Literary Fests in India

Is India Reading ?

Reading habit in India has come of age, considering one lakh and a half footfalls at the Jaipur Literary Festival 2015.  Litfests in the country are the new genre of festivals gaining momentum over the last few years.  Every other city boasts of an art/lit fest,   Apeejay  Kolkatta Literary Festival, the Mussourie Writers’  Festival, the Hay Festival  and Bookaro, to name a few.  Is it a passing fad or a lasting phenomenon and has the common man become an avid reader?  These are questions which spring forth, but going by the mere 10000-sold mark for a book to become bestseller in India , the story needs to be  investigated.

I was a delegate at the Goa Art/Lit festival . Into its fifth year, the Intenationa l Center  Goa  was beehive of activity for four days last December.  Book launches, regional  and global voices, food and translations, culture and politics found centrestage at the fest.  The mood of discussions and debates propelled me to continue the experience and I found myself part of the burgeoning crowd of intellectual elite at the Jaipur Literary Festival.  It was hosted at the Diggi Palace within the heart of the Pink City. Readings were held simultaneously at six venues (lawns and halls) of the palace.  What heartened me was the turnout and active participation of youngsters at the readings.   It was a congregation of the intellectual elite from various cities of India and abroad in their winter best. The writers, literary agents and publishers from India and abroad completed the circle of the most elusive and celebrated people from the world of books.

The talks at lit fests celebrate great writings from poets and writers, lyricists and novelists, environmentalists and journalists, and the power of great ideas to transform our way of thinking. The festivals become a playground of the exchange of views and meeting of minds that inspires revelations- personal, political and educational. A Chinese writer at JLF remarked  that he was both astonished and warmed by the wide open debate between writers, journalists, members of the civil society and the audience without any embargoes. He felt intrigued by the diverse voices applauding and at the same time critiquing the government and other policy makers. Queer literature too finds a voice at festivals, and has been the force for widespread consciousness amongst people. .
The festivals are global in their reach and yet anchored by several Indian languages. Bollywood, rappers and food aficionados are equally represented at such fairs. Young adult workshops on the latest pedagogical practices in education and the children’s hour at the Goa fest was a great success.  
The bookshops engage the crowds effectively by proudly displaying works of all writers in attendance. The DSC prize for best South Asian literature and the showcasing of the Booker of the Booker prize shortlists are programs not to be missed. The Khuswant Singh Poetry prize is an addition to the same genre, coveted and awaited through the year. The readings run clockwork with close adherence to the printed schedule and protocol.

That’s the bookish side of the picture. The other side introduced the idea to the spectators that though we are here for books and books only, it would be too boring without music, food and controversies to sum the matter on a somber, pleasing note. The venues look like  a commercial hub, with food stalls, crowds and local cuisine and fashion in full splendor. Did this showmanship detract book lovers and writers from their activity of serious discussions or spurred them on with its alluring whiffs of colour is a matter of debate in itself. Goa remains more intimate and personal with close interactions between writers, musicians and the small but effective audience.   

Coming back to our original question of whether the events (I have been part of the Bookaro, and Kala Ghoda Lit Fest too sometime back) are an evidence of our revolutionizing reading habits in the present times of the visual media and gadgetry. The pointer is towards young India with never-ending deadlines and short attention spans. Or is it a cool quotient to be seen at such spots of the literary elites? You mention books, as you drop names, without having read them.  Maybe they are new centers of business and touristy agenda under the garb of literary and cultural promotions.

The fast growth and explosive popularity has achieved the inclusion of corporate sponsors. An example in case maybe the Jaipur literature festival,  which this year became Zee JLF. In the solitary world of books, reading and writing, these incursions are indicative of a defining change in the modern times of writing, selling and promoting books. The ubiquity of the market has definitely invaded the world of books.  Certain writers and avid readers like to remain far away from such happening fairs.  But the question remains ‘Is the general public reading?’

Brand Books Festivals are here to stay. What form it will evolve into, only time will tell. Let’s wait and watch as the Tamasha continues, says Amitav Ghosh.

Logicomix Summary

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=1949912&date=2015-03-29&pageid=1

Logicomix: 

A few weeks back, I waxed eloquent about Comics.  My interlude with comics continues, thanks to libraries and bookstores in Goa and of course, patrons of exclusive comic collections. ‘The improbable material for comic book treatment’ is what has me completely hooked and I can’t seem to let it go. One such graphic novel is Logicomix – An Epic Search for Truth (I am late arriving at it , it was  launched in Greece in Sept, 2009),  a helluva highbrow comic panel about mathematical philosophy based in the later part of  nineteenth century up to the Second World War.

