Sunday, February 19, 2023

PRATIK SOUTH ASIA SPECIAL : CELEBRATED INDIAN POET K. SATCHIDANANDAN's "Between Seventy And Seventy five"

 

 

K. SATCHIDANANDAN

 

Between Seventy And Seventy five

 


There is a dark place between

Seventy and seventy five: broad

Like memory, deep like death.

Those trapped there have no return.

They roam about in the childhood bushes

Or fall headlong into the well of decrepitude.

 

Be warned if those between seventy and seventy five

Behave like the young: for, they are young.

They can love, can dance to music, and if need be

Even lead a war or a revolution. In fact

They are not dead, like most young are.

 

Those between seventy and seventy five

May suffer from delusions: at times they want

A horse-ride; at times want to fly above oceans and mountains

On the back of an eagle, wander along deserts

Looking for water that is not there,  stand naked

In the rain, or  read a poem no one has written yet. There

Are times when they feel history is retracing its step,

And feel like crying aloud, screaming, almost.

The solitude of those between seventy and seventy five

Is sepia, like some early morning dreams or

Like the friendships in old albums. When they

Laugh, sunlight retreats into village lanes.

Their sweat smells soft like sesame flowers.

Their walk is like the descending scale of saveri 1                       

And their lilting speech is littered with gamakas 2 

 

You wonder, why, this is all about men. Yes,

Women do not pass at all between

Seventy and seventy five; invisible to us,

They just glide along on a tender rainbow of affection,

With the soft feet of fairies fragrant like heaven

And the smile of oleanders, an invitation to salvation.

 

Translated from the Malayalam by the poet

 

---

1 Saveri :  A raga in Karnatic music

2 Gamakas: embellishments done on a musical note

 


K. Satchidanandan is widely published Indian poet and critic writing in Malayalam and English. A pioneer of modern poetry in Malayalam, he is the festival director of Kerala Literature Festival.

 

 

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Saturday, February 18, 2023

Her Excellency Ms. Felicity Volk's address at the Kathmandu Launch of Yuyutsu Sharma's Lost Horoscope & Pratik's Special South Asia Issue

"...Yuyu takes my breath away with the unexpected and the new.  He has an unwavering capacity to startle with the perfect image, with his attention to small, revelatory detail and his sly, understated humour, often directed at himself."


Book launch – Yuyutsu Sharma – 18 February

Lost Horoscope/Pratik South Asia Vol 18 No 1-2

Photo by SN Misra

With the words of Yuyu’s own invocation at the beginning of his new volume of poetry, I greet this gathering of book lovers:

 

“Believe me,

I’m risking my life here

coming out in the open

to sit in Café Mozart

to resume my routine

of pouring sparks

from my tamed sleep

onto the pages of my moleskine

notebook that had remained

blank for more than a year.”

 

Namaskar distinguished guests, friends and Happy Maha Shivaratri.

I’m delighted to join you to celebrate Yuyutsu Sharma and to thank him for risking his life at the Café Mozart, for resuming his routine with his notebook and for unravelling the vermilion thread of his lost horoscope, inviting us into that most intimate space of birth chart and poet’s heart.

Yuyu, I’m grateful for the honour of speaking for a few minutes at the dual launch of Lost Horoscope and Volume 18 of the journal, Pratik.

I first had the pleasure of meeting Yuyu last year. He appeared in an email having heard that I was a writer as well as diplomat. We began a correspondence that led to a book exchange.  Indeed, Yuyu first manifested physically in my world as a package of books – Annapurna Poems, A Blizzard in my Bones, past editions of Pratik.  He assume the shape that all writers take, namely a universe delivered in the most economical confines of bound pages.

And soon after, Yuyu appeared in the flesh when we had a long lunch at my residence at the Australian Embassy compound.  We talked for hours about books and writing.  I count it as a gift from Nepal that I’ve had the chance to experience this country through the prism of Yuyu’s eye and painted by his hand. 

In addition to crossing paths with Yuyu last year, I also crossed paths with myself - as in the self that is ordained in my stars.

