Dr Mod. Ayyub Khan: The poet’s journey towards brilliance. Reviewed by Amar Nath Wadehra

 

Title: Ghazal Darpan

Author: Dr Muhammad Ayyub Khan

Publisher: Brar Sons, Malerkotla

Pages: 112; Price: Rs. 250/-

I have been following Dr Ayyub Khan’s evolution as an Urdu scholar and litterateur of substance.

As is his wont, Dr Khan begins even in his latest book – an anthology of ghazals – with prayers:

Ho raza teri to majhdharon mein bedey paar ho/teri marzi kay bina aab-e-rawaan kuchh bhi nahin. (Ships cross the midwaters with your approval/The flowing water is nothing without your consent).

After his foray into the spiritual, Dr Khan transitions to the contemplation of the temporal. This is a vast field comprising materialism, consumerism etc. But the poet dwells on human relationships, including unrequited love.

Dekha na kabhi usne mujhe apna samajhkar/Dali jo nazar bhi to ehsan ki soorat. (She never looked upon me as her own/If ever she cast a glance it was patronising).

He goes on to lament:

Zuban se kuchh-na-kuchh iqraar bhi ho/Mohabbat hai to phir izhaar bhi ho. (Let there be vocal commitment/If there is love, let it be declared).

He then points out how Time and Mind can be cruel:

Beetey huey lamhon ko guzarne bhi nahin deta/Dil zakhm judaee kay bharney bhi nahin deta. (It doesn’t allow the spent moments to go away/The heart doesn’t allow the wounds of separation to heal).

Ojhal bhi nahin karta merey haal-e-shikasta ko/Ye waqt ka aaina sanwarney bhi nahin deta. (It doesn’t make my misery disappear/The mirror of time doesn’t allow me to spruce up either).

He looks back at his life’s journey:

Gumnaam sahilon pe utarna pada mujhe/Mausam kay saath badalna pada mujhe. (I had to disembark upon unknown shores/I had to change with the change in weather).

Apart from being a gold medallist in MA Urdu and MA in Persian from Punjabi University, he is an M.Phil. in Urdu and PhD in Persian. He is presently working as a Program In-charge with the Haryana Urdu Akademi. He has also taught Urdu and Persian to undergraduate and postgraduate students.

He already has five published books and scores of articles to his credit. His published books include Aag Ka Dariyaa – Tafheem-o-Tajzia, Mausam, Punjab Mein Pharsi Ghazal, Safar-Dar-Safar, Ghazal Darpan, Punjab Mein Farsi Ghazal Ba-hawala Nasir Ali Sirhandi, and Reg-e-Rawaan. Five more books are in the process of getting published. He has already edited more than a dozen books. Dr Khan is quite active in the literary field. He has appeared in over fifty seminars, mushairas, radio and TV programs.

Dr Khan is a much-acclaimed personality. He has been honoured with several awards within and outside the state.

But he is still young and has a lot of potential to exploit. He is maturing with time. I see a brilliant future for him.

 

Dadabhai Naoroji: Gandhiji called him “Father of the Nation”

YOUTUBE

The other day I came across a book excerpt in The Scroll wherein it was mentioned that Mahatma Gandhi had described Dadabhai Naoroji as “Father of the Nation”. I was intrigued because right from my childhood I had been taught that Naoroji was the Grand Old Man of India and Mahatma Gandhi the Father of the Nation. But this book ‘Dadabhai Naoroji: Selected Private Papers’ by S.R. Mehrotra and Dinyar Patel states otherwise.

I decided to do some reading. And I came across some fascinating details about the man who has been gradually disappearing from our collective consciousness. No political outfit found it profitable to lionise him or adopt him as their principal icon; our mainstream media is too busy toadying up to the powers that be. After all, he belongs to the tiny Parsi community, whose votes cannot tip the balance at hustings for or against any political party. And given the level of enlightenment of today’s generation of rulers, he has been most probably clubbed with the Muslim community.

Dadabhai Naoroji was born to a Parsi family in Navsari in Gujarat on September 4, 1825. His academic brilliance at the Elphinstone College fetched him the prestigious Clare Scholarship.