Scientists, philosophers and mathematicians occupy inaccessible realms in the living world, completely incomprehensible to the minds of common masses. To transpose a journey of complex mathematics, logic and philosophy interwoven with a human angle to the stories of  star performers(mathematicians in this case), coloured with family history along with raging zeitgeist, is a feat very craftily achieved by the makers of this sensational comic strip. The graphic novel is the brainchild of two Greeks viz. Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou.  The former, an international expert on the relationship of mathematics to narrative and of the fame of the bestseller Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture (the maiden  foray which  bridged mathematics to the world of storytelling) ; and the latter, Bill Gates’ teacher, a professor of computer science at Berkeley and  the author of a novel on Alan Turing( the father of computer science, we recently watched him in Imitation Games).  The art was done by Alecos Papadatos (clean line drawings made famous by Herge’s Tintin series) and Annie Di Donna (color) who went location-hunting to original storyscapes on this pretext.  

It is a quest of Bertrand Russell (the British mathematician, philosopher, logician, reformer, pacifist and activist) for foundational logic in mathematics.  An orphaned, insecure, insomniac teenager with a history of raving family madness and mystery is driven by demons in his restless fearful mind (he is preyed by the idea bordering on certainty that he will go mad one day) to find a secure logical explanation to incongruities in his life  and the living world he sees around him. His epic obsessive search to find truth, through certainty and logic in mathematics (which should answer all conundrums of creation) spanning decades, in tandem with the work of historical figures like Leibniz, Boole and his contemporary sworn-logicians  Gottlob Frege, Georg Cantor( the inventor of set theory)  and many other madmen of sciences, forms the idealistic core of the book(a mathematics scholar could most proficiently write a thesis paper outline with it). Whitehead the co-author of his great work Principia Mathematica and argumentative brilliant pupil Wittgenstein (who constantly challenged and spurred him on), too, form a major part of the narrative.

The frame of the comic panels switches between two threads – The story of Bertrand Russell and his geek buddies and the creators of the novel in the studio space arguing over cups of coffee, brainstorming and commenting on Russell’s mindscape, experiments, theories and personal life.  The second comic panel becomes the brilliant stroke on which the novel rides high. The creator panels and their discussions (an echo of the reader’s mind) ground the highly technical mathematical exposition into layman questions and plausible, lucid, digestible answers. Another frame to the storyline is Russell’s speech which begins the narrative and holds it in place to the end. He is invited to speak to a sceptical audience at an American University just before the US jump into WW II. The spectators want to know the logic of war and Russell answers them with the question, ‘What is Logic?’ -  taking the audience through an autobiographical  road trip of his dogged trail of finding logic through the father of logic – mathematical philosophy. His hard hitting attempts and decades of study to find logical provable equations to every unproven axiom and hypothetical assumptions (e.g. concept of infinity) on which mathematics is based, nearly drove him to insanity - the very blackness he was trying to escape.

The age old pursuit of man to rationally comprehend the world by reason (the basis of science, medicine, technology, wars in the modern world) lures the reader into the thick of the argument with Bertrand Russell to have Kurt Godel the mathematician announce "There will always be unanswerable questions," and that arithmetic is "of necessity incomplete" –toppling the very basis of logic.  In the end, Russell seeks saving grace for his soul by becoming a pacifist and a humanist seeking ethics and a peaceful world. A line echoed by Stephen Hawking too in The Theory of Everything – that as long as there is life there is hope, but to pinpoint the pulse of life is a futile endeavour.

The novel ends with the comic creators walking to a Greek amphitheatre where they watch Oresteia, a trilogy of Greek tragedies written by Aeschylus ( the first play of the series  Agamemnon, was staged in Kala Academy last month),  succinctly culminating the treatise with the climax that life is greater than logic.

Logicomix then becomes a masterpiece in equating logic to a comical quixotic quest to unravel the flawed fabric of reality. The ambiguity of truth and the conundrum of ‘madness and logic’ surface as prominent fallouts.

That such polemics is the heartthrob of Logicomix is a loud statement in itself!  Kudos!

The Marg Magazine

Comics Galore!

That Marg, A Magazine of the Arts, in its current edition should be about Comics in India is a profound statement in itself (an encyclopaedia of Indian art, the magazine was launched in 1946, with Mulk Raj Anand as the founding editor).  It tables essays and graphics on the journey of comics from a heady content of superheroes and teen romances to the concurrent complex narratives; psychological, theological, scientific, autobiographical, subversive and socio-political in content, challenging adult readers alike. The present issue of Marg is guest edited by Aniruddha Sen Gupta.  

The fact that there is active exploration and scholarly studies in universities across the globe and creators prefer to be hailed as comic creators rather than art-literature artists, or other euphemisms (graphic novelists, sequential artists etc.) is indicative that comics have arrived in the high brow milieu of arts. Underhand borrowings of pop artists from comics in the mid 20^th century to an open collaboration between iconic  art and comics is fast blurring the lines between these  acclaimed  genres  of creativity.

It is indeed interesting to unearth the trajectory of the comics in India and abroad begun in the 19^th century. The process illuminates the deep troughs that the illustrated art charted, to the sporadic peaks which began in the latter part of the 20^th century. If Punch(UK) ,Raw(US) and Bandes dessinee(France)  were making breakthroughs in the West , the Japanese Manga comics, Avadh Punch and Indrajaal comics in India were keeping the fires burning in the East. The avant  garde  came in through Art Spiegelman’s  Maus  (holocaust narrative), Osamu Tezuka’s  eight-part Buddha biography, and in India Sarnath Bannerjee’s  Corridor, Orijit Sen’s  River of Stories( the first graphic book in India ).  The piece de resistance of the Indian series would be the ingenious Amruta Patil’s  Kari  (a landmark  contribution to the burgeoning genre of comics).