For the first time in my life, thanks to a Nepali artist friend, I had my birth chart drawn up by a priest and read to me by an astrologer who lives in the shadow of Pashupatinath. In a drawer in my Bansbari bedroom, I have a red and gold woven pouch.  Within this is my own ‘scroll of scented homemade paper’, the sort that Yuyu writes of in his titular poem, Lost Horoscope; a ‘crumpled calendar of chaos/ with astral lines and circuitous loops’.

In my case, I went searching in the stars to make sense of a brief, doomed love. It was one in a series of exercises to exorcise the loss. A tarot card reading and numerology by a soothsayer, a Tantric meditation retreat led by an anagarik, Sunil Babu Pant, (not nearly as racy as it might sound to those with a stereotypical western understanding of Tantra). I joined a puja led by a lama at a monastery in Boudhanath, lit butter lamps, and had regular shiatsu massages with a dreadlocked dog whisperer in Budhanilkantha.

As Yuyu writes, I was ‘Humming the prayers drenched in the Monsoon showers/ of the Himalayan valleys/ rolling in the world of spirits and sages.’ But ultimately, my healing sprang from the reliable doctoring of time and distance, the medicine of all peripatetic wanderers.

So, when Lost Horoscope arrived a couple of weeks ago, penned by another peripatetic wanderer, I was reminded of the universe’s love of symmetry and the comfort it takes in overlapping orbits of space and time, something we might call destiny. And I’m so happy that my destiny has overlapped with Yuyu’s here in Kathmandu.

I have welcomed Lost Horoscope as an old friend. Yuyu’s wry pitting of mysticism against the prosaic is deeply familiar to me as a way of viewing the world.

He writes of (quote):

‘a dingy world of my Punjabi town

where God was the only resort’

 

and:

‘a moldy world of rickety realities

a hyperbole of spirited domes

a medley of omens,

spirits wheeling in and out of our sleep’.

But as much as I might read such observations and think, I love this because I recognise it, because I know it; on page after page Yuyu takes my breath away with the unexpected and the new.  He has an unwavering capacity to startle with the perfect image, with his attention to small, revelatory detail and his sly, understated humour, often directed at himself.

In Dai, Chengdu, we meet a girl named Xio Xio, who asks the writer ‘How old are you?’. We’re told her ‘eyes shone like blackbirds in the white nest of her singing face’, and in her slender waist is ‘a gold-spangled ring with a tiny lotus dangling out of it’.

But romantic possibility dissolves when she dispenses the writer with the delicious flick of her observation regarding his age, ‘You must be Dai then, an elder brother, I was wondering how to address you’.

In Unstitching a California Poem, a woman tells Yuyu ‘You dress too elegantly to be a poet from Tibet or wherever you say you are from’. She calls him ‘Yoyo’ and, when she asked him to gift her his tie, he ‘looked into her green eyes, and saw wild animals prowling there’ and meekly handed the apparel over.

Yuyu demonstrates an immaculate capacity to weave his personal narrative into the warp of the historical, at once illuminating both.

In Lost Horoscope, he writes:


‘I’ve faint memories of a lanky priest

his small-pox face, his tiny head wrapped up

in a large white starched cotton turban.

Under the light of a marooned sky

we went to his cubicle-shaped shop

along the narrow brick lanes

leading to the main bazaar that

the Muslims of our town/ had left behind in rush,

prior to crossing

the bleeding borders,

almost a decade

before my birth.”

 

The sweep of Yuyu’s canvas in Lost Horoscope, the richness and piquancy of the tableau of characters to which Yuyu introduces us, including himself at different ages, renders this poem at once epic in its ambition and yet intimate in its invitation into the poet’s private navigation of destiny and memory.

This collection underlines Yuyu’s reputation as one of the region’s foremost poets, ‘The Himalayan Neruda’, as American poet, Mike Graves, puts it. But as we move to the subject of today’s second launch, Volume 18 of Pratik, we are reminded that Yuyu is not just a formidable creator, but a talented and diligent curator.

