A letter from Shri Jayanta Mahapatra

I really don't know how to start this blog post.

I also do not know how to write about my recent visit to Orissa with my parents (for 5 hectic days prior to Ugadi) when the bittersweet disquiet of being back at a home that we had left (I grew up in Orissa) played hide and seek with the joy of experiencing and enjoying the familiar milieus of my childhood.

This was a brief, rushed trip since Amma wanted to be back in Hyd for Ugadi (I had a marriage and the reception that followed to attend), but we did manage to go to Lord Jagannath's temple at Puri, the Sakhi Gopal temple at Sakhi Gopal, Lord Lingaraja Temple at Bhubaneshwar and Maa Biraja's Temple at Jajpur.

While at Cuttack, I remembered that a famous poet (somebody whose poems I had hunted out and read back in my schooldays) whom I remembered without recollecting his name, whom I remembered without recollecting anything definite about his poems lived in the same city at a locality quaintly named Tinkonia Bagicha (triangular garden).

Our cab driver said he knew Tinkonia Bagicha and took us there, but since I gave him the wrong name (for some reason the name that came to me was Jatin Das), it took me some wandering around in the afternoon heat before I was directed to a building with the name "Chandrabhaga" besides its gate.

Not at all bothered by the afternoon heat, but feeling very penitent for not having done this long before and mentally kicking myself for getting a senior and eminent poet's name wrong, I finally fetched Amma from the cab and we together walked through that gate -- to meet Shri Jayanta Mahapatra.

We weren't lucky enough to meet Shri Jayanta Mahapatra (he was away at New Delhi) but I did manage to spend some time in his living room / study and the feeling was of being blessed, like being in a temple of wisdom and thought -- because I somehow feel fortunate when I come in touch with senior / old poets, be it when I read their poetry or when (in rare cases like this) I get to feel the aura of their presence.

Since I couldn't meet him, I left a note for him instead -- along with a copy of my book -- introducing myself as someone who hasn't met him or enjoyed the privilege of knowing him and requesting his feedback on my book.

I had a sense of fulfillment as I stepped out of Chandrabhaga (similar to how I feel when I step out of a temple) and since we left for Jajpur thereafter (to Maa Biraja's temple, where again I felt very blessed) you could say these intense feelings were poems in the book called Orissa, segueing seamlessly into each other.

Yes, I felt fulfilled and really didn't want or expect anything else from my visit (though I did hope that Shri Jayanta Mahapatra would read and probably like my poems).

Which is why when M told me yesterday that a letter has arrived from a "Jayanta Mahapatra, Tinkonia Bagicha..."at the Coucal office, I couldn't really believe it. And when M wanted to know why I was acting so "worked up" and who Jayanta Mahapatra is, my reply was a terse "google him".

I hurried to meet M, claimed the letter (and the envelope) and have read it more than a dozen times already. And I still don't find words to explain my happiness. As you may very much expect, I am going to frame this letter and cherish it as a treasured possession for the rest of my life.

Not because he has praised my poems (which he has done), but because the letter (incidentally handwritten) itself reads like a poem, one revealing the wisdom, bighearted nature and humility of the great man.

P.S. Coincidentally, when I started writing this post my father wanted my help in filling up some forms to transfer his Kisan Vikas Patra certificates to a post office here in Secunderabad. The forms had an address field starting with "To The Postmaster..." where my father asked me to fill in "Ispat Post Office, Rourkela 769016" and that very act made it feel like I was writing a letter home.

I guess that's another reason why I am so kicked about this letter from Shri Jayanta Mahapatra. Because though I am very much a Telugu belonging to Hyderabad, my childhood "home" was Orissa and Shri Jayanta Mahapatra's letter was like a letter from home.