Indian traditional visual narratives of art like Bengal Patachitras, Togalu Gombeyatta(a puppetry form from Karnatka) inform and inspire experimentation in contemporary engagements of image and words in comics. The generative oral tradition is subverted at times to hear new voices and view the frame story from a different perspective. The long love-affair of India with the two epics- Ramayana and Mahabharata thrives still, and similar is the preoccupation of Japanese Manga with historic Japanese art. But then, Manga has diversified and produced prolific works and its story of exploration and breaking barriers continues steadily.

The piece on Art in Comics by Gokul Gopalakrishnan takes the reader into shared spaces of art and comics. The fledgling forays of comic creators to incorporate art images as book covers (Army @Love) or interweave art into their storyline frames gives birth to a new hybrid language. A case in example would be the subversive adaptation of the painting Whistler’s Mother in Alan Moore’s and Eddie Campbell’s comics masterpiece From Hell.  Exploring the transfiguration of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World,  Amruta Patil explains: “The readers’ decoding of such odes in my work is not of utmost importance. It is an additional layer that may be enjoyed by ones in the know, or by those returning for a re-read. There is, of course, a deliberate reference being made to the original master painting- i hope to be ‘found out’ but it isn’t essential to the basic reading of the tale. Some references are teasing play on the original, some are more direct. There are parallel conversations going on with different readers- conversations with readers cued in with art history. That is the fun of this medium, no?  So much room to play!” It is yet discerning for a viewer to see comic strips transposed on gallery walls, with many overlapping elements- murals, graffiti, a stand-up narrator Flaneur in the City at Galleryske Bangalore.

The craft of the genre is skilfully depicted through original image and text drawings of Orijit Sen (diary notes of River of Stories – Narmada dam and tribal habitats) and the Amruta Patil’s City of the Ninth Art.  Orijit Sen cannily captures the being of the place, the inter-textuality of emotions and deep rooted connections of land and its people in the face of man-made insensitively planned makeovers. Angouleme France’s the city of ninth art (annually hosts the International Comics festival since Francis Groux ‘fried public imagination’ with comic art in 1972) where artists breathe and sleep comics, opens new doors to readers about the culture of studio spaces and collaborative art.  Amruta attended a residency programme (“ in fact i have never been in a place with so many human beings who do what I do and do it better”) here. She packs a punch with one liners, craftily taking the reader through an innovative experience accompanied by images.

Vivek Menezes folds in a slew of information and his personal take on comics, as great reading material for kids today. A surreptitious reading (it was frowned upon by elders and thought that it made teenagers go berserk; remember the comic book villain - Dr Fredric Wertham, the psychologist who campaigned against comics)has moved to covetous realm of sought-after volumes ( Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic design by Chip Kidd, Manga Guide to Physics) by parents to guide their  children in their school curriculum and facilitate breaking hard nuts like Genetics and the Periodic Table. He cautions parents against Robert Crumbs adaptation of Genesis as a graphic novel  “keep it waiting till they grow-up”( being an Indian parent, his bookshelf creaks heavy under academia comic books rather than fun, wicked cartoon series).  His own journey with comics makes an interesting read. He puts himself on the page – a ‘foundering Indian kid’ in 1980s America who became hooked on New Yorker’s  hilarious cartoons and Doonesbury and Bloom County which turned on light bulbs pop!pop! in his mind about a foreign culture,  kept his boat floating  on an even keel in international waters.

Grassroot comics harbour powerful socio-political movements in the country and abroad. World Comics India, a voluntary non-profit organization in Delhi, trains ordinary citizens to bring forth underlying societal problems into focus for public scrutiny and debate through scroll-like comic graphics and punchy text. The common man is thus armed in remote locales, says Shared Sharma and unheard voices sound without pulling any punches into the mainstream arena. Targeted pithy prose and powerful imagery packs in a punch  - an effective medium being practiced in North East, Rajasthan, Nepal....The Don Bosco  citizen journalism one-day workshop that I attended at ICG, with Stefan K and Gauri Gharpure as  efficient resource persons, would do good to incorporate comic journalism (Comics Power!) for their students beginning with Goa and its myriad issues.

Shut Up About the Market and Show Me Your Internal Organs – by Rakesh Khanna , is a shake-up to Indian comic creators to sharpen their ware and come out with avant-garde work, to really make a mark out there on a global platform. 