And so we celebrate his capacity to choreograph both his own work in the Lost Horoscope collection, and the assembled works of others in his careful editing of Pratik. And we are grateful to him that he devotes as much, if not more, effort to discovering and amplifying the voices of other writers, as his own.  His is an uncharacteristic generosity among the writing tribe.

Looking at the extensive list of contributors to the South Asian issue, it is clear that Yuyu has a covening power second to none. And I am honoured to have an excerpt of my first novel, Lightning, included in the collection. I join the South Asian edition as a writer currently based in the region, and with a protagonist in Lightning who is a Pakistani, Ahmed, who has made himself out to be an Afghan to gain asylum in Australia in the early 2000s.

Travelling through the pages of Pratik, has been a miraculous and joyous travelling back in time for me, to my first diplomatic posting in Bangladesh in the early 1990s. Through this issue of Pratik, I have been reacquainted with women I knew at that time: Nasima Sultana, Taslima Nasrin and even Carolyne Wright, their translator from Bengali and herself an accomplished poet who was in Dhaka on a Fulbright scholarship, if I recall correctly, when I was posted there.

So, in addition to feeling grateful to Yuyu for making space for my Ahmed’s story in Pratik, I deeply appreciate that he has reunited me with friends from over thirty years ago. Another Lost Horoscope, rediscovered. Another reminder of the way destiny calls us back to itself whatever detours we might make. Another reminder that, however far we might journey away from a place and its people, we are ultimately travelling back towards them, because we walk the surface of a round earth. Because time, as we know from Yuyu’s Lost Horoscope, is not linear.

This notion of travelling away from home to travel towards it leads to themes in my own writing.  And Yuyu has asked me to read a section from my novel, Lightning, as appears in Pratik.

By way of introduction, my protagonist Ahmed, a Pakistani surgeon, is recounting the story of his journey by boat to Australia as a refugee, only to be incarcerated in a migration detention centre on Christmas Island, off the Australian mainland. Ahmed describes his journey with the camouflage of third person to his companion as they drive through the Australian desert.  He says:

‘The man lost everything when the boat capsized — his photos, his medicine, his money, his clothes, such as they were, and so on. For the first two days after he arrived, he simply lay on the grass outside his quarters in the detention centre. He lay face down on the ground and the grass thatched his forehead and his cheeks. He felt the earth solid beneath his fingers, his wrists, his forearms, his upper arms, his chest, groin, thighs, shins, the tops of his feet, his toes. He breathed in the sand around the roots of the ground cover; he inhaled the dust. He discovered that dust is not the same wherever you are in the world. And that sand is not sand. The fact that the ground smelled unfamiliar was painful to the man, yet he was glad to be attached to something that in its mustiness proclaimed its age and promised not to shift too far, too fast, something that assured him it wouldn’t drown him nor draw him down into its depths. The back of his head was hot with the sun and his neck burned. The soles of his feet too. It hurt him to walk. It hurt him to breathe. It hurt him to be alive.

‘He told the Christmas Island detention centre officials that he was an Afghan and that he had fled religious persecution. The other refugees knew this was not the man’s truth but they also knew that truth wears many guises. If truth were dressed in an Afghan chadri rather than a Pakistani burqa, was it any less the truth under its cloth? If it were fleeing from Islamic fundamentalists in Kabul instead of an equally dangerous threat in Islamabad, was it any less the truth behind the particularities of its fear? The survival instinct teaches you that truth must be supple, pliable. The molecules that comprise it are the same whatever state they take. H2O is H2O, whether liquid, ice or vapour. The words truth uses to describe itself must be allowed some licence, some flexibility. A brittle truth breaks and then its essence is spilled, wasted, lost.’

And this reflection takes me back finally to Yuyutsu’s poetry in his Lost Horoscope collection. Yuyu’s work, like a Bohemian artist’s, embodies the four ideals of truth, beauty, love and freedom. He writes with a raw honesty, supple candour and with great elegance. His opening lines are a perhaps unwitting metaphor for this stance : ‘Believe me, I’m risking my life here, coming out in the open…’

Yuyu takes us with courage and conviction into the ambiguous layers where we are reminded of the mystical and often painful essence of our living. 

