Wole Soyinka's tape? You're under arrest.

Wole Soyinka couldn't attend his father's funeral for fear that he would be arrested:

I recorded a farewell message, including lines from Dylan Thomas' poem to his dying father, and I ensured it was played at my father's funeral. As I recalled in my latest memoirs, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, secret service agents swarmed the routes leading to the town, convinced that I would indeed attempt to sneak into the country. They converged on the church and, on hearing my voice over the loudspeakers, concluded that I had eluded their net and was delivering the funeral tribute in person.
Soon enough, they discovered the mechanical source of the voice and, once the service was over, swooped down on the church in an effort to seize the tape-but why? To reassure their bosses that I had not shown my face after all, that it was only disembodied voice that had evaded their roadblocks? Or to interrogate the tape and find out by what agency it had landed in the church?

Nadine Gordimer: No Cold Kitchen

Nadine Gordimer has had much to survive this year--being assaulted by thieves at the age of 82 in her own home, grimacing reviews of her most recent novel, and now more reports about the rift between the Nobel Prize-winning author and her biographer, Ronald Suresh Roberts.

Rachel Donadio reports for the New York Times:

Among other things, Gordimer objected to the way he characterized an affair she had in the early ’50s , Roberts said. She also found distasteful Roberts’s account of the slow decline and death, in 2001, of her second husband, Reinhold Cassirer, a refugee from Nazi Germany and the nephew of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer.
More correspondence followed, in which Gordimer expressed objections both to Farrar, Straus and to Roberts, who insisted on his right to authorial autonomy....
In “No Cold Kitchen,” Roberts writes how Gordimer once introduced him to her Swedish publisher. “ ‘Ronald is my biographer,’ ” she says. “ ‘He is dangerous.’ She paused with the kind of grimace easily mistaken for a smile: ‘It’s a very strange relationship.’ ”

I'm not sure why the NYT did the story now; the first stories came out back in 2004:

"Ronald Suresh Roberts told the Guardian he was shaken by how a subject he revered turned on him after a seven-year collaboration intended to produce a sympathetic biography of her life and work.
The 80-year-old's objections led to publishers in the United States and Britain dumping the manuscript. "She is supposed to represent freedom of speech but she wanted complete control, tsar-like, which would have turned the manuscript into pious crap."

I suppose there are few relationships as close, and as twisted, as the one between a biographer and his subject. And it's probably the fact that they spent seven years in collaboration that makes some of this sound exactly like the messy end of a marriage juddering to a halt.

Word of the day: hikikomori

I came across "hikikomori" in this short review by Mark Panek, and, being an ignoramus, was immediately fascinated:
Yasukata Tsutsui's "The Lion" thus turns from a light surrealist piece about being yourself into a kind of indictment, when we learn in the accompanying interview that he has quit writing altogether, withdrawn in protest like a hikikomori walled off from his oppressive, conformist world.

The New York Times did a report about a year ago:
Like Takeshi and Shuichi, Y.S. suffered from a problem known in Japan as hikikomori, which translates as "withdrawal" and refers to a person sequestered in his room for six months or longer with no social life beyond his home. (The word is a noun that describes both the problem and the person suffering from it and is also an adjective, like "alcoholic.")

Here's a link to a page about Francesco Jodice's film on the subject.

I'm fascinated by the hikikomori phenomenon, but somehow I can't see this working in the Indian context:

"Rajesh bete, come out and say hello to Aunty Pushpa."
"Oho, don't bother the boy, my daughter was telling he's gone hikikomori."
"Hikikomori-nikikomori, I don't know, but he must have some manners, no?"

Or:
Rajesh sits in his bedroom, brooding. He will spend the next six months in here, maybe longer, far, far away from the world.
"Rajesh bete, don't mind, na, but Sushma needs to use your bathroom, Chachaji is having his hair-oil-shampoo-bath for so long, poor thing is needing to go."
Rajesh says nothing; Sushma comes in, giggles, uses bathroom, comes out, giggles, leaves.
Rajesh sits in his bedroom, brooding. He will spend the next six months in here, maybe longer, far, far away from the world.
"Rajesh bete, sorry but the mistri is here to fix the pipes, leaking-sheaking, I told your father not to buy this flat, such shoddy construction but he always knows best. Accha and Renu Aunty is leaving Nikhil here--" enter pimply youth--"for the evening, he will sit and watch Naach Baliye, Nikhil bete, not to bother Rajesh, ok? Oh, and Chachaji says he might sleep here at night, because the baby is yelling only and keeping him awake, he can't do pranayama in morning and his bowels are not opening fully, one full jar of Isabgol he had but still--nothing!"
Rajesh sits in his bedroom, trying very hard to brood, but it just doesn't seem that easy any more.