The comparative study between eye-popping works available on a platter in the US, Japan and European countries– leaves a lot to be desired in the Indian comic scene. The article intrigued me to go looking for comic books  on Flipkart – Eve Gilbert’s Tits, Ass and Real Estate, Linda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! David B’s Epileptic. He gives it to them( an appreciative thump) who can do it: “It’s easy for me to crib about the Indian comics that I am not seeing, I am not a comics artist, and I never will be. But most importantly I am too much of a coward. I believe drawing a really great comic takes courage. If you are drawing an autobiography, it takes the courage to look hard at the ugliest things you’ve done in your life and figure out why you did them; to publish your secrets for the world to see. If you are drawing a fictional universe, it takes courage to spend years working obsessively and in isolation, and in the end, the market might completely ignore you – and you will be another broke, starving artist. That’s what I think it takes to make a really great comic.”

The reading list at the end of the magazine is to aid the interested reader to find what is out there of value in the world of comics – a prompt to devour the books and spread the word around, for nothing works better than a good word.

That now your interest is piqued and you will go in search of the comic world that we live in through the world of comics is a certainty.  Go ravish ‘em!

Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=2548643&date=2015-03-01&pageid=1

                                                            The Forty Rules Of Love

Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we have not loved enough – Elif Shafak.

Shafak's most recent novel, The Forty Rules of Love sold more than 5,50000 copies, becoming an all time best-seller in Turkey. That it has already been translated into many languages  is not surprising in the least. It would have been, if the outcome had been any different. She is the most widely read writer in Turkey and essentially every novel that she has written has been awarded and has won the attention of the literary world at home and abroad. She writes in both Turkish and English. She is rooted in her native culture like a compass with a solid centre, but her other leg travels in a wide circle touching places, people and distant borders. She weaves stories questioning the status of immigrants, the marginalized, sub cultures, women in Islam and the lost love in humanity. 

The Forty Rules of Love is a fictional endeavour to showcase the mystic essence of Islam found in Sufism. The whirling dervish dance and heretical summation of  Koranic text breaks away with rules of convention, illuminating the love and brotherhood of mankind that Islam espouses and Jihad turns out to be a struggle within to win over our nafs, pride and ego.   

The structure of the novel involves two parallel narratives – the story of a Jewish American wife Ella  in Northampton, Massachusetts devoid of love  who is transformed by an intriguing manuscript about the Sufi mystic poet Rumi and Sufi mystic  dervish Shams of Tabriz wherein two soul mates  meet and attain beatitude. The second narrative is told by a range of characters including Rumi's wife and sons, self-proclaimed guardians of Sharia, prostitutes, drunkards and other marginalized citizens of that society. The narrative is gripping, told in first-person fragments, letters, emails and braided  with Shams's theosophy as told through his 40 rules of love.

 “The 13th century was a turbulent period in Anatolia, rife with religious clashes, political disputes and endless power struggles. In the West, the Crusaders, on their way to Jerusalem, occupied and sacked Constantinople, leading to the partition of the Byzantine Empire. In the East, highly disciplined Mongol armies swiftly expanded under the military genius of Genghis Khan. In between, different Turkish tribes fought among themselves while the Byzantines tried to recover their lost land, wealth and power. It was a time of unprecedented chaos when Christians fought Christians, Christians fought Muslims, and Muslims fought Muslims. Everywhere one turned, there was hostility and anguish, and an intense fear of what might happen next. In the midst of this chaos lived a distinguished Islamic scholar, known as Jalal Al-Din Rumi. Nicknamed Mawlana -Our Master- by many, he had thousands of disciples and admirers from all over the region and beyond, and was regarded as a beacon to all Muslims.

In 1244, Rumi met Shams - a wandering dervish with unconventional ways and heretical proclamations. Their encounter altered both their lives. At the same time it marked the beginning of a solid, unique friendship that Sufis in the centuries to follow likened to the meeting of two oceans. By meeting this exceptional companion, Rumi was transformed from a mainstream cleric to a committed mystic, passionate poet, advocate of love and originator of the ecstatic dance of the whirling dervishes, daring to break free of all conventional rules.

In an age of deeply-embedded bigotries and clashes, he stood for a universal spirituality, opening his doors to people of all backgrounds. Rumi stood up for an inner-oriented jihad where the aim was to struggle against and ultimately prevail over one's ego, nafs.

Not everyone welcomed these ideas, however, just as not everyone opens their hearts to love. The powerful spiritual bond between Shams and Rumi became the target of rumor, slander and attack. They were misunderstood, envied, vilified, and ultimately betrayed by those closest to them. Three years after they met, they were tragically separated.

But the story didn't end there. 
In truth, there never was an end. Almost eight hundred years later the spirits of Shams and Rumi are still alive today, whirling amid us somewhere...”

The novel celebrates love, in myriad hues. Love between soul mates, man–woman love, and love for all of humanity. Ella leads a colourless life with grown-up children and an unfaithful husband. She is given the assignment of reading a book Sweet Blasphemy written by Aziz Zahara by her literary agency. The latter forms the second narrative in the novel.

