delusion.
Truth must batter itself to survive
as uncertain days lay ahead in masks.
I smiled at the glowing darkness
and the giggling sky whispered with the restless stars.
The sunny avenues of musical days
in the season of complete emancipation,
grew inexorable in the slow firelight;
the silence made life painfully grotesque.
Amidst all this I found myself,
looking at each other after the postmortem,
on pages smudged with tears,
I discovered the music of life.


(oct-dec ’97)


Brown Critique – Part-II (new work by Mani Rao, Alaka Yeravadekar, Goirick Brahmachari, Anshuman Acharya, Amitabh Mitra, and Vihang A. Naik)


ix.


Mani Rao
(five poems)

Journey – Photo by Paul Schollmeier

BRAHMA’S MOMENT
 
Brahma unfolded
Four petals on a shoulder

TimeSpace emanated
Twinned at the hip

Quarreling who’s older

MONKEY PUZZLE

Large as the sky stands on a leaf
Small as a thorn on Ravana’s seat
Try telling him
The sun’s not a peach

Can’t find an herb uproot the mountain
Ocean’s vast so is devotion

Somewhat out of proportion Hanuman
A heart so precise it
Only has room for Ram

SHIVA’S DIGS

Fragrant floured
Nude blue bloat
Last seen by the boy who
Wanted to be a ghost

The scavenger hooks fingers
In the rim
Bone pots conk
Dangling swing

Finger a ring ran away with
Knobs and bits
Found in ash spills

It’s his job but gravely notes
Soil bored with air
Fluids laying cesspits

PANCHALI


Five limp fingers
A useless hand

Yudhistira sorry
For himself

So sure he was
The eldest son

FOR POOTANA’S SAKE

The beast
now in the guise
of a babe

Exuding
Sweetness

Draining the
Poisonous wetnurses

x.

Alaka Yeravadekar
(three poems)

The stream

I often dream of living near a stream
with Rumi to keep me company.

I often dream of living near a stream
that gurgles even in the summer.

I often dream of living near a stream
that bubbles with liquid birdcalls.

I often dream of living near a stream
where cicadas buzz on a silent noon.

I often dream of living near a stream
where pelf and power don’t matter.

I often dream of living near a stream
that brings me closer to heaven.

Silences

Words averse to daylight
run from mind to tongue
and then scurry away
unable to bear the searing heat of the volcano they carry.

Thus are born silences –
heavy soft fluffy bundles.
Each bears the past present and future of a relationship
sealed inert; the fluids conveniently never leak
and mess the designer interiors of cozy families.

And so the silences lurk
at corners of rain-filled streets,
or hunker down on lonely roads
apathy and hope alternating.

Rejection

The pain is not the kind that
shatters you at one go
and benumbs the brain.
It’s the kind that chips away at life
Drop by drop, draining, slowly ebbing
Like a slash on the wrist gone wrong

I didn’t know what else to do
They say
tell your friends – if only I had one
Family – dad would have crumbled

I was moved to a hospital
and realised
how truly lonely I was.

Even Death was not ready
to welcome me

xi.

Goirick Brahmachari
(two poems)

Fragments

The sky is crying.
Burning marijuana keeps painting faded circles in void.
Elmore James weeps in vain
Like a baby’s black balloon sailing away to some distant land.
As I creep lifeless on the road contemplating “Howl,”
Ashes of Burmese grass fly insane.
Senses strip and
I float across time to a land where Bohemian angels fell like shooting stars.
The earth was on fire in 1960.
Words-outshined shrine, Minds taller than castles, sanity traded for frantic 2008,
War is just another reality show.
A jingle for a million dollar row
with so much to write and sing for.
Why then do remains of dead poesy float in gutters still?

Tongue-tied

The seas have dried
Tongue-tied,
We never cried

xii.

Anshuman Acharya
(a couple of excerpts)

Excerpt 1:

“The first memory of coming back is the rains. They came gushing in torrents, thick clumpy cascades rippling against the buffeting winds like billowing saris on the wash line. They pounded and rushed along the sloping courtyard, washing away the gritty summer dust settled in its pores and revealing it in stark grey. An eddy swirled and rippled at the corner where a granite slab lay an inch lower than the ridge dropping into the garden. The sound of them, like a thousand hooves on the tin roof shed across the garden, on the leaves, on the stone, on the flooded lawn and the drains in spate, on the sky-windows and the walls, dripping in buckets under leaking ceilings, the occasional rumble in the sky – relentless, unceasing, cathartic; filling and drowning every other sound, like the inside of a blowing conch shell. Colours burst in the gardens, the grey dust turned a deep brown, the leaves a livid green, redolent with the tumescent fragrance of wet earth. I watched, fascinated and silent. It is this moment – a room half-dark and lit from the outside, billowing white sheets of rain seen over a knot of fingers laced in the mesh of the rhomboid window jaali, and a steady drumming all around – where my memories of Lucknow vividly begin. I had never seen a rain before.”