Galle-d: Sri Lanka's literary festival

The Galle Literary Festival sounds like yet another great pitstop on the writers' version of Formula One--you go round and round endlessly, at very high speeds, before you crash and burn--known as the global litfest calendar. The list of participating authors has several Sri Lankan writers--including Romesh Gunesekera--and many of the usual suspects, from William Dalrymple to Suketu Mehta and Kiran Desai. So what's wrong with this picture?

A lot, according to The Asia Sentinel: "Is it appropriate for a registered charity dedicated to Sri Lanka’s December 2004 tsunami relief to sponsor a foreign literary festival in the middle of what to all intents and purposes is an ethnic and civil war? Of course, says Geoffrey Dobbs, a colorful Anglo-Australian hotelier who founded both the upcoming Galle Literary Festival and the charity Adopt Sri Lanka. He says he sees no conflict whatsoever."

The financial accusations are disturbing, but what's really annoying is the pompous, sneering tone of the Asia Sentinel report.

"Dobbs’ festival aims at marrying the yuppie fervor for exotic foods with a neo-colonial langor and the presumed intellectual glamour of being in close quarters with famous wordsmiths."

Then the reporter quotes from Nazreen Sansoni's blog--Nazreen is a festival organiser and runs a bookshop at Colombo's barefoot:

A posting on a festival-related blog asked “What are they discussing? The “one Sri Lanka” or some such bullshit? Tell that to the people of the Northeast especially the Vanni, Jaffna, and Vaharai, you all party while people die.” Writer

Not that he provides a link to, or quotes, the flame war that follows:

Of all things a festival of this sort should surely be free of the ethnic merry go round. It gets on my nerves when everyone gets on the bandwagon and insists they be represented come what may. Chill out! If you wish to attend the festival come by all means. If you have issues stay away and let the rest of us readers and book lovers in war torn, crazed, unsafe, racist, chauvinist Sri Lanka attend this literary festival that I for one am delighted that someone took the initiative and decided to organise. Ethnichybrid.

So why have a festival in the middle of a war-torn country when, as a writer, you could just... I don't know, shun Sri Lanka in solidarity with its conflict-affected citizens or something?

Nazreen puts it best in one of her responses on the blog:

Please come up with a plan on how to solve this terrible, ego-driven, politically motivated (war) last I heard most people in all rural areas of the country just want the freedom to get on with their lives.
So you know what? whilst i can, I am getting on with mine. In the hope that if some good comes out it, (whether it’s bringing up a child, a lit fest or whatever) then we may have won half the battle.

Ah well. The Babu wishes he could be in Galle this January, but he is chuffed to see how the Sri Lanka litfest is every bit as normal as every other lit fest in the world. Someone's bitching about flying writers down business class, someone's cribbing about who's been left off the authors' list, someone kvetches that there are too many popular authors as opposed to writer-writers on the list (if it's the opposite, someone always complains that the fest is way too literary for the masses), and the ones who can't go suspect darkly that everyone else will enjoy the party without them. Unfortunately, the only other story I can find about the festival in the Lankan papers online is pretty much a regurgitated press release. The funds bit is murky, but then again, the Asia Sentinel only quotes anonymous donors, so it would be nice to know what's really going on.

Kashmir, Lahore, Sudan: bookshops

Yoginder Sikand trawls Lahore's bookshops and comes back disappointed:

Lahore's famed Urdu Bazaar, located in a chaotic, run-down part of the old town, consists of several narrow lanes lined with filth-clogged drains.
I spent two days in the bazaar and visited each of the dozens of small bookshops it boasts of. On the look-out for literature on the lived social realities in Pakistan, I was sorely disappointed.

In a feel-good story that's been doing the rounds on the Net, Sheikh Mushtaq reports that bookshops have been reopening in Kashmir:

Shops selling Islamic tracts or tuition books stayed open amid the violence that has killed tens of thousands of people, but Asian or Western classics and new blockbusters were scarce.
Now, the works of Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy jostle for space with Salman Rushdie and Dan Brown bestsellers in Srinagar's few bookshops.