And as he races to Café Mozart, hoping to recover what lay in the horoscope he lost decades ago, he helps us, his readers, to rediscover and understand ourselves better, too, as part of the crumpled calendar of chaos where destiny and self-determination intersect.

Thank you. Dhanyabad.

 

 --Her Excellency Ms.  Felicity Volk

Australian Ambassador to Nepal

 

 



Photo by Bikas Rauniar

Australia’s Ambassador to Nepal, Felicity Volk has published two novels, Lightning (Picador Australia) and Desire Lines, (Hachette Australia). She studied English literature and law at the University of Queensland before joining Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). After diplomatic postings in Bangladesh and Laos, and following the birth of her two daughters, she began writing for publication while continuing to work at DFAT. Volk is recipient of a grant and fellowships from artsACT and the Eleanor Dark Foundation, (Varuna, the Writers’ House). Several of her short stories have won awards. “No place like home,” was a prize-winner in The Australian Women’s Weekly/Penguin Short Story Competition (2006), “Steal it with a kiss” won the Angelo Natoli Short Story Award (FAW National Literary Awards) and “Ite, missa est” (Go, you are sent forth) won the 2013 Carmel Bird Long Story Award. 


 

 

Sunday, February 12, 2023

SUBMISSION DATE EXTENDED: Pratik Magazine’s special issue on City Writing

 

Call for Submissions: EXTENDED DEADLINE:  March 31, 2023

 

“City Diversions – When the City Takes Center Stage”

Edited by Yuyutsu Sharma with guest editor Piia Mustamäki

 

Photo by Sam Anderson 


Can one write “in a linear way about and in cities?” Teju Cole and Alexandar Hemon claim one cannot because cities are “necessarily non-linear spaces.” We’re searching for new works on cities – non-fiction, short stories, poetry, photo essays – which explore the non-linear diversions cities force and ignite, and the creativity, tolerance and historical traces that bring those diversions about. We welcome submissions particularly on global south cities, but invite any new writing where the city and its diversions take center stage. 

 

EXTENDED DEADLINE:  March 31, 2023

Prose entries should be below 2000 words

Submissions to :

pratikmagsubmissions@gmail.com

 

 

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Saturday, February 11, 2023

10 BEST BOOKS FROM NEPAL : PRATIK SOUTH ASIA SPECIAL

 

BOOKS


 

AMAR AAKASH

 

10 Best Books from Nepal

 

Transliterated from Sanskrit, written by Bhanubhakta (1814-1868), the standard Nepali literary tradition established after the Ramayana has witnessed drastic changes. Not only has the written language been modified, its subject matter has changed dramatically along with its vision. Though rich in folk culture and myths, Nepali literature has yet to attain its renaissance and continues to reel under the substantial influence of Western literature along with Sanskrit and Indian literary heritage.

Moving from the tradition of writing hymns to gods and eulogies to the ruthless rulers to the 1932 Political Awakening, the modern Nepali literature seems to have found its element during the despotic Rana rule only. During the one-party Panchayat regime and the 1990 Democratic Upsurge followed by a decade-long Maoist War, Nepali literature has been largely influenced by the political, economic and social turmoil that continues to rock this Himalayan republic even today. The quandary remains more or less the same even in the post-2006 state, after the demise of the Monarchical system.

Here’s a selection of books that have succeeded in winning the hearts of the Nepalese people and seem best in terms of creative expression to represent Nepali literature to some extent.

 

GOPAL PRASAD RIMAL

Aamako Spana


Ammako Sapna (A Mother’s Dream) is a collection of immortal and incomparable poems written between 1935 and 1962 by Gopal Prasad Rimal (1917-1973), the founder of modern Nepali poetry. Though these elegant and artistic poems were written against the autocratic Rana tyranny to advocate a just democratic system, they do not speak for a political party or ideology. The language of the poetry is simple enough for a lay person to comprehend the inner energy that rocked Nepalese poetry immensely. Some of his poems are also well-known among Nepalese people as songs and anthems.

