It just opens a door, quietly

A Poem Never Says Anything
Uttaran Chaudhuri

translated from Bengali by the poet

A poem never says anything.
It just opens a door, quietly.

Sleepless and bent
just like my aged father
waiting for me in a lonely winter night.

https://www.amazon.in/100-Great-Indian-Poems-Abhay/dp/9386950936

Cancer, our Doppelgänger

After 3 occurrences of cancer within the family (2 dead, one will go any day now) I finally bought this book I have been meaning to read since years. Brilliantly written, very easy reading for the layman. And a great reminder that any day you wake up and are still alive and well, and no one in your family is dying, you must remember to be happy and cheerful.
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"...This image - of cancer as our desperate, malevolent, contemporary doppelgänger - is so haunting because it is at least partly true. A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a phenomenally successful invader and colonizer in part because it exploits the very features that make us successful as a species and as an organism. [AM: cell division, cloning, survival of the fittest, growth via evolution]

...When a chemotherapeutic drug or the immune system attacks cancer, mutant clones that can resist the attack grow out. The fittest cancer cell survives. This mirthless, relentless cycle of mutation, selection, and overgrowth generates cells that are more and more adapted to survival and growth. In some cases, the mutations speed up the acquisition of other mutations. The genetic instability, like a perfect madness, only provides more impetus to generate mutant clones.

Cancer thus exploits the fundamental logic of evolution unlike any other illness. If we, as a species, are the ultimate product of Darwinian selection, then so too is this incredible disease that lurks inside us."

Page 38, 'The Emperor of Maladies, A Biography of Cancer', Siddhartha Mukherjee
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction 2011
Winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2011

Raag Kaushi Kanada

I love Hindustani classical music solely because of Ustad Hameed Khan, our dear friend in Dharwar, the most gentle person I know, and the only person I know who can make gentleness heard through a sitar, so perfectly. Because whenever he does his riyaaz in our guest room, I walk around the house in tears, because I cannot contain any more joy...........

I've never heard Vasant Rai before. A friend sent this to me. I know nothing about raags, but I know this piece is beautiful beyond expression. I suspect you will too. As I keep saying, you don't always have to understand. Poetry, or music, or people. There is still a giving. To open up and receive is a choice we make.

The most beautiful evocation of Raag Kaushi Kanada

http://aryaputr.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/kaushikanada/


* Photo from http://aryaputr.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/kaushikanada/

The audience of alternate selves

Note Autobiographical

"Every time he speaks of himself you sense something missing, something not quite true. It's not that you doubt his sincerity - on the contrary, you know he's making every effort to be honest. It's just that by putting himself in the spotlight he has blinded himself to his own shadow, to the audience of alternate selves who watch him from the wings. He tells you what he sees, but all the while the real self remains invisible, like light seen from the inside of a bulb.

It's like the difference between the way you picture yourself and your face in a photograph. The way you hold your breath at immigration, waiting to see if the man examining your passport will accept you for who you are."

Aseem Kaul, 'Etudes'

These Hills Called Home

Temsula Ao. Poet, short story writer and ethnographer. Nagaland, India

Yet another beautiful collection of stories from Temsula Ao. Mind-opening too. We see what we choose to see. How much more effective these stories are in sensitizing us to what is going on in Nagaland, than newspaper/TV reports full of statistics.

Available on http://www.flipkart.com/, for delivery within India. I had written about her earlier, here.

"More than half a century of bloodshed has marked the history of the Naga people who live in the troubled northeastern region of India. Their struggle for an independent Nagaland and their continuing search for identity provides the backdrop for the stories that make up this unusual collection.

Describing how ordinary people cope with violence, how they negotiate power and force, how they seek and find safe spaces and enjoyment in the midst of terror, the author details a way of life under threat from the forces of modernization and war. No one—the young, the old, the ordinary housewife, the willing partner, the militant who takes to the gun, and the young woman who sings even as she is being raped—is untouched by the violence.

Theirs are the stories that form the subtext of the struggles that lie at the internal faultlines of the Indian nation-state. These are stories that speak movingly of home, country, nation, nationality, identity, and direct the reader to the urgency of the issues that lie at their heart."

Let me love you as a tree loves...

...Let me love you
as a tree loves
with all its flower tips on fire
without embracing. 

Sunitha Jain, 'Till  I find myself'