But Daniel Lepeska has a different take, in his story on Kashmir's neglected libraries:

In the age of bottomless broadband Internet and 2000-channel satellite television reading may be on the wane across the globe, but in Kashmir the problem is especially acute, and the stakes particularly high. From Mughals to Dogras and so on, Kashmiris have for centuries been under one or another oppressive yoke; an unwillingness to read could fate them to remain there.
"Without a library there's no university, there's no thought, there's no progress," Agha added. "Libraries and universities, these things are on the frontier of thought, where you can move forward and ask inconvenient questions; this is an absolutely dead society, afraid of asking questions."

There are places in the world where running a bookshop is much stranger than in Lahore or Srinagar, though, as this 2004 Economist story on Sudan's only bookshop testifies:

IF JEROME K. JEROME were alive today, he would be proud. Over a century after he wrote it, “Three Men in a Boat”, his quintessentially English comic novel about accident-prone Victorian gentlemen paddling down the River Thames, is a bestseller in southern Sudan.
This may seem unlikely. Southern Sudan is the scene of Africa's longest-burning civil war. Its people have for decades lived in fear of death or enslavement at the hands of mounted militiamen. How could they relate to a comedy about chaps in red-and-orange blazers sculling to Hampton Court and getting lost in the hedge maze there?

Birkerts on Sacred Games

"I opened to the inside cover, where I saw printed in giant caps "AN EPIC NOVEL OF CRIME, FAITH, FAMILY, AND DESTINY," a tag so basic as to be invisible. But then, just below, in slightly smaller caps: "$300,000 MARKETING CAMPAIGN."

Sven Birkerts on receiving the advance copy of Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games. Birkerts is, like most reviewers, cynical about the publishing game: Sacred Games has, in order, the "India factor" going for it, the "exotic in the familiar genre" factor going for it, and Chandra's "moody-eyed, brooding" looks going for it.
Then he gets down to reading the book, and this is the part I love:

[Sacred Games is] working. Page after page it plucks me from the here and now, from the world governed by marketing mentalities, ruled by tasks and anxieties. I really am for long stretches in some phantasmagoric, confusing, reeking, corrupt, overheated, overpopulated elsewhere, a Mumbai of the mind, with characters who surprise me with their look and sound, their twists of behavior. How strange. It's as if I've needed to go through this peculiar re-immersion to get to my turnaround, to remember -- again -- why I got into this game in the first place. It was out of love.
After all these years I see that love is still the motive force. The honest work of art trumps the cynic, and elevates the critic, every time.

Needed that little reminder.

"My Father's Suitcase"

I have rarely been as moved by a piece of writing as I was by Orhan Pamuk's Nobel lecture:

As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favourite question, is; why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can't do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

Noblogging excuse # 267...

...you think "the dog ate my homework" was lame? Try "my cat slashed my eyelid into two matching crescents".
Mara, our 10-year-old diabetic cat, decided for reasons known only to a cat balanced on the fine edge between divine madness and creeping senile dementia that four am would be a very good time to climb to the top of a cupboard. The problem is that she's not as young or limber as she used to be, and she can't always find her way down. Her solution is to mew piteously and wait for one of us to rescue her--which we would have done if it hadn't been 4 am, and even in our insomniac household, definitely Sandman time.
So the first I knew of her cupboard-scaling experiment was when a pile of books on the headboard of the bed cascaded onto me, followed shortly by a panicked cat who had decided to cushion the great leap into the unknown by using my face as a landing pad.
"Can you open your eyes?" the partner said.
I did.
"Good, good, now close them."
I did.
Long silence.
"Cool," he said, "I can see your eyeball through the eyelid."


The stitches came out today, and instead of the fetching, dashing, slightly sinister scar I'd been hoping for, what I have is a line that looks, as a cruel (and hey, now ex-) friend said, like a second eyebrow. Or really smudgy mascara. The weird bit is it's only now that I have the use of my right eyelid back that I realise how odd reading had been over the last week. The stitches worked like a miniature facelift, tightening the eye so that everything on the right side of the page/ computer screen came into exceptionally sharp focus--except for a small and irritating patch of "fog" that seemed to travel down the screen/ page and usually blurred the exact bits I was trying to read. I did discover one kind of writing that didn't strain the eyes or add to the Babu Botox look--terse, laconic, three-words-to-a-line poems of the kind that cling to the left margin of the page.