 



LAKSHMI PRASAD DEVKOTA

Muna Madan



Muna Madan by Lakshmi Prasad Devkota (1909-1959) is a work that every Nepalese has heard and claims to have read. Even if Devkota is popular among the Nepalese readers, due to immense use of Sanskrit words, the general public cannot grasp the essence of his poems and only a few have in reality read his entire work. Although this short play is based on a Newari folk song and is said to be written in Jhyaure rhythm, it has nothing to do with the Jhyaure folk meter used by the Nepalese in the hilly regions. During the Rana rule, the rulers looked down upon the Nepali language. The aristocracy took pride in employing Hindi, Urdu and Sanskrit words and Sanskrit poetry was held in high esteem. Against this background, Devkota’s use of simple Nepali language, without using Sanskrit meter, deserves accolades. The plot revolves around a Nepalese youth who goes to Tibet to earn gold and in the process gets separated from his wife. Most of the Nepalese people hum the sentences from the play like “Not with a bag full of gold but with a golden heart, a person can be real and great.” 

The book is available in English in the Nirala Series.

 

 

BHUPI SHERCHAN

Ghumne Mech Mathi Andho Manche

 

Bhupi Sherchan (1936-1989) continued the poetry tradition spearheaded by great Gopal Prasad Rimal. Sherchan joined the Communist Party of Nepal in his early youth and wrote poetry about the downtrodden people but soon got disillusioned with the Party and its ideology.  By then, he had written two collections. However, his best work can be found in his third collection, Ghumne Mech Mathi Andho Manche (The Blind Man in a Revolving Chair), very popular among the Nepalese even today. Though some of the poems like “Hami “and “Hundain Bihan Mirmirma” were written under the influence of Rimal’s revolutionary spirit, Sherchan excels in ridiculing the Nepalese society’s fake nationalistic images including the Gurkha bravery involving going abroad to fight the mercenary wars. Although he could not rise above Rimal’s poetic excellence, Sherchan significantly added a new dimension to Nepali poetry alive in the contemporary literary circles.

 

SHANKAR KOIRALA

Khairenighat

 

Khairenighat is the first and important novel of the writer Shankar Koirala (1930-), a writer of several third-grade formula novels. Khairenighat again is the first and last Nepali novel written by an author from within Nepal about Nepalese people and their grueling lives. With minute, photographic details, Koirala describes the farmers of mountainous village Dumja in the Sinduli district as they lead harsh lives in isolation, without modern means of transportation or medicine. The importance of this novel can be seen in terms of sociological study that the novel presents. The novel is also available in English.

 



BHAIRAV ARYAL

Jai Bhundi

 

Jai Bhundi (Hail The Belly, 1965) is a very popular collection of essays written by Bhairav Aryal (1936-1976), considered as the emperor of Nepali non-fiction.  Aryal is highly regarded by the Nepalese public as the finest essayist. Any Nepalese who has studied up to secondary level must know Aryal. He lampoons the darker aspects of Nepalese society. In fact, Aryal has achieved the same success as Lakshmi Prasad Devkota and is considered a celebrity among the Nepalese people and the credit for this goes to his immortal book of satire, Jai Bhundi.

 


GURU PRASAD MAINALI

Naso


Naso is a collection of eleven stories written by Guru Prasad Mainali (1900-1971) where he initiated the tradition of realistic story in Nepal to depict a reliable portrait of Nepalese society. Before Mainali, there was a tradition of writing fiction in the fashion of Indian Hindi writing involving espionage, romance and fantasy. Reading Mainali, one encounters middle class men and women from the Nepalese society caught up in real-life events. Mainali created the first memorable and influential idealistic characters and their struggles. “The Martyrs” and “The Fire of the Straw” included in the Naso collection are considered to be great achievements of modern Nepali story tradition.