Ella’s story is predictable and also seems a bit contrived. It is the second narrative about Rumi and Shams of Tabriz which really is of paramount importance, and holds the reader. It is indeed a triumph on which the book sails high. A prophecy leads them to each other resulting in an encounter where they first test each other, become firm friends and then love each other. A coming together which transforms each, such that Shams of Tabriz surrenders his life to the conniving hatred of his friend’s family(they are driven to desperation because of the complete change in Rumi, who no longer connects to them) and Rumi becomes a passionate poet, a mystic. He writes transformative poetry which generations can never get enough of, leading all followers to a love which breaks away from conventions and is pristine in its purity and form.

The two stories work together to allude to the forty rules of love which are revealed in italics through the novel. A very Paulo Coelo like writing technique, but then it deviates from it, that there is nothing allegorical about the narrative. It is a fictionalized version of the coming together of Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, the effect of their merging mindscapes on themselves and others around them.

The forty rules of love, the treasure trove of the book, if expounded could become a treatise in themselves. Here are a few to savor and think about, for ruminate you shall; the core philosophy of Sufism:

East, west, south, or north makes little difference. No matter what your destination, just be sure to make every journey a journey within. If you travel within, you’ll travel the whole wide world and beyond.

 The quest for Love changes us. There is no seeker among those who search for Love who has not matured on the way. The moment you start looking for Love, you start to change within and without.

 Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead, let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?

 Real filth is the one inside. The rest simply washes off. There is only one type of dirt that cannot be cleansed with pure waters, and that is the stain of hatred and bigotry contaminating the soul. You can purify your body through abstinence and fasting, but only love will purify your heart.

 The whole universe is contained within a single human being—you. Everything that you see around, including the things you might not be fond of and even the people you despise or abhor, is present within you in varying degrees. Therefore, do not look for Satan outside yourself either. The devil is not an extraordinary force that attacks from without. It is an ordinary voice within. If you get to know yourself fully, facing with honesty and hardness both your dark and bright side, you will arrive at a supreme form of consciousness. When a person knows himself or herself, he or she knows God.


The book is a keeper, highly recommended for a read.

Love it was that made us!

                                               

Love in Classical Literature!

Love it was that made us!

Music and love are in the air with the Sufi Festival at Kala Academy and Valentine’s Day just round the corner. Arundhati Subramaniam, hailed as the love poet of India, won the Khushwant Singh poetry prize at JLF just a few days ago. Poets of the Bhakti movement and Sufi saints in medieval times invoked God and glorified him. Contemporary poetry is in search of love in all its dimensions from bestial to celestial realms of escatsy.  Each one of us craves for the right love to enter our lives. The power of LOVE elevates us and fills us with an ultimate feeling of well-being and happiness. From reading and seeing love around us, it is only when we embark on our personal journey of love that we realize that it is not about receiving but giving love, which ultimately fulfils and enriches us. Let’s talk about the different colours of love in books that I have dwelt-on in the  past one month. Utterly disparate and alienated they may be. 

                

The books we read are not just love stories, but life stories. Some of them stay with me for the larger-than-life portrayal of a character or an interlude which leaves an indelible mark on my mindscape.  ‘Theory About Everything’, a recent film at INOX,  inspired by the memoir Travelling to Infinity:My Life with Stephen by Jane Hawking. The writer comes across as an utterly committed, passionate and determined homemaker, a rock behind the life and success of Hawking, the great physicist.

 A Ph.D. in Spanish Poetry, she writes candidly and sensitively about her 25 years of married-life with Stephen Hawking. She evocatively paints the paradoxical picture of her ex- husband’s scientific breakthroughs, his rise to stardom and deterioration of his motor-muscular activity affecting his physical abilities. The camera is the storyteller as it stays and strays from Jane’s facial expressions and lived experience.

 The interwoven threads of a warm family life of fun and activity with three children, against the great odds of a chronically disabled father, add poignancy to the dramatic detailing. The fact that she, as a young girl, inspired great faith and love in an otherwise despairing Hawking in the intial stage, when the wasting disease becomes a reality for him, and then for 25 years held on staunchly, loving caring is a remarkable feat in itself. Love visited and sustained!

The dichotomy of fame and disease pervades each frame, a great lesson in the power of life force which has superseded and defied all logic and science. It makes one believe in a divine presence, a love beyond compare, though Hawking never puts it into so many clear words of faith or GOD.

A revisited a great love story that I have never forgotten - Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Catherine’s wildness in ‘Wuthering Heights’ is the rejection of her gender identity as defined by a bourgeois society. The heliographic on the walls of her room at Wuthering Heights is the symbolic remnant of her struggle – Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff and then again Catherine Linton. Her practicality makes her choose to be a lady over her wild passion for Heathcliff,  which is her real self. Catherine is  women’s anguished voice which revolts; a haunting presence, always to remind of that which is denied to her – of what she actually wanted to be.  A love which let her be the way she was – wild and passionate and another which gave her everything but denied her herself.

The book reading session this month was based on the play, A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. Williams’s representation of the eroticized male body on stage for the pleasure of others (whether other characters or the audience or both) was revolutionary in its day. For example, according to Dean Shackelford, Blanche DuBois “projects the gaze of the gay playwright” when she ogles her working-class brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski’s naked, well-built torso. It is he rather than she who is made by Williams to be “the principal object of the gaze” in the play. Williams eroticizes and displays Stanley’s masculinity, betraying his own attraction for the male body and therefore, opening up the possibility for others to do so as well.