Although he had business interests in London, he remained resolutely nationalist in his lifetime. He had realised much before the establishment of the Indian National Congress in 1885 the importance of carrying out political activity in England to remove the layers of misunderstanding and ignorance from the minds of the British people about India and its people. He was a firm believer in parliamentary democracy. He founded several important organisations and belonged to many leading societies and institutions, both in India and the UK. Prominent among these were the Indian National Congress, the East India Association of London, and the Royal Asiatic Society of Bombay.

After a brief stint in 1874 as the Dewan of Baroda, he started a newspaper called the ‘Voice of India’. He took a leading part in the founding of the Indian National Congress and became its president on three occasions, in 1886, 1893 and 1906. During the third term, he prevented a split between the moderates and extremists in the party. For the first time, he publicly articulated the demand for Swaraj in his Presidential Address during the Congress Party’s 1906 session. Only self-government, he declared, could stop the drain of wealth.  He publicly established Swaraj as the Congress Party’s central and ultimate goal. “Self-government is the only and chief remedy”, he declared. “In self-government lies our hope, strength and greatness.”

Earlier, in 1892, when he became the first Asian elected to the British House of Commons, Dadabhai Naoroji got a resolution passed in the British Parliament for holding preliminary examinations for the ICS in India and England simultaneously. Further, he forcefully established how India was bearing the burden of British empire-building efforts, paying the salaries of the civil administration and footing the bill of the occupational army. He got the Royal Commission on India Expenditure to acknowledge the need for uniform distribution of administrative and military expenditure between India and England.

Dadabhai Naoroji was the first to understand the mechanics of India’s economic exploitation. He propounded the Drain Theory that focused on the drain of wealth from India into England. In his book, “Poverty and Un-British Rule in India,” he did pioneering work on estimating the Net National Profit of India and the effect colonisation had on the country’s economy. He sought to prove that Britain was draining money out of India and pouring it into its domestic economy. For example, the money being earned by the railways did not belong to India, which supported his assessment that India was giving too much to Britain. He established that India was losing between 200 million to 300 million pounds in revenues to Britain every year. He called this phenomenon vampirism as money is the bloodstream of any economy. He pointed out that the process of income formation in India was such that it left the masses of India at a static poverty level and its population periodically decimated by famines. Naoroji advocated stopping the economic drain by establishing industries in India.

Naoroji’s Drain Theory was later adopted by other nationalist leaders, such as Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who declared in 1907, “When the Mohammedan rulers came they settled in the country and there was no question of any foreign drain.” Gokhale added that the British rule established the “industrial domination” which worked “in a more insidious manner”.

Naoroji’s pioneering work in the field of the Indian Economy had a lasting and powerful influence on the development of the nationalist movement in India. It fuelled the Independence Movement under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership later on. Naoroji’s words turned prophetic when he remarked that once India rallied behind self-government and realised the drain was the ultimate cause of its miseries, “the British will have either to leave precipitately or be destroyed in India or if they see the danger of the disaster in good time and apply the remedy, to save the empire by putting an end to the drain”.

The Calcutta Congress was Naoroji’s last major political undertaking. On June 30, 1917, he passed away at the age of 92 years, appropriately enough, a short distance from the Tejpal Hall in Gowalia Tank Maidan, the venue where, in 1885, he helped inaugurate the first meeting of the Congress. Now it is known as the August Kranti Maidan in Mumbai as a tribute to Gandhiji’s Quit India call in 1942, exhorting Indians to do or die. During the last three decades of his life, Naoroji had been at the forefront of the Indian National Congress. He presided over its institutional growth and, in 1906, established Swaraj as the ultimate objective of the INC.

A true patriot that he was, Dadabhai Naoroji said in his Presidential Address to the Indian National Congress’s 1893 Lahore session, “Let us always remember that we are all children of our mother country. Indeed, I have never worked in any other spirit than that I am an Indian, and owe a duty to my country and all my countrymen. Whether I am a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Parsi, a Christian, or any other creed, I am above all an Indian.”  He was a prominent nationalist with progressive views. Although he was a champion of Swadeshi, he was not against the use of machines for organising key industries in the country. He urged Jamshedji Tata to raise Indian capital for his iron and steel plants.

Writing in Hind Swaraj, Gandhiji declared Naoroji to be both “the author of nationalism” and “the Father of the Nation”. “Had not the Grand Old Man of India prepared the soil,” concluded Gandhiji, “our young men could not have even spoken about Home Rule.”

How true!