Excerpt 2:

“When we asked Ba about her life before us, she told us that her mother had died a long time ago and that her father was always drunk and in his rages would beat her and the new mother who was retarded and there were goats to take out to graze and there were the mountains and rocks she would scamper over before evening fell and then the scattered flock had to be herded and brought back. We accepted the unfaltering finality of her monotone, unbroken by a pause for breath, and asked nothing more. The idea of her life before us was not without a tinge of jealousy, suffered only with the consoling reasoning that she had to be somewhere till we were yet to be born. In fact, the brevity which summed her life before us sounded reassuring, very much like the waiting which it ought to have been.

Ba’s story for us began with the unspoken story of mother’s slow death.

Much of this story I came to understand from the cache of albums I discovered once in a storage loft in one of the rooms of Windsor Manor that I reached by climbing over the grill of the window-frame. These were not like the few photographs I had seen of her –sticking her tongue out as a young girl, holding a dazzling smile in place for the photographer in a gathering, laughing as she posed in a group in front of an excavation site, the Bear crushing papa and her in with a giant paw, the wedding album. There was no self-conscious posing in these discovered albums, no smiles and laughs held in place. Instead, they seemed to chronicle unconscious everyday intimacies where she would be combing her short hair in front of an oval mirror, chewing at a pencil as she frowned at a book laid on the easel of her raised legs on a chair, or raising an eye from a book, cheek resting on the palm of a propped elbow with the other hand holding the place in the book, to look straight out of the photograph to me, the smile suggesting not a coquettish flirtation with the lens but a serene assurance – of heels dug firmly in place and the reins of the life they were building firmly in her grip.

I never saw the albums again – they might be lying buried in the rubble somewhere or perhaps they really got lost – but all my imagined memories of her got overwritten by those photographs that day. When I would develop enough sensibilities, I would realise that they were brilliant portraits, even though all I saw papa ever click with the Pentax were artifacts. But at that moment, and for many days after, I was overwhelmed by a grief that seemed larger than myself, and understood, even as a child, why the adults had interred these albums here. And I asked myself again and again, through silent rage and tears, why? – why had papa taken these photographs? Because they were not only the narrative of their life together but also her slow painful passage to death.

I had always imagined her death as something which had happened to us suddenly, something from outside which had come hurling and caught us all unaware. The albums told another story. Even as Preeti entered the albums, even as ma suckled her beneath a blanket, bathed her, put her to sleep over a shoulder, buried her face in her tummy and made her cackle with delight – even as she grew in her arms – it was clear that she had started to slowly wilt like a flower in a vase. Her eyes widened at first, with fatigue, and the surprise springing perhaps from the first brushes with the idea of her fragility and mortality, as each bout of infection left her weaker and weaker.

It is here that Ba entered the photographs. Her first photograph showed her as a little girl standing behind ma’s chair as she held out the bowl in which ma dipped a cloth, probably sponge-bathing the infant Preeti spread on her lap, Ba’s other hand resting lightly on ma’s shoulder. Slowly, she shifted to the foreground as Preeti grew – combing her curls, feeding her from a spoon, washing her legs on a basin, drying her after a bath – while ma watched from a divan on which she rested heavily, a hand on Ba’s shoulder if she happened to be sitting below her on the floor, playing with Preeti. In another photograph, she held out Preeti to kiss ma lying weakly on the bed, Preeti’s tiny arm wrapped around her neck, the blur suggesting a nuzzling of cheeks and many kisses, a long exposure, a night time and a goodnight kiss – papa never used flash.

The surprise slowly waned to tired resignation as she seemed to sink deeper and heavier into the divans and beds she would rarely been seen out of now, the eyes drooping and closing. In one of the last photographs, ma lay in bed, covered in white quilt, her head resting on a big soft white pillow; her hair, which I imagined must have grown because sitting for a cut took too much toll on her fragile health now, seemed to be tied in a loose bun behind. A cup rested on the side-table beside her head and an arm fell protectively over Preeti’s lap, who sat in a chemise beside her, her loose curls spilling over her face as she appeared to peer at something in her hand. Her tired eyes watched Preeti, the mouth slack and without a smile. I imagined Ba must have been nearby, waiting to catch Preeti if she tumbled down, but she’s not in the frame. The palm of ma’s other hand was cupped loosely over the swell of her belly underneath the quilt, discernible if you were looking for it.

It was the only photograph I tore from the album and brought down with me, hiding it in the pages of a colouring book.”

xiii.

