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).

Untitled Ventings

The last week's been funny.

I do time trials against a setting sun in the evenings and write and read this and that most of the other time.

But at nights, the same dream that had left me sleepless for most of June last year comes back. Again and again, as nightmares do.

Its a stark setting, there is this conference room with a bunch of people around a table -- some half-asleep, some barely there, some pecking away at their laptops -- a management review meeting is happening.

And I have just being pronounced guilty.

"What do you do anyway?" has always been the question here. Sometimes voiced, sometimes not, usually very subtly stated of course.

"You don't deserve what we pay you" has also been always the accusation here {when the recession happened, my ROI was naturally the first to be questioned (purely a case of fingering because I had NEVER not delivered something asked of me)} sometimes veiled, sometimes not, never stated of course.

Let me cut back to the dream.

So I have just presented what my team has been doing for the last two months. All this has already been reviewed by my reporting head (and management by default), we have been sending weekly status reports.

My own reporting head has also never brought this up. Its been understood that my team will facilitate and support all techno-marketing-whatever-you-call-it activities and "marcomify" (as phrased by him) whatever content is sent over. Even if the content is a mish-mash that has been "captured" from this and that source and rewritten to be muck and "rewriting" which again meant getting a headache in just 10 minutes!

Psst...my team consists of only one writer. Yes, yours truly and him alone.

Now that I have presented the presentation, a gent says "Not happy with you boss!" Then he even kindly raises his voice and repeats the same thing yet again. As I have already said, the conference room is full of people, this is not a one-on-one review and I report to someone else.

So this was no off the cuff, casually uttered and unintentional jibe. This was evidently something far more than a rap on the knuckles. Something akin to "public mein pant utaarna" by somebody for whom I had bent backwards, never refusing anything, doing everything asked of me in the spirit of passion, leadership, blah, blah....

So a bit of me died that day and this dream started coming every night. I had decided to quit that very day and two other incidents that happened thereafter vindicated my decision.

ONE -- I am told that my reporting head feels that all I do is "put a comma here, a semi-colon there, and so on", by someone in management who had said the same thing to me a number of times earlier (of course jocularly, with marked bonhomie, a nice smile, et al). So a bit more of me died.

TWO -- And then {post a lengthy internal debate post which I am told my team of three will be an independent department again and will be AGAIN solely responsible for putting up a full-blown website (supervised by the techno-marketing excel sheet types of course) when I look at the work in hand and ask for resources, I am reminded of my hearing disability twice (but the same damn phrase) by two gents from management. Again, a bit more of me died.

Continuing there after these two things happening would have been like living on a dole or feeding off someone's far from veiled kindness.

So I quit, wrote Moving On and I had thought I had moved on.

But then this dream comes again and again.....

Some poetry and a lot of pain

On the morning of 17th February (it wasn't afternoon -- of that I am sure) one of the dumb bells I exercise with (once in a while) fell on my left hand.

Nothing broken thankfully (especially not the dumb bell), but my hand really ballooned up in a big way. To look like a bear's paw and become equally unwieldy.

Typing was a pain, holding onto a book was a pain, putting on a shirt was a pain, and so on...

I did manage to cycle around (the motorcycle's clutch lever is on the left handlebar; will try clutching it tomorrow and hope that I don't pass out from pain) and though jolts of pain shoot up when I put the left hand on the handlebars, the joys of moving on are worth it.

Incidentally, on the evening of 16th I was cycling after posting up Memory's Scythe here and it rained and rained and rained, making things more than a bit dicey for me since my clothes (I was wearing a Kurta and baggy cotton cargoes) soaked up all the waters and made cycling back home really heavy going.

Coincidentally (I mean this in an eerie way), I had been similarly soaked (and caught up in a 4 hours long traffic jam somewhere near SR Nagar on my way back home) when I had written Unslept.

Eerie, no?

Maybe I shouldn't complain about the rains not raining too much :-)

Dragonflies

If I could go back 25 years in time, around 3.00 in the afternoon today, I would have been besides some Pokhuri in Rourkela, watching the buffaloes from the Khatals all around it wading into the dull emerald green (rich in spirogyra) waters, marveling at the recalcitrance of the egrets - blobs of sun-splashed white on the dark bovine hides - most of them waiting till their feet are wet before kicking off and flying around....

I would have been chewing on a stem of grass, the sun would have been hot on my back and I would have had thousands and thousands of dragonflies all around, transparent winged specks of yellow, red, black and green, there but still not there, as whimsical in their flight and direction as the kapok parachuted seeds floating out of a Bombax fruit that has ripened and burst.....

I didn't go back 25 years in time today (I did go for cycle ride sometime back, charmed out by the moonlight, more about that later) but I have been seeing quite a few dragonflies here in Alwal (a locality in Hyderabad) too (quite notably above the Football ground near Loyola Academy, that becomes almost a mini-pond every year after the rains), so well, I wikied (yes, its now as much of a word as googled is) and apart from coming to know that the Samurai identify themselves with the dragonfly and so many other things that I don't want to bore you with, came across this beautiful Vietnamese saying -

"Chuồn chuồn bay thấp thì mưa, bay cao thì nắng, bay vừa thì râm"

What does it mean?

If Wikipedia is to be believed, "Vietnamese people have a traditional way to forecast rain by seeing dragonflies: "Chuồn chuồn bay thấp thì mưa, bay cao thì nắng, bay vừa thì râm" (Dragonflies fly at low level, it is rainy; dragonflies fly at high level, it is sunny; dragonflies fly at medium level, it is shadowy)."

Well, I think I need to get away soon and go farther than the Football Ground near Loyola Academy (or Shameerpet Lake, for that matter).

And find a lake / wetland where the dragonflies float around in thousands.....

Gabriel García Márquez on writing

Gabriel García Márquez: I'm still writing

Contrary to reports that he has laid down his pen, the Nobel prize winner Gabriel García Márquez tells Colombian newspaper "the only thing I do is write"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/06/gabriel-garcia-marquez-still-writing