A handbook for aspiring editors and indie authors

A handbook for aspiring editors and indie authors

Reviewed By Randeep Wadehra

Editing Bootcamp Part 1 (Writer’s Toolkit Series)

Author: Dola Basu Singh 

The Book Club

Pages: 46

Price: Rs. 180/-

Available on Amazon

We are living in a world where professional excellence is routinely expected in every field of work. Writing is no different. In fact, whether you are writing a novel, a dissertation or an analytical article for a publication, you have to go beyond excellence to catch the publisher’s eye and hold the reader’s attention. This is where an editor’s role comes into play.

Before talking of this slim volume, I would like to emphasise that an editor does not merely check grammar and spellings, although these two elements are indispensable to quality writing. An editor’s role is far more sophisticated. She has to have the knowledge of the subject she is editing, should be thorough with structuring of sentences and the narrative. Creative inputs that add substance to the narrative have become indispensable today – something that no editing or writing software can provide. In fiction writing, the editor’s role includes polishing of characters, plot, dialogues and overall structure of a story. Since fiction comes in a wide range of genres – romance, chic-lit, thrillers, historical novels etc, we get a fair idea of the importance of quality editing.

Dola Basu Singh has kept the above in mind while coming up with this slim but invaluable volume on editing of fiction. Aspiring editors and indie authors of fiction will find chapters on the types and processes of editing useful. The volume provides useful information on genre and structure. It takes into account what readers expect from the author and seeks to equip the authors to meet those expectations by focusing on various elements in a novel. The editing checklist for a novel’s structure is an extremely useful addendum.

Singh’s chapters on treatment of characters, POVs, plot, setting of a story, conflict and its resolution, dialogues along with their respective checklists offer lucid and useful insights into the art and craft of writing and editing.

This volume is a must read for every aspiring author and editor, whether they want to self-publish or go through the traditional publishing process. If you aim at becoming a professional editor, this volume ought to be a part of your reading collection. 

I can personally vouch for the usefulness of this volume because I have availed of Singh’s editing services via her firm, the Shiuli Editing Services. The benefits to my novel were immense.

Rejuvenating the Urban India

Book Review

By

Randeep Wadehra

Founder-Editor, Smart Scholars

Urban Renewal in India by SK Kulshreshtha

Sage Publications

Pages: xxv + 276. Price: Rs. 950/-

Urban renewal has a hoary past. During the 1870s, efforts to rejuvenate Mysore led to decongestion of its Fort area. Similarly, Calcutta, Shahjehanabad (Delhi) etc. came in for various degrees of renewal efforts. After India’s independence, there has been a phenomenal growth in the number of urban areas, with more than 7,000 cities and towns in the country today. As per the UN’s projections, India’s share in the world’s urban population will reach about 13% by 2030; this translates to 600 million Indians, or 40% of the country’s population. However, despite Chandigarh and a couple of other honourable exceptions, urban growth has been largely haphazard. Consequently, the country has witnessed a sharp rise in the number of unplanned townships and slums – Mumbai’s Dharavi is not the only such instance. According to estimates, more than 3.6 crore children (in the age group of 0 to 6 years) live in urban areas, of whom more than 80 lakhs live in slums. It has been a fact that people migrating to urban areas in search of livelihoods and a better quality of life invariably find shelter in slums.

One does not really have to go for extensive research to know the state of our towns and cities. Polluted air and water, rain-flooded streets and traffic snarls are the salient features of almost every urban centre. Utilities and infrastructure are inadequate quantitatively as well as qualitatively. Thanks to carbon dioxide emissions, industrial effluents and firecrackers, Delhi’s pollution levels are among the highest in the world. This becomes worse during winters when the air becomes more toxic. Bengaluru’s transport system was never ideal even during its more tranquil past. Today, it has miserably failed to meet the people’s needs. Its roads are choked with almost eighty lakh motorized vehicles, a rise of more than 6500% since the 1970s! The consequences are there for all to see in the form of traffic snarls, heavy emissions of greenhouse gases and choked public utilities. Mumbai has become a symbol of inefficient urban governance and a highly irresponsible and corrupt system. Every year even moderate rains cause flooding of its roads and rail tracks. Deaths due to open manholes, potholes and low hanging wires are common. One regularly hears of dilapidated buildings collapsing and killing hundreds of residents. Kolkata is another metro where life is becoming extremely difficult, if not hazardous, for common people; the civic amenities are pathetic. Its water and electricity distribution systems are anachronistic, to put it politely. Chennai too suffers from similar drawbacks but on a smaller scale. However, its utilities are coming under increasing strain, thanks to chaotic urbanization. Over the past two years, Chennai has witnessed avoidable ‘natural disasters’ like the flooding of residential areas causing loss of life and property. Obviously, these ‘natural disasters’ are man-made and a result of corruption and bad town planning.