Watch "Four Minutes" at OUCIP

Osmania University Centre for International Programmes
& Goethe-Zentrum Hyderabad

cordially invite you to a screening of

“Four Minutes”
(Dir. Chris Kraus, 112 mins., 2006)



Time : 3 pm
Day & Date : Mon 22 Mar 2009,
Venue : AV Room, OUCIP


About the film: Four Minutes is “a powerful drama about an
elderly piano teacher and her relationship with a young
prison convict”. It “tells an unusual story with equally
unusual conviction”. Traude Krüger has been giving piano
lessons in a women's prison for decades. She meets Jenny,
a reserved young woman convicted of murder who was
once considered a child musical prodigy. Her attempt
to guide her pupil to victory in a music competition
leads to a difficult, contradictory relationship
between the two women which fascinates to
the very last second.

OUCIP is located in the Osmania University campus, and can be reached by turning left opposite College of Arts (if you are coming from the Tarnaka side) OR by continuing straight from the Administrative Building (if you are coming from the Vidyanagar / Shivam side).

Invite - Meet the Author @ Evening Hour

Evening Hour is organizing a Meet the Author session with Priti Aisola, author of See Paris for Me (Penguin Books, 2009)

Date - 20 March, 2010
Time - 6.30 PM onwards
Venue - Evening Hour Store, JNTU Lane, Kukatpally, Hyderabad

Consider this a personal invite from Evening Hour, for more details, click here

Ugadi Pacchadi, 1999

The calendar
by birthright and mother tongue
that I call mine
doesn't have a scary millennium,
waiting beyond the brink.

The rituals
I these days follow
for release, money and the release of money
don't know any falls,
I alone walk the edge.

This new year
has to taste different
last year's sourness cannot be bittered
and this spoonful of sweetness, like a day
can't stay on as a permanent aftertaste.

From Moving On

As indicated by the title of the poem, it was written on Ugadi, 1999 (yes, I know it seems almost a lifetime back). Ugadi (March 16th, this year) is Telugu New Year day (as opposed to January 1st) when a Pacchadi (chutney / mixture) is made and eaten across all Telugu (and Kannada) households.

Apart from being deliciously tasty, the Pacchadi's ingredients themselves are supposed to be indicative of the overall balance of life. As such it comprises of the sweet (jaggery / sugar, banana, other fruits ), the sour (tamarind / raw mango), the bitter (neem flowers), the salty (salt) and the hot (green chillies).

Please do note that this is basically a simplistic explanation, there may be deeper meanings in that spoon of Pacchadi.

"Bittered" in the poem is not a typo, its word play :-)

Kaliyugabdi 5,111 Ugadi Subhakanshalu

This and that about how "Moving On" happened

By mid July, 2009 ( a month after I had quit my job) I was finally convinced that I had a body of work that was worth being published and that it was high time I took the plunge and brought out my book. Also, for a various number of reasons that I will try and talk about later (related to the "penury of demand" for poetry, the confused landscape of publishing, my past interactions with some so called publishers and my belief in the so called tradition of "self-publishing) I had already decided to learn everything required and do all that needed to be done to bring "the book" out.

Now, if this makes you visualize someone sitting locked up in a room at a desk / computer spending most of the day and night waiting for the muse to come, you are both right and wrong.

Right -- because, I did spend a lot of time sitting locked out of what used to be pretty much of an ordered life prior to my momentous decision.

Wrong -- because....oh well, here you go...

Around May / June, basically with the vague idea of getting fitter I had again got back to cycling (I used to commute on a bicycle through most of my school / early college days) and I continued with cycling July onwards, because it helped in my poetic thought processes and also gave me the much needed release from all kinds of questions from within and without....

So for most of early July and August, while the monsoons played truant, I used to burn calories with a furious frenzy, on a road that still burnt with the vestiges of summer.

Had you been a bird in the afternoon sky, you would have seen me cycling away, in search of the epiphanic and inner peace -- willing new poems to come and waiting for those already in ferment in me to sort themselves out.

