An Attempt

Below is a poem/song by M D Rajendran ; it burned me at 2:00 in the night(morning?) and I *had to* do something with it. Decided to invoke that much dreaded thing - a translator's license. Here goes... if this doesn't come out well, apologies upfront to MDR - your work is truly beautiful.

ഋതുഭേദ കൽപ്പന ചാരുത നൽകിയ
പ്രിയ പാരിതോഷികം പോലെ,
ഒരു രോമഹർഷത്തിൻ ധന്യത പുൽകിയ
പരിരംഭണക്കുളിർ പോലെ,
പ്രഥമാനുരാഗത്തിൻ നന്മണിച്ചില്ലയിൽ
കവിതേ പൂവായി നീ വിരിഞ്ഞു...

സ്ഥലകാലമെല്ലാം മറന്നു പോയൊരു
ശലഭമായി നിന്നെ തിരഞ്ഞു,
മധു മന്ദഹാസത്തിൻ മായയിൽ എന്നെ
അറിയാതെ നിന്നിൽ പകർന്നു,
സുരലോകഗംഗയിൽ നീന്തിത്തുടിച്ചു
ഒരു രാജഹംസമായി മാറി,
ഗഗനപഥങ്ങളിൽ പാറിപ്പറന്നു
വെൺതിങ്കൾപ്പക്ഷിയായി മാറി...

വിരഹത്തിൻ ചൂടേറ്റു വാടിത്തളർന്നു,
നീ വിടപറയുന്നൊരാ നാളിൽ,
നിറയുന്ന കണ്ണുനീർത്തുള്ളിയിൽ
സ്വപ്നങ്ങൾ ചിറകറ്റു വീഴുമാ നാളിൽ,
മൗനത്തിൽ മുങ്ങുമെൻ ഗദ്ഗദം മന്ത്രിക്കും
മംഗളം നേരുന്നു തോഴീ...

Now, Yours Truly has a go at putting MDR's thoughts in English...

"Like a gift made even more beautiful
by the change of seasons,
Like the ecstasy in an embrace
that lingers as a tingle,
Sheer poetry; you bloomed; a flower
on the branch of my first love.

Drawn to you like a moth,
knowing neither time nor space
I melted into you without knowing;
in the magic that was your smile,
Splashed about in the heavenly Ganges,
felt a king among swans
Soared along the trails of the firmament,
an alabaster moon-bird.

Wilting in the heat of parting,
the day you shall bade goodbye,
when dreams; their wings clipped,
shall fall along with tear drops,
my chant drowning in impending silence
shall be, "All auspices, my love""

ഇനി ഞാൻ ഉറങ്ങട്ടെ; ശുഭരാത്രി :)

.

I can see myself turn to stone
I touch myself and feel the cold
Am I getting where I wanted to be?
Life now is nothing like what it was...
Was it me who turned myself to stone?
Or what Gorgon turned its gaze on me?

Half a Life

To live Half-a-Life,
To cry at every step.
To bite tears back,
at every turn,
To yearn for joy,
when there's none.

To cry while you smile,
not knowing what's next.
Hoping that the poet's pendulum,
swings back; but never forth.
To live Half-a-Life,
To cry at every step...

To drown it in a glass,
To hide it behind a puff,
To get stoned till you get stoned.
But these are mere thoughts;
Can't even do that... mine is Half-a-Life.

To yearn for loneliness,
in spite of the terror that it is.
Cutting yourself off
from your only, only love,
always afraid of what's next.
To live Half-A-Life,
To cry at every step...

To peck at my intellectual fodder,
only to put up a facade.
To act the cool dude while,
simmering, whimpering within.
To fly off into the sole solace,
of vicarious pleasures, realities,
only to live abstractions of full lives.
To live Half-A-Life,
To cry at every step...

To feel inadequate, impotent,
confused, dazed,
only to finally give it up.
Decisions are now outta my hand,
trusting the eternal wisdom of love,
the infinity of grace.

Who knows, it might become more than Half-A-Life;
Who knows, I might even smile at every step.

PS: 1. The phrase 'poet's pendulum' refers to Sreekumaran Thampy's famous song
"സുഖമൊരു ബിന്ദു,
ദു:ഖമൊരു ബിന്ദു,
ബിന്ദുവില്‍ നിന്നും ബിന്ദുവിലേക്കൊരു
പെന്‍ഡുലമാടുന്നു“
‌‌- ശ്രീകുമാരന്‍ തമ്പി
[ Happiness is a point,
so is Sorrow,
Life is a Pendulum,
swinging from point to point.]