The nice thing about having the eyelid sliced up, sashimi-style, is that the surgeon stitched it up with peacock-blue catgut. (I hope it wasn't REAL catgut, unless of course it was sourced from Mara-the-marauding-feline's intestines.) So I managed to gross friends out by not mentioning the eyelid thing at all until they stared hard and said, "Is that blue mascara running down your eyelid, or is that a mehendi tattoo gone wrong?" That was my cue to invite them to take a closer look and watch as the full horror of the situation dawned on them (people are really, really squeamish about eyelids).

"That doesn't look like mascara exactly."
"It isn't mascara."
"Oh? What are those funny pouchy bits in between? They look a bit like skin--EEK! AARGH! That is SO GROSS!"

That's usually when I'd tell them about how one of the doctors who saw the injury said, "Hmmm. If your cat had gone half a centimetre further, your eyelid would have been opening and shutting--you know, like a door on a hinge."

Anyway. Blogging will be back tomorrow; until then, I'm reading a present from a friend with a peculiar sense of humour--Jonathan Coe's House of Sleep. Enjoy this excerpt, about an eyelid fetishist. Or if you're a classicist, refresh your memory of the eyelid-clamping scene in A Clockwork Orange. Not squeamish yet? Check out this fine collection of eyelid speculae.

Events: If you're in Delhi this week...

Tuesday 12 December:
4 PM: Gulmohar Hall, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road

Penguin India hosts a discussion on the book 13 Dec: A Reader--The Strange Case of The Attack on Indian Parliament.

Speakers: Arundhati Roy, Indira Jaising, Nandita Haksar, Nirmalangshu Mukherji, Praful Bidwai, Shuddhabrata Sengupta.

"Most people, or let’s say many people, when they encounter real facts and a logical argument, do begin to ask the right questions. Public unease continues to grow. A group of citizens have come together as a committee (chaired by Nirmala Deshpande) to publicly demand a Parliamentary enquiry into the episode....Every day new articles appear in the papers, on the net. At least half a dozen web sites are following the developments closely. They raise questions about how Mohammad Afzal, who never had proper legal representation, can be sentenced to death, without having had an opportunity to be heard, without a fair trial. They raise questions about fabricated evidence, procedural flaws and the outright lies that were presented in court and published in newspapers. They show how there is hardly a single piece of evidence that stands up to scrutiny."

Tuesday 12 December
7 PM, Casuarina, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, Delhi

Zubaan presents "Words of Women: First Show".
Readings by Madhulika Liddle, Mitali Saran and Monica Mody; (I'll be moderating or immoderating, as the case may be.)
"The intention is to provide a platform to hear the voices, and read the words of the next generation of talented women writers. We will be showcasing three young women - poets, fiction and non-fiction writers - who are at the beginning of their writing careers."
Madhulika Liddle introduces a detective at the Mughal court; Mitali Saran explores the disappearance of a young woman in Srinagar; and Monica Mody's poems dismantle taboos, celebrate sexuality and demand an end to silence.


Friday, Saturday, Sunday: December 15, 16 and 17

6:30 pm onwards, India International Centre Annexe, lawns, (IIC, Lodhi Road, Delhi)

Almost Island is a web journal of literature, due to appear soon. It is
edited by Sharmistha Mohanty, with Vivek Narayanan as contributing
editor. To celebrate its founding, Almost Island would like to invite
you to a series of readings:

Dec. 15:
Allan Sealy
Mariko Nagai
K. Satchidanandan


Dec. 16:
Sharmistha Mohanty
Vivek Narayanan
Vinod Kumar Shukla

Dec. 17:
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
George Szirtes
Followed by
A performance of Dastangoi, a lost art of storytelling, by Mahmood
Farooqui and Danish Husain


Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is the author of four collections of poetry, The
Transfiguring Places, Distance in Statute Miles, Middle Earth, and Nine
Enclosures. He has also translated poetry from the Pali, The Absent
Traveller: Prakrit Love Poetry. He has edited The Oxford India Anthology
of Modern Indian Poets, and the Oxford History of Indian Writing in
English. He teaches English literature at the University of Allahabad.

Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of two novels, Book One, and the
recently published New Life. Her translations of Tagore's fiction,
Broken Nest and Other Stories are due out early next year. She has also
worked in the serious cinema and has scripted the feature film Nazar
directed by Mani Kaul. She lives in Bombay.