My road used to the same one, day in and day out, the stretch that leads to Shameerpet and then onwards to Karimnagar and Asifabad, S.H.1, also called Rajiv Gandhi Rahadari.

Then, for something like three weeks in September when the monsoons were well and truly here (over the Deccan) and the waters that rained down from the heavens varied in between being a misty ooze, a persistent drizzle, a hammering of liquid hail and deluges of cloudbursts that blinded and drowned -- I had continued with the habit that I had clothed my days in, all through July, August and September.

So, in stages, I got used to cycling, I got used to the thirst (and pain?) of waiting for the rains and then glorified in getting wet in it (as opposed to getting wet in my sweat). For most of these days, I would stop and cloudspot / horizon-gaze at Shameerpet Lake and I guess unwittingly, the lake (and the coming of the rains) became a metaphor probably larger than the season and life.

It started raining and I started cycling beyond Shameerpet (but still stopping there to cloud-spot / horizon-gaze) and I must say the cycling soon became more pleasure and less pain. Seeing Shameerpet lake covered by an umbrella of dark clouds (on a daily basis)and getting wet in the year's first rains were pretty much euphoric. But the best thing was cycling through a cloudburst that was primeval in its fury and intensity -- as primeval as the rain / hail / snow that I had stopped for and shouted at while motorcycling up a totally deserted Baralaccha La in 2005.

By and by, I lost the urge (or burnt out the fury) for cycling non-stop like an automaton and got bored of the routine of the same road again and again (in fact, I had written some really dark and confessional stuff in the days before it rained, but even with that mindset, I spat out "the outpourings of blame" onto the road itself).

Then I discovered a stream of gravelly red streaked with ochre and yellow running through a lake of wild green grasses -- that starts where one of the asphalt roads from my colony peters out and peters out somewhere near the stretch of N.H.7 that leads to Medchal. This stream of dirt led to more discoveries and more space for thought as it wanders through solitude and open spaces that are wild with grass flowers, butterflies, chameleons, and abandoned, water-filled quarries.

By now, my cycling getaways were more focused on reworking on my poems and most of the time I would have a copy of the manuscript of "Moving On" (in a plastic folder) with me. Or a notepad (again in a plastic folder) to jot down visitations poetic. In fact, for three consecutive days in October I went to the same quarry in the evening to try and do justice to the magic of the monsoons, when the skyline was all clouds and one couldn't really distinguish where the reflection in the waters trapped in the quarry was rain-wet rock and where it was pencil black, rain-swollen cloud.

And since it rained almost all the while I was on the cycle, "Segues of Shade and Shadow" was mostly pencilled on a wet notepad, with me hunched under an outcropping of rock while the poem came "... while rain walks / on stone-pooled rain ..."

Granite Gaggles also happened in a similar setting somewhere in that monsoon fed wilderness, where the poem arrived with "... light leaks out / and writes odes ... "

Yes, some of the poems came in / from this monsoon-fed, "monsooned" wilderness. As October ended and November started, the grasses were almost shoulder high at places and I even motorcycled through them, sometimes with the little man sitting on the tank, both of us equally thrilled at the Bullet thumping its way through the grasses and the sightings of the various birds (coucals, peacocks, parakeets, cormorants, bee-eaters, etc.) and I guess it was on one of those trips when he concluded that I have some kind of supernatural (at least comparable to the Cartoon Network characters known to him) powers since I was taking the motorcycle into a "thick forest".

Coming back to the book, though the rains and the cycling added more poems to the MS, by first week of November almost everything was sorted out and ready for printing. Then started this and that delay on this and that account. The "T" agitation just burst out of the blue around this time and that didn't make things any easier, either.

But then, December 18th finally arrived and "Moving On" was finally launched.

P.S. - Maybe its entirely in keeping with the way things happened, that the title of the book also came to me while I was on the move. In R's car and on the way back from a marriage at Nakrekal, on the same day the poem "Crossing Over" came.