2. 'The Infinity of Grace' is a book by O V Vijayan( ഓ വി വിജയന്‍).

Mahatma Gandhi and Why Australia Won't Win the Next World Cup

No Glenn McGrath (Adieu, Pigeon).
No Adam Gilchrist (The ICJ throws him into the cooler for violating the Geneva Conventions).
No Ricky Ponting( Bad case of Tennis Elbow. Come on, it's only fair).
No Mr. Cricket(He goes into depression 'coz his average goes below 60 ).
No Brad Hogg( God... I'll have to find out something even for Hogg. Sigh. ).

The Aussies won't be able to cope with sub-continent conditions. They'll get an acute case of Delhi Belly.
We bait them with Shilpa Shetty and have them arrested for kissing in public.
Above all, the Law of Averages(which has been, of late, sinking to new levels of incompetency) catches up with Australia.
See, there's no way they can win the next World Cup.

Okay, who am I fooling... sigh. They'll do it again...

But wait. Here's the perfect plan. People the world over have been burning midnight oil trying to figure out the perfect tactic against the Aussies. We Indians always had it under our collective noses, but only never saw it for what it was.

The answer is Mahatma Gandhi.
We are talking about non-violence here.
In the run-up to the world cup, all cricketing nations should agree to practice cricketing ahimsa against Australia. They should get on to the field all right, but should gracefully(and meekly) lose every match. Every catch should be dropped, every wicket gifted away and every run should be a stroll (not that India need to put in any special effort). Thus, Australia will be completely denied of any competitive International Cricket and will be so rusty by the time the next World Cup arrives that even Bermuda's Under-17 team oughtta be able to push them over.

[Silence]

[Sobs]

I don't see any other way.

[Silence]

[Hysterical Laughter. Curtains.]

PS: 1. This post is dedicated to NickTheGooner who asked me if I had run out of nonsense to blog. I had to prove him wrong.
2. No squash balls were displaced from their natural habitats and/or harmed during the writing of this post.

Profundity

'Nothing ever becomes real till experienced - even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.'
- John Keats

I was watching an interview of the world famous director Adoor Goplakrishnan on Manorama News. The interviewer asked him what his daily prayer was. Adoor's reply puzzled me a bit. He said that it was 'ഇന്നെനിയ്ക്ക് പെട്ടെന്ന് ഉറക്കം വരണേ...’ which loosely translates to 'God, let me fall asleep as soon as I'm in bed...'. I thought then how strange (and even trivial) a prayer it was.

[Cut to a night-scene about one-and-a-half weeks later]

Yours truly has the privilege of actually experiencing a 'sleepless night'. Well, not in the literal sense - I did eventually fall asleep - but it was torture till then. You might have read about 'sleepless nights' - the quintessential literary cliche - but have you experienced one? Only then will you understand the profundity in Adoor's prayer.

Being a programmer wannabe, I can't resist the temptation that is recursion; so here goes.
'When I understood how profound Adoor's prayer was, Keats' words that I quoted in the beginning recursively proved themselves.'
[Don't you feel like killing me? I usually have that effect on people [big grin] ]

But seriously, I believe that is what profundity is. To make unpretentious statements that anyone will be able to identify with at some point in their lives. It does not come easy, takes a lot of insight and probably is one of the hallmarks of true greatness.

Very difficult that achieving profundity is, it's probably more difficult to be profoundly humorous. You need insight plus a sense of humor. Rare combo indeed. Try Calvin and Hobbes, you'll see what I mean :) . And for darker humor try O V Vijayan's ‘ഇത്തിരി നേരമ്പോക്ക്, ഇത്തിരി ദര്‍ശനം’(A Little Humor, A Little Insight) or 'എന്റെ ചരിത്രാന്വേഷണ പരീക്ഷകള്‍’(My Experiments with History).

Yours truly is now signing off with a quote which he believes to fall in this category.

This statement made in 1958 is growing in profundity, especially in today's context,(see the year in which he wrote this down!)
"It remains a canon of modern diplomacy that any preoccupation with oil should be concealed by calling on our still ample reserves of sanctimony."
- John Kenneth Galbraith,
'How much should a country consume?', 1958.

