Jaipur Literature Festival: poets (1).

Jeet Thayil’s ghazal on Malayalam and Nilanjana Roy (who I think I have an academic crush on) speaks about poetry. Also on her blog are some lovely articles on Agha Shahid Ali. A must read.

An excerpt I loved:

“I like choosing theoretical homes, but the idea of “settling down” is pleasurable only in the abstract, a little disconcerting in the particular. People in Delhi are always settling down: into jobs, marriages, old orders, new regimes, rented houses, and finally, into the grandeur of “own homes”. The title of Shahid’s poem was comforting, reassuring, and those lines– “A house? A work in progress, always.” — gave me permission to never settle down, or in. These days I have squatter’s rights in that capacious place, the writer’s house, a subtenancy of sorts, and that’s mostly enough.”

– Nilanjana Roy on “Rooms Are Never Finished”