P.P.S. - I did not exactly keep a log / note down the "exact" way things happened. This is basically meant to be a structured ramble about how the book happened.

Priti Aisola on "Moving On"

A child-like wonder at, and gratitude for, the little beauties of nature is very evident in Anand’s poems. In his poems there is deep concern for the physical environment – how its landscapes are being transformed and water bodies are being devoured to make place for concrete structures and tarred roads. For example, the poem “Vizag’s Hills” describes how hills once teeming with life have been deforested and cut into, to provide ‘dead wood’ and ‘dead stone’ for houses. Similarly, in the poem "Banyan Square" he speaks of the ‘massive’ Banyan tree, whose world has been uprooted to make place for progress’ concrete structures and pukka shops. True the Banyan survives in memory ‘for the square’s known after it still.’ This memory will have to suffice.

What comes through acutely is a strong awareness of a past that cannot be reclaimed. It could be communal or personal past, or it may refer to the natural environment that has seen some dramatic changes. In "Three Soap Trees", he quietly mourns the fact that no ‘epitaphs’ are written on the death of trees, fields, open spaces, on the disappearance of childhood’s and youth’s familiar spaces.

Anand’s poetry is replete with images to do with journeys, water and fire. There is plenty of colour – black and white and deep and bright colours and pastels. And each is rich with multi-layered meanings. So many of his reflections, his lyric poetic moments, his philosophic musings center around water in its different forms – puddles, ponds, pools, streams, lakes, rivulet, rivers, rainfall, the monsoon…. In "Monsoons, 2004", he chronicles heartbreak against the backdrop of the monsoon and explores its changed meaning in his life.

Each image that he evokes has the authenticity of experience and the lucidity of something seen by the inner eye.

His passion for cycling and motorcycling comes through in his poems. Cycling becomes a metaphor for negotiating ‘the traffic of his (my) thoughts’, for escaping sleepless thoughts, for calming a certain restiveness that moves ‘from unslept night to sleepless day’. There is pain as on ‘reality’s’ road ‘dreams die (dying) in sight of open eyes’, and there is the courage to go on in spite of that.

A delving into the process of writing, into the well-springs of creativity, and anguish over ‘insipid writing’ also finds a significant place in his work. Silence has a disquieting connotation in his work.

Underlying his poetry is ‘the enigmatic search’ for some elusive resting-place as he journeys through different spaces – those within the self and those without. Spaces in ruins and spaces that have been swallowed by the irreversible march of urbanization preoccupy him.

-- Priti Aisola, author of See Paris for Me

Thanks a lot for your very detailed and sensitive notes, Priti, it's been an immense privilege to know and interact with you!

Peter O’Leary

"To dwell in language is to dwell in the moment of epiphany, even to elaborate it and conjugate it by stretching the word out into its grammar. The word is what hits the poet and goes all over him or her. Enshrining this moment is the act of poetry. The life spent making such a shrine is the burden — or the affliction — of the poet. The poem does not heal. Like life, poetry is something from which we cannot be healed." - Peter O’Leary

Dr. Sachidananda Mohanty on "Moving On"

"Anand Vishwanadha’s poems speak to us in many voices.Words and expressions come cascading in startling sequences leading to dramatic endings.The poems ‘Vizag’s Hills’ and ‘Media-shy’ are good examples: picture perfect cameos that haunt our memory.

Landscapes and lakes are often rendered animate and come alive as intimate associates.The poem ‘Maa Chilka’,for instance,reveals the intimate bond between man and Nature in filial terms.

Anand’s poems are distinguished by a set of vivid images that create a mood forever lasting. Rhythm and substance get inextricably fused evoking meanings considered long lost."

Dr Sachidananda Mohanty
Professor & Head
Department of English
University of Hyderabad

Many,many thanks Sachi Bhai.

The Road to Medhchal

(For Adrian)

We spreadeagled and pinned down
half a summer night
into conversations
-- soaring noon high --
of you and I, the roads in and out of life,
of you and I and throttle-fulls of speed and smoke.