Clearly, there is an urgent need for planned urbanization. This urgency is not only from the point of view of meeting the challenge caused by the burgeoning figures of migration to urban areas but also because India has been striving to achieve double-digit growth, realise its ambitious target of becoming a $10 trillion economy and be counted among the world’s developed countries by 2030. For this, it is imperative to take up urban renewal with a clear vision and due sincerity.

According to expert estimates, about 900 million square metres of well-designed residential and commercial areas will have to be built over fifteen years to realise the target of urban renewal, with special emphasis on smaller towns and cities since 68% of India’s urban population lives in towns that have a population of less than 100,000.

Therefore, several flagship missions have been launched for urban renewal; for instance, Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, PM Awas Yojna and Smart Cities Mission. The government has obviously realized that, for reaping the demographic dividend, it is essential to focus on urban governance, health, nutrition, water, sanitation and education. This entails re-imagining of the basic designs of most of our cities and upgrading the basic infrastructure and services, including transport, rejuvenation of heritage buildings and sites as well as redesigning the commercial areas.

Kulshreshtha has painstakingly presented relevant statistics to underscore the state of India’s urban areas. He has also detailed the various efforts being put in by the government for rejuvenating the Urban India. It goes without saying, most of the urban renewal projects are of long gestation periods. Nonetheless, at least an earnest effort has begun.

This book presents a lucid analysis of the process and problems related to the renewal of Urban India, which should interest students, research scholars and policymakers alike.

Sri Lanka: A Masterful Account of the Tamil Struggle & After

Elephant Complex: By John Gimlette

Publisher: Quercus/Hachette

Pages: 518+ix

Price: Rs. 650/-

Sri Lanka is an ancient civilization with a recorded history of over 3000 years and pre-historic remains dating back to several millennia (some, arguably, as old as 1,50,000 years). It is a multi-ethnic society having diverse languages and religions. Although Gimlette does not find any ethnic difference between Sinhalas and Tamils, both these major communities have been intensely proud of their respective cultural and linguistic identities. Other ethnic groups like Moors, Malays, Burghers etc too have a presence in this tiny island. While Buddhism and Hinduism are the island’s major religions, Islam and Christianity too have sizeable following. This plurality has enriched Sri Lanka’s culture but also created political fault-lines that have kept widening after the British left in 1948.

Tamils had a privileged status under the British, which began to wilt during the colonial rule’s last years and ended with the island nation’s freedom. With the advent of independence ethnicity based politics began to gather strength and momentum, although there were leftist rebellions by the likes of JVP. However, the LTTE led insurrection proved the costliest and bloodiest of all civil wars. It lasted almost thirty years, starting in 1983 and ending in 2009 with complete annihilation of the LTTE. 

Gimlette begins the narrative with a trip to Tooting, London, where Sri Lankan Tamil expatriates live. It is essentially a ghetto, which has its own rules and laws governing Tamils living there. And yes, they have their own criminal gangs and crime syndicates/mafias too. He learns of various political aspects of the Tamil Eelam movement, and meets some ex-LTTE cadres too.

In his accounts, Sri Lanka comes across as a society divided essentially on class lines, and dominated by ‘Brown Brits’ whose snobbery is as breathtaking as their disconnect from the masses. They live in the world of their own with a firm belief in their (divine?) right to rule. When he talks of political dynasties of Sri Lanka, viz., Senanayakes, Jayawardenes, Bandaranaikes and Rajapaksas (please note, all of these are Sinhala and none Tamil), we in India are reminded of our political dynasties viz., Nehru-Gandhis, Badals, Yadavs of Bihar and UP, Patnaiks of Orissa, the DMK Parivar in Tamil Nadu, and the umpteen Chavans, Pawars et al of Maharashtra. However, there is a difference. While none of the Indian dynasts is a diehard ‘Brown Brit’ most of the Sri Lankan dynasts are.

