This collection of poems is at once luminous, simple and with the poet’s old satiric bite
Over the years, Keki N. Daruwalla has been both proficient and prolific. Ever since he emerged on the scene with his scorching first book of poems Under Orion back in 1970, he has published nine other volumes, including a Selected Poems in 2008 and his Collected Poems (1970-2005), brought out in 2006.

It’s an adverse testimony on the publishing industry that even a poet of Daruwalla’s stature has been buffeted around by seven or eight different publishers. Besides poetry, he has published books of short stories and a novel, For Pepper and Christ, and has also edited an anthology on English poetry in India. He is currently working on another novel.

Solace and rhyme

His output has been quite remarkable. Usually, after the publication of a Collected, a poet often rests on his laurels or comes to an uneasy standstill, wondering if there are any poems still hovering about, just out of reach. Daruwalla has had no such hesitations. Since his Collected, he has published two more individual collections, Fire Altar in 2013, and now his newest offering, Naishapur and Babylon: Poems (2005-2017). This is avowedly his last volume of poems as he works on the new novel, though poems have the curious habit of popping up unexpectedly at the oddest times, hovering mischievously like those emojis on the computer screen. He also writes a breezy but prickly column on poetry for this magazine section in which he invariably talks down to other poets, assuming a superior position and taking up — and on — far too many poets at a time.

The poems in this new volume are imbued with the same vigour and sense of history and rugged landscape as his previous books. Unlike most other Indian poets, Daruwalla freely embraces foreign terrain — in this volume the Greek mythology of Persephone and Orpheus, Thebes and Creon, followed by ‘Luxor Diary’ in which his narrative skills are plainly evident, a skill underlined in a poem on the Portuguese seafarer Pedro Álvares Cabral, who in 1500 set sail for India but landed instead in Brazil. Though curiously inconclusive, the poem is a fine example of Daruwalla as a chronicler.

Past 80 now, Daruwalla can, as in the opening poem, still ‘light up’ through ‘this streak of fire / through the thin wire / of memory and mind’ and capture (in the poem that follows) that ‘one luminous moment / on that rim / where consciousness and amnesia / meet and vanish / blur and meet’. In another poem, he concludes: ‘Let’s face it / solace comes with poetry/ a rhyme that clangs against a tin can / insistent, but moves into memory, / a haiku that flies off a page / and turns into a bird.’ And in a later piece called ‘Letter’, he writes, a trifle awkwardly: ‘poetry? as one gets on in age / I write around the same dream / on the same page / paper gets larger, dream shorter.’

Moon river

Despite the advancing years — and, as he puts it, the ‘muted trumpet’ of the ego — Daruwalla still hasn’t quite lost his old satirical bite. On Ram Kumar’s painting of Varanasi, he writes ‘…isn’t Benares a parasite on the river, / that torrent of myth which inundates the country?’

Unusually for Daruwalla, creatures great and small also inhabit the poems, ranging from cranes, barbets, falcons and a crocodile’s ‘sunning corrugated hide’. Even the flow of a river is evocatively personalised — ‘in the hills she talks / to the rocks inside her’ though at night she is ‘a black mirror’ and ‘the quarter moon and the half moon / sail on her’. There are also some moving and plaintive touches in poems like ‘She Came’ and ‘Dream 11’ with its concluding lines: ‘The other day wife drove off / in our low slung car / our blue Standard Herald / which we had for twenty years / I said I’d wait for lunch/ and I waited and waited and then it struck me / she wasn’t coming back.’

It’s the simplicity of the lines that lend them a certain poignancy.

Besides the occasional tendency towards prolixity, there are a few unsuccessful poems in the collection, notably a rather rhetorical one on Gandhi who deserves a lot better. But if Naishapur and Babylon is really a swan song for Daruwalla, then it’s a triumphant one.

In contemporary poetry, accessibility and immediate comprehension has become a crime. It is assumed that the more ‘difficult’ and ‘complex’ a poem, the more ‘profound’ it is. This rarefied stratosphere has turned off many young readers from poetry. Daruwalla does not fall into this wilful trap. Some of his poems may need a rereading but they are not mired in obscurity. He is not a poet writing exclusively for other poets.

The writer recently published Full Disclosure: New and Collected Poems (1981-2017).

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Books> Review / by Manohar Shetty / March 31st, 2018

Chandigarh :

Classical vocalist Pt Sarathi Chatterjee and flautist Pt Rajendra Parsanna stole the limelight on the third day of the ongoing Bhaskar Rao Nritya Sangeet Sammelan at Tagore Theatre here today.

With performances over the last four decades in India and abroad, the Benares gharana stalwart Sarathi rationally blends the elements of Benares gharana into the Kirana gharana gayaki.

This was perceptible as Sarathi opened with a reposeful aalap of raga Shudh Kalyan and a slow-paced composition “Dayani daya kar de”, which melted into its medium-paced bandish “Peeharava aaye more mandir mein”.

A tarana in raga Bihag stamped his versatility while concluding a romance-laden thumri “Mein toh sari raat jagi par sayian na aaye” left the audience ecstatic.

Debashish Adhikari and Rajendra Bannerjee provided accompaniment on tabla and harmonium, respectively.

Flautist Prasanna bared the melodic features of raga Bageshri through an aalap and compositions in gayaki before presenting a composition in raga Jhinjhoti. The audience was thrilled to relish the concluding captivating dhun in Banarasi Dadra.

Rishabh Prasanna on flute and Athar Husain on tabla embellished his performance.

source: http://www.tribuneindia.com / The Tribune / Home> Chandigarh / February 23rd, 2018

Photo exhibition highlights the life and practices of the sadhus living in the oldest city of the country.

For three generations, Radhakrishna Ganeshan’s family, after moving from Tirunelveli, has lived in the holy city of Varanasi. Pursuing his passion for art and music, he graduated from the Banaras Hindu University in Applied Arts from the Faculty of Visual Arts in 1984 and later completed Masters degree in 1986.

Holding several diplomas in disciplines including painting, music, interior decoration, photography and computer designing from the oldest city, Mr. Ganeshan brings to the former French enclave the share of his world through ‘Sadhus of Banaras – Hidden Discovery of the City,’ a photo exhibition at Aurobindo Ashram Gallery on the beach road.

Growing up on the banks of Ganga river in Varanasi, which he calls ‘the city of subjects’, Mr. Ganeshan would be out every Sunday before dawn with his camera, walking through the lanes across 84 ghats in Varanasi to document the lives of sadhus. “In all these ghats, there are different sadhus. Their personalities, practices differ from each other and I am concerned that this heritage would be lost in the fast urbanisation of Varanasi. With industrialisation and tourism attracting thousands, I felt the need to preserve this heritage through photographs,” he says.

This exhibition is the first of his thematic exhibitions where he has tried to capture different moods of the sadhus whose lives are always shrouded in mystery and represents a world of detachment.

The exhibition gives a closer look at the mundane activities of sadhus, capturing the differences in their practices, identifying every sadhu including an aghori, a sanyasi marvadi, a shaiva sadhu, a vaishnava sadhu or a young sadhu with their uniqueness.

There are more than 60 portraits and photographs of sadhus at the photo exhibition organised by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts. The exhibition will be held for a week beginning from March 5.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Puducherry / by S. Senthalir / Puducherry – March 07th, 2018