 

 


LIL BAHADUR CHHETRI

Basai

 

Guwahati-based Indian-Nepali writer Lil Bahadur Chhetri’s first novel depicts the socio-economic problems prevalent in Nepal until 1989. It portrays the widespread socio-economic situation in Nepal. Basai was actually the first novel written about Nepal by a Nepalese author. In the book, the village landlords lure ordinary farmers to take loans in times of emergency and entrap them in a vicious cycle of exploitation. The life and livelihood of Nepalese farmers are portrayed in this novel.  Chettri dares to raise intriguing issues of migration of the Nepalese race seeking work in India, Burma, Bhutan and other countries.

 



TARANATH SHARMA

Belayattira Baralida

 

Written by a great pioneer in the field of Nepali criticism and travel writing, Taranath Sharma (1934-2021), the book evokes memories of his visit to Great Britain. It appeared as a watershed in Nepali literature and contributed immensely in establishing travel writing in Nepal. Till date, no Nepalese author has been able to rise above the level of immaculate prose found in this travelogue.  Sharma also initiated Jarrovad, a movement to use proper Nepali language shorn of all foreign influences. The book depicts the mindset of Western people in the 60s in just 152 pages. Once one starts, it’s impossible to put the book down.

 

 



DAULAT BIKRAM BISTA

Chapainyeka Anuharharu

 

Novelist and storyteller Daulat Bikram Bista (1926-2002) gained fame by writing Ek Paluva Anekoon Yam (1969) that appeared as a breakthrough in the Nepali fiction. The prevalent Nepali fiction temper initiated by Parijat’s Shirish ka Phool (The Blue Mimosa) was enhanced by Bista. The novel has been hailed as a masterpiece in the Nepali language. It exposes the paradoxical plight of characters pitted against harsh human existence during the World War. There are only three characters in the novel. British Gurkha (Nepalese), German soldier and German woman.

 

 

 


PARIJAT

Anindo Pahaad 




This is the eighth novel by Nepal’s foremost woman writer, Parijat (1936-1993) who was successful in rocking Nepalese literary circles with her first one, Shirishko Phool (1965). Anindo Pahaad (The Sleepless Mountain, 1982) reveals an accurate depiction of the struggle of the Nepalese people with specific focus on the students’ struggle for democracy against the long-standing dictatorial one-party Panchayat system. The novel also exposes the Nepalese men’s exploitative behavior in the villages, corrupt police administration, undisciplined and crafted violence against women. Sentimentality and pessimism seen in her first novel, Shirishko Phool, is missing in here. The fiery feminine spirit found in the characters in the book has impacted Nepalese fiction in the modern times. Decorated with a skillful delineation of characters and plot, this novel is more readable than her earlier works, also the last best to showcase her artistic integrity.

 

 








A significant Nepali poet and fiction writer of younger generation, Amar Aakash contributes columns to several Nepalese newspapers and journals, including leading literary monthly, Madhuparka. His debut poetry collection, Tungana, has just been published. He lives in Kathmandu. 






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Thursday, February 9, 2023

PRATIK South Asia Special Issue Highlight: Indian Poet Gulzar's "The Heart Seeks"

 GULZAR

The Heart Seeks

The heart seeks again those moments of leisure

When all day and night we just sat thinking of the beloved

                                                                        – Ghalib

 


The heart seeks again those moments of leisure

 

Lying in the courtyard in the mellow winter sun

The shade of your aanchal pulled over my eyes

Face down, and sometimes on one’s side

 

Or, on summer nights, when the east wind blows

To lie awake for long on cold white sheets

Sprawled on the roof, gazing at the stars

 

On some cold snowy night perhaps

To sit again in the embrace of that mountain

And listen to the silence echoing in the valley

 

The heart seeks again those moments of leisure

When all day and night we just sat thinking of the beloved.

 


Translated from the Urdu by Pavan K. Varma

 

 

Gulzar is a celebrated Indian Urdu poet, lyricist, author, screenwriter, and film director known for his works in Hindi cinema. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2002, the Padma Bhushan in 2004, and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2014. He lives and works in Mumbai.


Pavan K. Varma
is an Indian diplomat, politician, and author who served as an ambassador to Bhutan and Cyprus. He has written over a dozen bestselling, books including Krishna: The Playful Divine and a biography of the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib.


 






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