Vivek Narayanan has lived in Africa, the United States and India. His
poems and stories have appeared in journals and anthologies in India,
South Africa, and the United States. His book of poems, Universal Beach,
has been recently released. He lives in New Delhi and is part of Sarai.

Mariko Nagai is a poet and a fiction writer. She lives in Tokyo, but has
spent much of her life in Europe and the USA. She has twice won the
Pushcart Prize, for poetry and fiction. Her book of poems Histories of
Bodies is due out soon in the United States. She is also a translator
from the Japanese into English. She heads the Creative Writing Program
at the Tokyo campus of Temple University.

Allan Sealy is the author of The Trotter-Nama, Everest Hotel, The
Brainfever Bird, and Red. He has received the Commonwealth Prize and the
Sahitya Akademi Award. He lives in Dehra Dun.

Vinod Kumar Shukla is a poet and fiction writer. He has over twenty
books of poetry and prose. Shukla is the recipient of the Shikar Samman
and the Sahitya Akademi Award. His work has been translated into several
languages He lives in Raipur.

K. Satchidandan has nineteen collections of poetry, including Five Suns,
When the Poet Writes, Imperfections and other New Poems. He has also
translated the work of major Euorpean and Latin American writers into
his native Malayalam. He has received the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award
four times. He has recently retired as head of the Sahitya Akademi. He
lives in New Delhi.

George Szirtes was born in Hungary but has spent most of his life in
England. He has over fifteen collections of poetry, the more recent of
which are An English Apocapypse, and Reel, for which he was awarded the
T.S. Eliot Prize. Szirtes is also a translator from the Hungarian into
English, and has translated the work of such major writers as Laszlo
Krasznahorkai, and Sandor Marai. He lives in Norwich.


Thursday, December 14


6:30 pm, Gulmohar Hall, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road

Book discussion: Scarred: Experiments with Violence in Gujarat, by Dionne Bunsha

From Dionne's blog: Ameena’s on the run again. During Gujarat’s communal violence in March 2002, she had to escape when her village, Pandharvada, was attacked. Today, she’s running from the law. The police have filed a case against her and several refugees because they dug up a mass grave in Lunawada with the remains of their relatives.

Speakers: Sheikh Naushad Rasool and Hafizabanu Naushad, from Pavagad village, Gujarat
Tanvir Jafri, son of late Ahsan Jafri, former Member of Parliament
Rohit Prajapati, peace activist, Paryavaran Sukarsha Samiti, Vadodara

Friday, December 15

7 pm British Council, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi
For details: British Council website

Spoken Word Series: Malika Booker and Taru Luederitz-Dalmia
Poets have always read from their work so the concept of performance poetry is in many respects not new, particularly in India where court poets over the centuries have entertained their masters with rhythmic ghazals and finely turned couplets. In the grand tradition of epic and not-so-epic poetry, the poets of today are dusting off their vocal chords to bring to audiences what they like to call open mic, poetry slam, performance poetry or, very simply, the spoken word travelling across the world from town to town, reading their work and getting themselves heard.

Malika Booker: Writing is the best way to engage the imagination, to create magic, change the world. I write because my mother tells me I am the first generation of women to be able to tell our stories and because I know there are women in the world who cannot speak. I write to make sense of life, to make the ordinary extraordinary. I write to tell stories, our stories. But most importantly, I write because I cannot do anything else. If I am not writing, then I am not breathing.

Taru Luederitz-Dalmia: Rapper and spoken word artist based in New Delhi; his work draws from the subversive politics of hip-hop culture and Reggae Sound system culture.

A Lille bit of this, a Lille bit of that

Should've posted this ages ago, but was very busy goofing off. Ruchir Joshi and Indrajit Hazra went to Lille for a writer's festival that's part of a larger Oriental scene-type thing, and all they brought back were hangovers and these memories:

Indrajit Hazra:

Rather incredibly for a northern-European town replete with 18th century classical-baroque architecture, there are giant elephants paving either side of the road. It turns out that before my arrival to Lille, Bollywood art director (of Lage Raho Munnabhai fame) Nitin Desai has already been here. Instead of a French version of Unter der Linden, Berlin’s famous boulevard with lime trees on either side, Lille’s Rue Faidherbe is lined with bedecked Nitin Desai elephants — not to mention giant deepa stambha. I guess if it’s Lille 2006, it has to be Deepawali. So much for running away from the bright lights of New Delhi...And I, mon ami, was supposed to be one delightful representative of India’s cultural delights.
My mind, of course, was less focused on answering difficult questions — “Is there punk rock in India?”, “You have a negative character called Ajit Chaudhuri in your novel. Is that a camouflaged depiction of your fellow Bengali writer Amit Chaudhuri?”, “Are you a misogynist?” — and more inclined towards discovering Lille’s nooks and corners.