But Gimlette does not confine himself to these ‘elite’ classes. He interacts with a wide spectrum of the populace that comprises Buddhist Monks, Muslims, Christian padres, former Tamil Tigers, farmers, slum dwellers, politicians, generals and Vedda forest dwellers among others.

You love to accompany Gimlette as he delves into the isle’s mythology and history, marvels at its magnificent past as exemplified by Anuradhapura, lingers while taking in the scenic beauty and the lure of its wildlife. You are confused when told of the Sri Lankan Tamils' high-nosed attitude towards ‘Indian Tamils’ who have been living there for long enough to be considered naturalised Sri Lankans. But it is the ugliness of violence, the destruction wrought by it that leaves you pained and stunned. You learn of the Tamil ingenuity in fashioning mini-submarines, improvised bombs and booby traps, their daring suicide bombers (prototypes for the Jihadi suicide bombers who followed their example in later years). But there were internecine wars among various Tamil groups that ended in Prabhakaran alias Thambi led LTTE emerging as the strongest of all the insurgent groups. The LTTE’s cruelties perpetrated on fellow Tamils are matched by the Sri Lankan military’s unspeakable atrocities and compounded by the IPKF’s follies as well as mindless violence and greed. Consequently, women and children were the greatest sufferers. As if this suffering was not enough. The tsunami wrought further havoc on the hapless in 2004, sweeping away scores of villages and killing hundreds. 

In this masterful account of an eminently avoidable tragedy the Tamil insurgency proved to be, Gimlette dwells on the various shades of post-insurgency Sri Lanka with sensitivity and humour. A humour that appears to be tinged with the average Sri Lankan’s ability to take the tragedies in their stride, even get philosophically indifferent towards them.

Deconstructing an icon

SMG Sportingly Spoilsport 

 by Kishin R. Wadhwaney.
Siddharth Publications.
Pages 232. Rs 500.

INDiA is starved of sporting icons. Very few disciplines have thrown up sportspersons of international calibre and, fewer still, world-beaters. Although tennis, badminton, boxing and wrestling have contributed a bit towards this end, cricket remains way ahead of the rest. This is the only game that has consistently produced champion players like Sachin Tendulkar, Kapil Dev, Rahul Dravid, Virender Sehwag, Anil Kumble etc. However, Sunil Manohar Gavaskar is considered Indian cricket’s first superstar. During the 1971 tour of the West Indies, his performance drew comparisons with Don Bradman. This, when he had missed the tour’s first Test owing to a surgery and was short of practice!

Wadhwaney refuses to deify Gavaskar and treats him as an ordinary mortal, portraying, along with his achievements and positive personality traits, the darker shades, or the warts and moles. Whether it is the controversy involving Bishen Singh Bedi’s axing in 1981, the treatment meted out to Dilip Doshi or the Gavaskar-Lillie run-in at Melbourne, the author does not mince words. There are other issues, too, wherein the cricketing legend’s penchant for intrigue and pretence has been underscored.

This is a book that would interest all those who are enamoured of all things cricket – both on and off the field. After all, what could be more absorbing than an incisive writing, garnished with anecdotes, on a cricketing legend like Gavaskar.

Knowing Dil Das
by Joseph S. Alter.
Penguin.
Pages xvii+193. Rs 299.

Alter is a son of a missionary and teaches anthropology in America. During his childhood days in India, he had become friends with a ‘low-caste’ doodhwala named Dil Das. Over a period of time, Alter became interested in the fascinating tales that Das used to narrate. Mostly autobiographical in nature – typically dwelling upon shikar-related adventures; these tales were a mix of fact and (perhaps) fantasy. Das talked of having gone on hunting expeditions with kings, politicians and other upper-class huntsmen. Nevertheless, the author discerned in these narratives glimpses of history that you would not find in any standard textbook or even other published records.

But there are other tales, too; of the pleasant, and not so pleasant, interactions with people belonging to upper castes, which show Das observing all the then extant rules of Hindu hierarchy. These give us an idea of how the village society used to function in the Himalayan foothills and, most probably, still does. For example, when a Brahmin friend invited Das to have tea with him, Das accepted the offer but on a neutral ground – where it was not a taboo for a Brahmin or a ‘low-caste’ person to enter.

Alter has skillfully coalesced history, anthropology, biography and sociology to come up with a book that should be of great interest to common readers as well as research-scholars.