We cannot talk of Streetcar Named Desire and not talk about the protagonist  Blanche DuBois.  She  who substitutes her love for her husband with flagrant sexual misconduct which derails her into delusion and madness.  According to one study, Blanche’s rape can be understood as a sexual means to a spiritual end.  When Mitch fails her,  Blanche turns to the one element in her world that will not—Stanley.  His potent sexuality will destroy a desire for the flesh that has completely consumed her life (and those of her ancestors) and placed her on a one-way, nonstop streetcar towards death. Blanche rides both the streetcar “Desire” and “Dies Irae” (latin phrase which means Day of Wrath) toward her own day of spiritual reckoning, and those streetcars cross tracks in the play’s rape.

Arundhati Subramaniam’s bardic renditions of love poetry from her latest book of poems God is a Traveller, musically emphasizes “the  unique, eternal and yet contemporary, timeless and topical quality of love.”  A simmer of hormone and a carnal need, a shudder in the loins is levitated to a metaphysical attainment of vacancy and nothingness. Frissons get elevated to fusions and surrender to the oblivion and vastness beyond comprehension. Demand, Black Oestrus, Lover’s Tongue, and Rutting are poems that choreograph the sheer sensuousness of words and rhyme into a verbal rhythm of erotic poetry: ravish you/with the rip, snarl/and grind of canine/and molar, taste the ancestral grape/ that mothered you, your purpleness/swirling down my gullet/but it still won’t be me enough/there was nothing simple about it even then/an eleven-year-old’s hunger for the wet perfection/an undoing/an unmaking/raw/raw-/a monsoonal ferocity/of need/reminding you/ that this uncensored wilderness of greed/is simply/or not so simply/body.

 The piece de resistance of the series would be the Eight Poems for Shakuntala. So here you are/just another mixed–up kid/daughter of a sage/and celestial sex worker/clueless/like the rest of us/about your address/the clue Shakuntala is not to see it / as betrayal/ when the ceiling crumbles/ and you walk/into a night of stars. An age-old love myth punctuated, twisted into a parody by the lyricism of modernism.’ A woman lustrous eyed/a deer,two friends/ the lotus, the bee/ the inevitable man/the heart’s sudden anapest/  a kiss/ jasmine lapis moonshock/ besides who hasn’t known Dushyanta’s charms? A man with winedark eyes who knows/of the velvet liquors and hushed laughter/in curtained recesses/ who hasn’t known/ a man cinnamon-tongued/ stubbled/with desire//

And to wind up the love story, I pay recourse to the Sufi Mystique at the festival hosted by Kala Academy.  Sufi practice helps attain spiritual love through song, music and dance.  Sufism itself is often seen as an exotic sect comprising of whirling dervishes and rhythmic divine chants.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.

When I am with you, we stay up all night.

When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.

Praise God for those two insomnias!

And the difference between them.

Love transforms, heals, and renews. Let’s go find the magic in our lives!

When God is a Traveller

 When God  is a Traveller

Arundhathi Subramanium’s travelling God looks at the world with human eyes, keeping pace through our travails and tribulations. Her latest book of poems ‘When God is A Traveller’ was the focus at the Goa Art Lit Festival last month. She has published two collections of poems ‘On Cleaning Bookshelves’ and ‘Where I Live’, and co-edited ‘Confronting Love’, a collection of Indian love poems. In recent years, her spiritual quest has led her to publish ‘The Book of Buddha’ and ‘Sadhguru: More Than A Life’. She is the editor of the Indian domain of the Poetry International Web, besides being a cultural curator and critic. The first section Deeper In Transit in the latest book  houses poems from her previous collections and When God is a Traveller, the second section comprises a new set of poems for the present edition. She is part of the contingent of poets ( five in all ) who have  been shortlisted for the Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry to be announced at the Jaipur Lit Fest in a few days’ time.

Over the years, Arundhati has become a strong poetic presence in India. The style is lyrical with embedded rhymes, juxtaposed with rapier-sharp wordplay and a craft sharpened, to a precision-like perfection. She introduces the reader to the verticality of  lyrical verse, leaving pedestrian prose far behind. She revels in poetry and her own poetic creativity: the need to believe/there is octane enough/in a bequest of verbs/to gallop/dive/scoop/abduct/rescue/ reader and writer/in the long hard ride/ into the sunset/the need to believe language/will see us through/and that old, old need to go, typo-free, to the printer. Her poem Leapfrog follows the metaphorical trajectory of a tadpole leaping and swimming a trail of nouns and verbs networked into a communicable language to his mates: Grant me the fierce tenderness of watching/ word slither into word/into the miraculous algae of language/untamed by doubt or gravity/words careening/diving/swarming/unforming, wilder/than snowstorms in Antarctica, wetter/ than days in Cherapunjee/leaping to some place the voice /is still learning to reach.

