two days of snowstorms
then robin accentors
going about as a matter of fact
snow, as if silence grew tissue, rests now
a human heart needs
this more-than-human world
with its wind, its snow
its winged things
a few moments, intense, intimate
and fidelities change within you
from emptiness to expanse
from lovers to love
from suffering to merely pain
the mountains watch
you tiptoe into a mystery
This first of a three-part series is on the cluster of temples, smaller pillared shrines and other architectural wonders that stand on the legendary Hemakuta Hill in Hampe (the anglicised Hampi). The hill itself rises from the ground like a surreal geological piece of art, offering a sweeping view of this ancient city.
It’s also my privilege to quote the radiant mind that the Kannada philosopher, writer and great orator that Lakshmeesha Tolpadi is in this part.
Vikram Nanjappa, thank you for this collaboration! And many thanks to Rajiv Shyamsundar for sharing his photographs generously.
In Wade in the Water, the brilliant Tracy K. Smith has composed a poem that is a series of letters and statements of African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and those of their wives, widows, parents and children. She has preserved the original spellings and punctuation to the extent possible. While the ones written between the loved ones are heartbreaking as they are, some of the ones addressed to President Lincoln are touching, too; even more so when they are humorous. Imagine being capable of humour of all things at the time when slavery and war had compound effects on the African American families. These letters show persistence, good faith and endless dignity in their appeal to President Lincoln. Smith has really struck a chord deeply by compiling these letters, the resonance lingers long after one puts the book down.
It’s time to take up photography more seriously and learn from the artist I live with. I experimented with a point-and-shoot in my second most favourite country in the world, Italia, last November. A shout out to BookMyLens founder and our dear friend Goutham Shankar for insisting I carry a camera just in case. How kind and thoughtful. And smart, to make a stubborn see-er of things see and photograph as well. Saligram is finally helping me edit photos that are worthy of preserving. Not too shoddy, I think, after a brief photography stint with another basic camera in Tanzania in 2018. Photo stories coming soon, good folk! Words with my own photos, woah. đŸ˜¦đŸ˜§đŸ˜¨
These funny things called coincidences. Santosh chose to edit a poem on ‘time’ this morning, of all the videos we had filmed in Europe last November. Ten years ago, SH, one of my dearest friends, the space dude, took me to watch Nolan’s Interstellar on IMAX so he could do his best to make me understand that film where time itself is a character. While Santosh was editing this video early this morning, SH texted me saying it’s been a whole darn decade since Interstellar happened! All the three of us seem to have lived many lifetimes in these ten years, and I managed to spend time with both of them today. We have just been galaxies of stories, sometimes walking with our hands in our pockets like we were hiding stardust in our fists. Sometimes, it takes a space-nerd friend, who spends most of his time looking at the night sky while falling more deeply in love with Earth by the minute, to make you realise just how much gravitas the idea of us being walking and talking stardust has. What a burden, this joy. What an honour.
Last year, I gathered the courage to let your poetry pierce me as acutely as it could, and I have been walking around with a knife that was slowly driven into my aorta as I read your words one after another ravenously. If that knife were pulled out, I would die. Instantly. Milosz, master, I come to you. Again. I desperately wish my heart is ripe enough to assimilate your words. Again. I fold my hands and bow to thee. Take me under your wings, again, kind master.
(Image from the blog of Steven Fama, a fellow ardent fan of Miłosz)
The wish to devour all the art at the MusĂ©e d’Orsay, especially Manet’s, hasn’t been fulfilled despite our best attempts at packing it into our Paris itinerary twice. It’s a sweet failure that wants me to work hard to make the next one happen, simply because a lifetime is not enough in that crazy city, argh! I’m most eager to meet Manet’s women. Those unabashed women who didn’t give two hoots about the labels people gave them for living unapologetically, those who returned the male gaze like it were not even worthy of being a big deal. Not to forget, some of them were inspired by Manet’s own female collaborators who were artists themselves. (Image: Sortis Ă¡ Paris)
Two inkpots, green and magenta, from a quaint antique shop in the UK, now rest on a desk of a South Indian girl. Sometimes, light falling on one of them at an oblique angle stirs words in her already noisy mind and they acquire form with the flow of these very inks. She scrawls them on paper, the sound of this soft scratch is music in its own right. Apothecary, alchemy, sorcery, witchery… there can be all these words for ways in which words happen. And then, the ink dries, the paper is ready to sleep in its drawer, the pen rests in its case. All else can wait. All else is quiet. All else has a tomorrow.
(With gratitude to the kind and wonderfully candid SP, who trusts me with utterly human stories and brought me these inkpots.)
Earlier today with seven of my many most-favourite human beings on the planet. These amazing people, so alive with their genuine love for life, reaolved to be as harmless as possible towards the planet in the way we live every day, trying their best to participate in the human world with a keen awareness of all its virtues of vices, its philosophies and politics. They inspire me as Padayaatre has been an anchor in my life because of them. Love them to pieces. Today was so much about AKR, Béndré ajja that my head is abuzz with their breathtaking verses. Hemaa, Abhi, Sumanaa, Shashaank, Vyaasa, Katta sir, Kausheel, thank you so much for bringing so much poetry, laughter, thinking, wonder, love, warmth and kindness with you today, as always.
Before the 74th episode, we filmed a couple of poems for Padayaatre YouTube featuring Vyaasa, one of the kindest human beings I’ve ever known. And Santosh works like he has cloned himself for all the projects he’s working on, all equally high-functioning versions, which for me is both inspiring and heartbreaking because he works so hard. We are on the cusp of a new era and I am restless with butterflies fluttering madly in the pit of my stomach.
https://youtu.be/-yOZEiHLuVU?si=r3SXIIYuD5UpLGOq
Implosions in the gut, avalanching inward, collapsing, crumbling, swallowed whole by forces you can’t fathom. Hans. IN.EVERY.FILM. Recently it was Dune 2, but this ETERNAL Gladiator track. Oh, this. This.
Half the world away, a philosopher of our time struggles with questions around artificial intelligence. Here, from our cricket stadiums rises human-roaring and flows into our living rooms through screens. Somewhere between joy and fear exists everything else, just the way it has always been. Some of us, when bogged down by the weight of it all, return to what simply continues to save us. Shell, cocoon, nest, hollow. Home. A story pours out of an open book, so wonderfully vulnerable, inspiring some of us to remain the fools that we might be seen as for being resolute in our love for abstract things. Words, poetry, language, nature. Magic. It is in these very cocoons our arms learn the strength to embrace this world with all its opposing forces. We grow, with every word that flows in our bloodstream. Egg, larva, pupa, butterfly. Freedom. Freedom so quiet and all ours, drifting with the songs of the wind.
Rebecca Solnit and Ellen Bass from the Universe in Verse 2024 edition. While Solnit’s prose walks with her readers when they need a ‘field guide to getting lost’, Bass’ poems visit to test your flesh as to how much hurt it can hold with the promise of spring blooms erupting at the end of that hurt. Such powerhouses these women. What a privilege it is to share time with them. And then there is Maria Popova who brings them all together once a year to read out loud to us these little universes called poems.
And then, in our time, there is also a Helga Davis. Enunciating every word of a poem given to her like it were a sacred hymn, hoarding her audience to chant in unison in response to her, sending ripples through the air around her with the sounds of words. Such simple magic. If her pauses don’t move a lover of language to tears, I don’t know what else will. It was an honour to listen to her half the world across, even it were only through a screen. I dream of witnessing Universe in Verse in the flesh one of these years.
Silkworm Slumbers 