Me, My College and the People I Love

It has already started biting into me, the fact that we'll be going away; away from the canteen, away from the lobby, away from the acacia forest, away from that long corridor in the main building. I'll never forget an image I have in my mind. Had to go to college on a Sunday, and by chance I was at one end of the main building corridor... and I could see straight through to the other end, nobody was walking the corridor, not even the omnipresent "couples" sitting along it. To make the experience even more visceral, the wind blew some leaves across. I suddenly felt alone, like I was in a house that had just seen a death, a loss. At that surreal moment, I truly understood what CET and its people meant to me.

[Note to Self: Just 4 precious months remain after today. This is a time like no other; never before, never after. Keep this in mind, always.]

Three Things That Go Well With The Sunday Mornin' Cuppa

Ah, one of those little pleasures of life that we all look forward to; hot Sunday mornin' cuppa(coffee is my thing) with something to meditate on. The ideal time to get up is about 7:30-8:00'ish when diffused sunlight starts pouring in through the curtains onto the bed. It's pretty cool, the sun hasn't gotten angry yet and with some luck, there's a bird or two chirping outside. Heavenly!
This setting brings us to the question of what goes well with heaven, what can one chew on? Here are three personal recommendations:

1. Ram Guha's column in 'The Hindu Magazine'
Ramachandra Guha is a social historian by profession and currently writes the column "Past and Present". But it was his original column "Cricket Lore", that had me hooked. I have wanted to write like many people, and Ram Guha is definitely one of them. His style is lucid, un-pretentious and anecdotal, with an uncanny knack of prodding your imagination ever so slightly to get you to think. I have meticulously collected his "Cricket Lore" columns over the years and populated a scrap-book with them. Just flipping through it is boundless joy. Thank you Mr. Guha for those wonderful Sunday mornings.

2. The Music of M S Baburaj-P Bhaskaran
My apologies to non-malayalees who haven't had the privilege. Also, my sympathies to malayalees who could have, but haven't. You have all missed something truly divine. True believers will know what I mean.
For the past 2-3 years, saturday nights have had a special meaning for me, and at least one preson reading this blog will know what I mean. Sunday morning being the "morning-after", many times I had the blues and the music of Baburaj and the poetry of Bhaskaran would perfectly fit the mood. Bhaskaran master's lines overflow with romance tinged with sadness and Baabukka's music is probably inspired by his deprived childhood spent on the street. Here's a sampling, you be the judge.

ദുഃഖങ്ങള്‍ക്കിന്നു ഞാന്‍‌ അവധി കൊടുത്തു
സ്വര്‍ഗ്ഗത്തില്‍ ഞാനൊരു മുറിയെടുത്തു
വിധിയും ഞാനും ഒരു കൂട് ചീട്ടുമായി
വിളയാ‍ടാനിരിയ്ക്കുന്നു... വിളയാടാനിരിയ്ക്കുന്നു...
[I gave leave to all my worries today,
and took a room in heaven.
Here I am; a deck of cards in hand,
Gambling with fate...
Gambling with fate...]

or

ഒരു പുഷ്പം മാത്രമെന്‍ പൂങ്കുലയില്‍ നിര്‍ത്താം ഞാന്‍‌
അരികില്‍‌ നീ എത്തുമ്പോള്‍‌ ചൂടിയ്ക്കുവാന്‍‌
ഒരു ഗാനം മാത്രമെന്‍‌ ഹൃദയത്തില്‍‌ സൂക്ഷിക്കാം
ഒടുവില്‍‌ നീ എത്തുമ്പോള്‍‌ ചെവിയില്‍‌ മൂളാന്‍‌
[A singular flower, I shall leave
on my bunch of flowers,
to adorn you, at the end of my wait,
when you finally come.
A singular tune, I shall treasure
in my heart of hearts,
to hum for you, at the end of my wait,
when you finally come.]

3. Looking Out of the Window
Simple as that! Just look out of a window with coffee mug in hand. The only pre-requisite being that you need a strategically placed window. It should ideally open into greenery, not concrete noise. I'd give my window a 7/10; open back area, lots of green, and the backside of a thekkath( a small temple). Also, nobody should be looking back at you, unless of course, it's the situation mentioned below ;-)

ജാലക തിരശ്ശീല നീക്കി ജാലമെറിയുവതെന്തിനോ
തേന്‍‌ പുരട്ടിയ മുള്ളുകള്‍‌ നീ കരളിലെറിയുവതെന്തിനോ...
-യൂസഫലി കേച്ചേരി, ‘ഖദീജ’

PS: If you see garbled text in between, it does not prove that I have been watching mindless Bollywood movies or been listening to Himesh Reshammiya; only that you need to install a Unicode Malayalam Font like AnjaliOldLipi