Amitabh Mitra
(two poems)

Knives

knives i love in quiet submission
a sheer habit
a linear stabbed dermis
an ooze turning into a
splash hits the words
i incise into each night
breath streaks
a slash and then a murmur
of spent needs
sleep eludes unspoken lust
i cut my dreams often wide open
a night walker perhaps feels the wound
a dog yelps
in suggested desolation

July Afternoon

july afternoon
an unbridled river rushed
down the fort
on to the chironji trees
a battle cry rose
eyes and steel
glinted in forsaken
shadows
a cloud burst galloped
in many a steed
on the dead and dying
the green turbaned man who lives
with bats in the cave
came out again
touched the rain
his eyes swirled
birds screamed
imprisoned
in stronger silence
we had held on to
stones
your hair closed me in
your hands held my thumb
palms caught the language
of rage
a maratha rain
a tale as old as this fort
you said
is a slaughter of rumination
you and me
would still grow
in this broken sun
in a fallacy
of such a gwalior noon.

xiv.

Vihang A. Naik
(two poems)

Poetry Manifesto

Yes, a poetry must be
an unexpected thing; perhaps silly.
A nightmare or a dream.

A craft, a paper art.
Why bother for something more.
The why, the how
and the what of poetry.
May it be black and white or bloody.
Or let there be VIBGYOR
paper poems.

Being Contemporary

These days it is wise
to be learned, certified and appointed.
You can be safe
hammering your thought.
Speak or do not. The day enrolls.
Academics, Seminarians,
professional theoreticians,
and a pack of barking dogs. You
become one, quarrelsome
who seldom bites.

Contributors

Nissim Ezekiel (14 December 1924 – 9 January 2004) was a well-known Indian poet.
Dr.Koyamparambath Satchidanandan is a bilingual poet attached with Indian Literature and Sahitya Akademi
Milind S. Malshe is Professor of English, Dept of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT, Powai, Mumbai. His books in Marathi include Literary Stylistic (1981) and Modern Linguistics (1995). Malshe’s areas of research and interest include Semiotics of Music and Literature, Aesthetic Theory, and Translation Studies.
Dr. E. V. Ramakrishnan is a bilingual critic and poet in English. He was given the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in 1995.
Meher Pestonji is a Mumbai-based writer and journalist. Her play ‘Feeding Crows’ won the South Asia prize in the BBC/British Council Radio play Competition. She has just completed her third novel.
Brenda Porster, born in Philadelphia, US, has lived in Italy since 1971. She has taught at the University of Florence, and is currently a tenured teacher of English language and literature at the Liceo Scientifico Leonardo da Vinci in Florence.
An actor, singer, and poet, Salvador Ortiz-Carbonerez , has published articles on Spanish literature and books. His translation of ‘Platero and I’ by the Spanish Nobel, Juan Ramos Jimerez, has won universal praise. Salvador lives and works in Warwick.
Navamalati Chakraborty is a Kolkata-based writer who has lived and worked in Nagaland.
Mani Rao is author of eight books of poetry and a translation of the Bhagavad Gita forthcoming (2010/2011) in the US and India. You can visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/Its-mutual-Mani-Rao/ to see all her literary updates. These poems are from the manuscript of Gods R Us.
Writer, trainer, consultant, Alaka Yeravadekar’s poetry, travel writing, and photos have been published by print and online magazines in India and abroad. (http://alakaline.blogspot.com/)
Goirick Brahmachari works and lives in New Delhi. And according to him he is just another American pawn in India who prefers to sink in music… to read more of Goirick’s work, visit http://www.goirick.blogspot.com/. (Fragments was first published in DSCJournal, issue for October-December 2007 DHVANI SAHITYA CHAKRA http://sites.google.com/site/barakdhvani/journalissueforoctober-december2007)
Anshuman Acharya is a New Delhi-based amateur photographer and working on a book.
Amitabh Mitra is a Medical Doctor in a busy hospital in East London, South Africa. A widely published poet on the web and print, Amitabh has been hailed as one of the most popular South African poet writing in English (http://www.amitabhmitra.com/)
Vihang A. Naik’s poems have appeared in numerous literary journals. Four collections of his poetry have been published: Poetry Manifesto: New & Selected Poems (2010), Making A Poem (2004), City Times and Other Poems (1993). His Gujarati collection of poems include Jeevangeet (Gujarati Poems) published by Navbharat Sahitya Mandir (Ahmedabad) in 2001, dedicated to the cause of victims of Gujarat Earthquake of January 26, 2001. He also translates poetry written in the Gujarati language into English, including his own Gujarati language poems. He has taught English for more than a decade in U.G.C colleges of North Gujarat including Shree Ambaji Arts College , North Gujarat. He can be visited at http://www.vihang.naik.name/

[This ‘TBC’ page is dedicated to my father, Sunil Chandra Majumdar (1929-1999)]