Ruchir Joshi:

"...Could there be a similar reason why, all too often, Westerners, especially the French, have feted and felicitated some our most mediocre painters, film-makers and writers? Could it be that the different segments of the famed French intelligentsia are actually all too aware of how pedestrian some of the ‘names’ are that they have invited over from India? Could it be that it isn’t, as we suspected previously, plain old laziness and ignorance but shrewd insight that has led to some quite bizarre celebrations of so-called ‘maitres Indiennes’ at the expense of genuine talents? Where the exotic poseur-painter, the pseudo-cineaste, and the loud charlatan of a writer have all served to bolster some fraying Gallic sense of cultural self-esteem?
The fact that some would immediately include this writer in their list of usual suspects didn’t stop the thought from accompanying me all the way from Lille in northern France to Marseilles and then Arles in the stupendously lovely south."

Back to Jejuri

"Enjoy, and please throw away that organic mass of germs you've been calling poetry," the note said. Enclosed was a shiny new copy of Arun Kolatkar's Jejuri, which was reissued this year by the NYRB.

For years, like most of my generation, I'd been reading Kolatkar's classic poem-cycle in samizdat form--some of us had copies that had been xeroxed so often that Kolatkar's words assumed ghostly form on the page, some had painstakingly typed (yes, typed, as in on a manual typewriter) copies of the book with corrections made in violet ink. It felt very strange to be finally reading Jejuri in proper book form, to see 'A Scratch' laid out perfectly, without smudges, on a page that didn't look moth-eaten:

what is god
and what is stone
the dividing line
if it exists
is very thin
at jejuri
and every other stone
is god or his cousin

there is no crop
other than god
and god is harvested here
around the year
and round the clock
out of the bad earth
and the hard rock

that giant hunk of rock
the size of a bedroom
is khandoba's wife turned to stone
the crack that runs right across
is the scar from his broadsword
he struck her down with
once in a fit of rage

scratch a rock
and a legend springs

I like Amit Chaudhuri's clarity in his introduction to Jejuri:

When I reread Jejuri now, I realise how important the modern metropolis before globalisation - with its secret openings and avenues, its pockets of daydreaming, idling, and loitering, its loucheness - is fundamental to Kolatkar as a way of seeing. I am reminded that, although it's about a journey to a remote (for many) pilgrimage town in Maharashtra, it's less about the transformations of the journey than about a man who never left the city, or a cosmopolitan, modernist idea of the metropolis; that his journey, and his sense of travelling and of wonder, brought him back to where he was - and where he was is metropolitan, shabby, and dislocating.

(The Calcutta Telegraph published the complete introduction, so here's Part I, II, III, IV and if anyone can find a link to Part V, please let me know!)

Earlier, in 2005, Amit had written about the unease that Jejuri often evokes:

Kolatkar died last year, and his death means he's safely passed into the minor canonical status that India reserves for a handful of dead poets who wrote in English. But the present consensus about him shouldn't obscure the fact that his estranging eye in his English work has been problematic to Indian readers.

And here's Bruce King's essay on three Indian poets--Moraes, Ezekiel and Kolatkar.

Even so, I'm not sure I want to trash my "copy" of Jejuri, with each set of stains and perforations on every page marking a different set of memories. But when I find the manila envelope that Jejuri has lived in, missing pages and all, for so many years, it contains only fragments--my cats have been using Kolatkar's poems as a convenient scratching post. I can move on and enjoy my brand-new copy with no regrets; there's nothing to hold on from the past.

Debut novelist beats Pynchon, Haddon, Welsh, Self

Iain Hollingshead took away the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction award, says the Guardian.

Judges were moved by Hollingshead's evocation of "a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles." His description of "bulging trousers" sealed the win, the judges said.

"Because Hollingshead is a first-time writer, we wished to discourage him from further attempts," the judges said in a statement. "Heavyweights like Thomas Pynchon and Will Self are beyond help at this point."

Extracts from the shortlist here.

Since the Babu is still engrossed with Yak poetry, we thought we'd sidle in and leave you a link to a subject we know is of great import to his Babuness.