She has well been hailed the love poet of India. A simmer of hormone and a carnal need, a shudder in the loins is levitated to a metaphysical attainment of vacancy and nothingness. Frissons get elevated to fusions and surrender to the oblivion and vastness beyond comprehension. Demand, Black Oestrus, Lover’s Tongue, and Rutting are poems that choreograph the sheer sensuousness of words and rhyme into a verbal rhythm of erotic poetry: ravish you/with the rip, snarl/and grind of canine/and molar, taste the ancestral grape/ that mothered you, your purpleness/swirling down my gullet/but it still won’t be me enough/there was nothing simple about it even then/an eleven-year-old’s hunger for the wet perfection/an undoing/an unmaking/raw/raw-/a monsoonal ferocity/of need/reminding you/ that this uncensored wilderness of greed/is simply/or not so simply/body.

Here I cannot but mention the commingling of the sacred and sensual in Indian classical dance performances. Arundhati, for whom words dance in poetry, wrote a cadenced wordplay of love for the exponent of Bharatnatyam,  Alarmel Valli. A collaboration which led Valli to “embroider a dance poem around the tonality and imagery of the word poem’’, a grand finale to the performance “Only Until the Light Fades: Love in Dance and Poetry”, emphasizing “the  unique, eternal and yet contemporary, timeless and topical quality of love.” 

Mystery is the province of poetry. And yet, it illuminates and invokes a visceral exaltation from within, very akin to music. The patterned language and tonal quality of the poems Fit, Almost Shiva, Watching the Steamrollers Arrive, Border and Shoe Zen, stirs the senses and then percolates to the neural pathways of being, resonating a symphony familiar and sedate. A human soul lost, ravaged and utterly perplexed by storms outside and within and then in a moment of time an epiphany -The Way You Arrive, the way your words reach me/phantom-walking/through all these tensile/suspicious membranes of self/the way you unclog/these streets and by-lanes/so I can surge/through star shine and aqueduct/the luminous canals of a world/turned Venetian/the way you enter/and the day’s events scatter/like islands in the sea/the way you arrive.

And  then,  Arundhati leads you from a solitary reaper to a shared communion of relationships. The poem Sharecropping is a tailor-made fit of her connection with her mother. Right from the title to the lines: sowing the same dream/ in a different self / she treads nimbly/across language/I vowel every now and then/into mouldering inertias/and she watches me / as I grow stealthily/ into her body/ here it is then /the treachery/ of love/ it gets no closer than this, Mum// there is a coupling connect and a disconnect.  Forever Connected is a poignant yet stark imagery of Geishas and their synapses with the living world: heart chakras unclogged/by the Great Express Highway/our ducts sweetened by after-mint/and Kenny G , the Peepul between us felled/to unclutter the view/the arrangements are in place /love will follow//

The piece de resistance of the series would be the Eight Poems for Shakuntala. So here you are/just another mixed–up kid/daughter of a sage/and celestial sex worker/clueless/like the rest of us/about your address/the clue Shakuntala is not to see it / as betrayal/ when the ceiling crumbles/ and you walk/into a night of stars. An age-old myth punctuated, twisted into a parody by the lyricism of modernism. And what you might say of the ending/yes, it’s cosy/family album in place/a kid with a name/to bequeath to a country/perhaps even a chipped magnet/on the refrigerator door.  Inline are more such flowing lines in other poems:  Six About Love Stories and When God is a Traveller. The latter from which the book gets its title is a tribute to the god Kartikeya/Muruga/Subramania/her namesake.  A god who has seen it all, who himself is the creator of this Maya and yet : trust the god/ back from his travels/ ready to circle the world all over again/this time for no reason at all/ other than to see it/ through your eyes//

Hierarchies of Crisis and The City and I are recordings of a flux of emotions in the aftermath of terrorist strikes on spaces we call our own. Returning to Bombay after 26/11, she writes: This time we didn’t circle each other/the city and I/ hackles raised/fur bristling/this time there was space/between us/for the woman on the 7.10 Bhayandar slow/with green combs in her hair/to say /he’s coming to get me/this time/the city surged/towards me/mangy/bruised-eyed/non-vaccinated/suddenly /mine//.   Living with Earthquakes, Quick-fix Memos for Difficult Days and Confession,  are poems about life boulders; Catnap, Learning to Say Yes, Flagbearers and Swimming make way for riverine green and sweet lime. – Gingerbread boys/run away but return eventually/to their bakers/deep within your seashell heart/you hear it again/the oceanic roar/that reminds you/that it’s happening/ right now/ life is here//.  We could say that her writing shape-shifts the contours of life’s muddles; and if there is noise, then there is silence too, a belonging and an alienation, darkness and dazzling, fear and hope, ends and beginnings. The beat of the words arms readers to comprehend life in all its pauses, blanks and holes – the uncertainties, doubts – to live a passionate life in a space of John Keats “negative capability.”

