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On finding “Dragon Jotter”
The clean-up of cupboards and boxes I found size 36 tops and smiled. At size 42 these look like doll clothes. This is change I oscillate between sizes Big. Small. Same old me. A shelf full of old writing Mostly journals Among them “Dragon Jotter” 2008 Photography of Hong Kong by Neil Farrin When I…
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Four Walls
Four Walls Four Walls By Zeeshan Sahil, translated from the Urdu by Faisal Siddiqui, Christopher Kennedy, and Mi Ditmar March 15, 2013 You could call where we live a house. A room, very high up with a very low ceiling, one window, quite large, and one very small door that you could pass through with…
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Give it up for the Introverts!
Give it up for the Introverts!. I am an ISFJ. Everyone around me thinks I am an extrovert. The mask sticks well. At the end of the week the I takes over with such condensed fury – the up-side is in that space I am at my creative best, in my bubble of peace.
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river’s lullaby
of rivers crossed walking barefoot on their saturated beds their vastness bound into a trickling ribbon the pregnant swelling during monsoon fish in baskets, fish in oil dried fish rubbed with salt hung to dry the roundness of stones beneath feet of rivers exiled burnt in heat, shivering in the cold often looted,…
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One thousand desires | An Ode to Mirza Ghalib
One thousand desires | An Ode to Mirza Ghalib. Today I discovered this beautiful blog called “A Date with Delhi” – impossible to turn that down; it is everything that I remember of Delhi. A friend had storified my tweets about Delhi. I am hoping I can put them up here. It is a city…
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The dots I can’t connect
In my deep moments of losing and finding myself in a ghazal (right now I am reading: “Red Ghazal”) I find my mind turning to songs I’ve heard. Sometimes I can find a direct connect between the two e.g. reading Adrienne Rich and listening to Abida Parveen sing Mirza Ghalib‘s ghazals, Rich often refers to…
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Agha Shahid Ali, “Postcard from Kashmir”
poem-locker: Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox, my home a neat four by six inches. I always loved neatness. Now I hold the half-inch Himalayas in my hand. This is home. And this the closest I’ll ever be to home. When I return, the colors won’t be so brilliant, the Jhelum’s waters so clean, so ultramarine.…
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Butterflies
On being asked why do I have butterflies tattooed on my arm, I hesitate, fumble, I hear myself quoting Darwish, “The poem is always incomplete, the butterflies make it whole.” In that poem “To a Young Poet” he writes: “Don’t ask anyone: Who am I? You know who your mother is. As for your father,…
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Har ek baat pe kehte ho tum ke tu kya hai
Originally posted on Atul’s Song A Day- A choice collection of Hindi Film & Non-Film Songs: This article is written by Sadanand Kamath, a fellow enthusiast of Hindi movie music and a regular contributor to this blog. During 1960-70, Lata Mangeshkar had sung some beautiful non-filmy ghazals. Two of these NFS, viz. dahar mein naqsh-e-wafaa…