We spreadeagled and pinned down
questions for time
-- the need to just ride, the need to just be --
mirroring the soul in the machine,
the engine in the being, agreeing
-- we write even as we ride --

In throttle-fulls of speed and smoke
book, chapter and verse
stories of metre and mile
the metre of miles....

Ambika Ananth on "Moving On"

"The intensity, force, depth and lucidity of Anand Vishwanadha's poems defy the fact that "Moving On" is a debut collection. His poetry shows a contemporary sophistication in expression and imagery (truly characteristic of his poetic sensibility), yet sometimes symbolizes frailty , vulnerability and uncertainty – the absolute human side.

Adopting the techniques of allusiveness and multi-layered irony, he chronicles the the poignancy of love and mundane twists and turns of life, to convey his pertinent questions on and about life.

His poems -

convey empirical truths in words of elemental simplicity,

have philosophical mysteries ventilated from within,

are compellingly different, refusing to get tied down by conformist principles.

Some poems have a sense of movement , yet with a sort of rootedness and depth of thought – they justify the title – Moving On."

- Ambika Ananth, Chief Editor, Muse India

Thanks Ambika Ji!

Free Shipping (anywhere within India) offer on Moving On

For all of you who have wanted to know where to get my book from, here's a quick update! You can order "Moving On" at Evening Hour, here at absolutely NO shipping charges. Thanks Priyanka!

The book (paperback, 100Pp, 72 poems, foreword by Hoshang Merchant, published by Coucal Books) costs 150 INR.

In fact, according to some well-read friends, "Moving On" can probably be called three books rolled into one, since the poems presented in it deal with three distinct themes / subjects. The euphoria and angst of reacting to and dealing with "this wide, wide world", the pleasure, pain and nostalgia of "love and loss" and the joys and discoveries of being "water-washed".

Some critical feedback has come in on the book, I will be posting up the same here soon.

I guess, "Moving On" would mean so many other cliched things to so many people, but this title was chosen because it does justice to all the poems in the book.

So if you have wanted to get it, get it now! And in case you have any problems do drop me a line, will be happy to help.

Muse India - March - April Issue

Muse India , a bi-monthly e-journal for Indian literature has launched its latest (March - April) issue.

In this issue, Ambika Ananth (Chief Editor, Muse India) presents glimpses from Tamil literature, with Rajaram Brammarajan, the noted poet and translator, serving as the section editor, and Prof T Vijay Kumar oversees a special feature on ‘Indian Writing in English – Criticism Across Genres’.
There is also an article by Manu Dash on Dilip Chitre, (the illustrious Marathi and English poet), who passed away last December, where Manu Dash recounts his personal association with him.
There are also two book reviews by Ambika Ananth, of "Letter to an Imaginary Pen Friend and Other Poems" by Kumarendra Mullick and "Women in Indian Writing – From Difference to Diversity" by Ranu Uniyal.
Muse India has a very lively forum called Your Space, meant for readers to share and invite feedback on impromptu poems and short fiction. Incidentally some regular contributors to this forum were part of the Muse Meet (in January this year).

Invite - Evening Hour Storytelling competition for kids

The nice people at Evening Hour are organizing a storytelling competition for kids. Details are as below,

Date - 06 March, 2010
Time - 6.00 PM onwards
Venue - Evening Hour Store, JNTU Lane, Kukatpally, Hyderabad

The competition is for kids between the ages 3-10, for more details contact Evening Hour on 040-65873003

The Tandav of life

Stiff-tailed, biting noon air
a muddy yellow cat's-paw
of cold rabid dread
it passes me,
pattering left,
on two tap-dancing paws

Lurching right,
wobble-legged
toppling onto its back
in an empty-stomached width
of shade
a common cur
maddened
by the Tandav of life

Refusing to die
a dog's death.