If the reader would like to go with my picks then the poems, The Other Side of Tablecloths, Or Take Mrs Salim Shaikh, I Speak for Those with Orange Lunch Boxes, Transplant and Bhakti are originals in a satirical cheeky sense, puns galore! Bhakti (with some adulteration) has your attention as soon as you read the title and ends with an echo very much like modern American poetry – Allow me to uncork you/ in the middle/of days that rattle like coke cans/so I can steal a whiff/a whiff, no more/of your crazy liquor/decant into my hipflask/Settle down in my pocket/Stay illicit// Transplant likewise ends with the gnarled age old banyan asking to be –a little less ancient/a little less universal/a little less absolute/a little more bloody/bonsai//. The first poem in my line of favourites: Miss Guzder’s outrage was moral/A girl like you – I never expected it- how could you? Before her the underside/of my tablecloth/snarling green mayhem/of equatorial rainforest/seething beneath an upfront view/of convent-educated daffodils//

Now, before you reread the article

Go, buy the book

Savour; let it ravish you

Marinate in it

The alchemy will astound you

The Storyteller

   

A FIVE YEAR OLD BOY is the protagonist of the Booker nominated book ‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue. The story is narrated from his perspective which is pretty constricted as he is imprisoned in a room with his Ma since he was born. For him the outside world, fresh air, flowers, other people are just fairy tales. His reality is a eleven square foot room and one other human being - old  Nick, the man responsible for abducting Ma and continually raping her. A transition from the room to the world outside is a shattering experience for him and his Ma. What makes it utterly poignant and avant garde for the reader is the narration from the boy’s point of view. He is the triumph on which the book rides high. Structuring of a book is an art ever so subtle and masterful in the hands of great writers. The craft is prevalent, though superbly restrained, and holding the entire work seamlessly together. The narrator who tells the story is distinctly chosen by the writer, after great thought. Unusual narrators have contributed to the uniqueness of a book of fiction

 It happened yet again. Nilanjana Roy, the journalist and literary critic released her first book – ‘The Wildings, in which the narrators are CATS, cheels, dogs and tigers. Successful people don’t do different things , they do things differently. Imagine hearing the story from the perspective of cats, which she set out to do initially but later with the progression of the book other interesting animals too found a voice in the narration.

A masterstroke would be ‘My Name is Red’ by Orhan Pamuk in which the first narrator is a CORPSE. The book is narrated in 20 different voices, with a dog, a horse and the colour RED, too, taking turns to narrate the story of a miniaturist illuminator who is murdered in medieval Turkey. Here, we cannot but talk about DEATH as the narrator of ‘The Book Thief’ by Markus Zusak. The over busy death, weary and cynical of retrieving souls during World War II in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, is a humane entity, devoid of grotesque monstrosity, serving its purpose with great empathy. If I say a grandfatherly figure, I wouldn’t be far from it.

To take the conversation further, the first section of ‘Sound and Fury’ is from the point of view of an AUTISTIC  33-year old man Benjamin "Benjy" Compson, a source of shame to the family due to his autism. The narration is a series of non-chronological events and shifts haphazardly. Limited by himself he cannot interpret time, cause and effect and conceives happenings through visual and auditory stimulus. Moving on to the autistic brave boy Christopher John Francis Boone, a 15-year-old boy who describes himself as "a mathematician with some behavioral difficulties” is a deserving mention here, from the book ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.’ Finding a keen grasp of his social fears, he solves the mystery of the murder of the dog and then goes on to find his mother. An appealing, quirky novel. A great feat, using a narrator with asperger syndrome.’ The chapters are numbered according to prime numbers; the book is filled with mathematical puzzles, maps and illustrations.

‘Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka is told by a GIANT INSECT– a young lad morphed into an insect. A symbolic, multi-layered story of human complexities.  ‘The Art of Racing in the Rain’ by Garth Stein uses brilliant narrative device. The narrator is the know-all old dog Enzo, who has mastered human behavior by watching TV when his master is away. The story of the master who is an aspiring car-racer is relayed from the perspective of his dog, who is as good as human except for opposable thumbs and no speech. He takes us through the joys and pains of marriage of his master, meddling in-laws, illness, highs and lows of a race-car driver. A catchy read with emotional strings attached to it. You will never be able to look at a dog in the same way again.

‘The Screwtape Letters’ by C.S Lewis is in the voice of two DEVILS who exchange letters between themselves. The letters appeared during the dark days of World War II and later came out as a book dedicated to his friend TRR Tolkien “The secrets out. You've stumbled upon a mysterious series of recorded conversations between two demons tasked with securing the demise of their human patients.” Delightfully disturbing (and often diabolically humorous) entertainment, The Screwtape Letters will open your eyes and ears to the devil's schemes — and to the One who has overcome them.”

 Ralph Ellison's nameless protagonist in Invisible Man ushers readers to the stare and gaze of racial American society. A society who sees and yet does not see the black man as an individual in his own right. This looking without registering  impacts the victim and reduces him to a non entity with psychological repercussions of withdrawal, suppression and violence.

No doubt all the books mentioned above have been a great success of their times. Next time you set out to write a book, think hard who is going to do the talking.