You are not Alone
by Arun Mirchandani.
Frog Books.
Pages 150. Rs 195.

This novel, written in first person, recounts the tale of Sanjay Sanghavi, a seventy five year old gay person. It starts with his childhood in Singapore where, as a four year old, the ‘tendency’ begins to manifest itself. The child shows interest in Barbie dolls and feminine dresses and feels uncomfortable with masculine behavior. 

Soon, his father is transferred to Mumbai where Sanjay does most of his schooling in an up-market school. As he grows up, Sanjay turns obese, and becomes infatuated with a well-built classmate. But, things turn raw when he is bullied and sexually molested by some of the boys in his school.

Mirchandani has written a sensitive and absorbing account of a homosexual. Section 377 or not, it is well known that our society has still to accept gays as its own.

The Tribune

Why the Green Revolution did not bring food security

Financial World|Tehelka  Posted on 04 July 2012 CULTURE & SOCIETY  BOOK REVIEW Why the Green Revolution did not bring food security By Randeep Wadehra  Economic Liberalisation and Indian Agriculture By GS Bhalla and Gurmail SinghSage 390 pp | Rs 795 WHEN THE Borlaug seed fertiliser technology was introduced during the mid-1960s, the growth in India’s agricultural output began to gradually catch up with its population growth rate, and eventually outpaced it. Not surprisingly, the technology became our main strategy for increasing food and agricultural output. From 1962-65 to the beginning of 1990s, before the initiation of economic reforms in 1991, the agricultural policy operated within a planned economic framework. The strategy of agricultural development constituted a part and parcel of the overall planning of the Indian economy. The Plan outlays accorded priority to public investment in rural infrastructure in general, and in irrigation in particular. Substantial resources were invested in large, medium and minor irrigation projects in both the central and state plans. However, the gains of new technology were not spread evenly throughout various states and regions of the country. Moreover, several experts — including environmentalists like Vandana Shiva — have pointed out that the Green Revolution may have significantly increased the outputs of wheat and rice, but at the cost of domestic output of pulses and oilseeds, among other crops. This study, too, admits that the introduction of Borlaug technology increased the yield levels of mainly wheat, and later, rice. Policymakers laid great stress upon agricultural R&D and extension services. A number of agricultural universities were established under the aegis of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research for combining the functions of education, research and extension. Policies were formulated to provide cheap institutional credit and subsidies to encourage farmers to invest in irrigation, including tanks, pump-sets and irrigation structures. Both irrigation and power tariffs were hugely subsidised. However, if you look at the overall rate of agricultural growth — 3 percent — it is really not impressive by any standards, and lends credence to the arguments presented by Vandana Shiva and other like-minded experts that one set of crops prospered at the cost of another set of crops, which were equally vital to the Indian economy’s health. Vandana Shiva has pointed out that one set of crops prospered at the cost of another set The authors point out that the agricultural price policy aims at keeping food prices low in the interest of food security, which is sought to be ensured by augmenting domestic production although imports of such items as sugar, edible oils and even food grain have become quite frequent over a period of time. BUT, WE have seen how the pricing policy has manifestly failed to ensure even a modicum of food security. In fact, it has neither benefited the majority of farmers — who have small to marginal land holdings — nor has managed to keep the food prices down. Our present high inflation rates are largely, if not primarily, due to the rising food prices. Actually, the current regime of agriculture pricing and subsidies has helped only rich farmers, while the majority of the rest don’t even get the benefits of such pricing policies. There is a need to revisit the entire structure of agricultural pricing and overall management of its growth. Our policymakers and researchers would find this volume quite useful.

Devotion, longing and kaleidoscopic colours of spring

Call of the Spirit By Venu Sanon

Recherche Books. Pages: 52. Price: Rs. 200/-

Or is it your breath / that we call as the wind

painting this canvas / with the colours of spring?

These lines conjure up a beautiful imagery of the bhakta in dialogue with her bhagwan. The colours of spring become all the more radiant during Holi when she is “drenched with sunshine” even as shades of violet and colours of the Himalayan flowers, fiyuli and primula, tint the landscape. Sanon continues her dialogue, looking upon Him as mother, lover, friend and companion in Realization and Looking Back, among other poems. In fact, the first poem, This Holi, sets the mood for this anthology. The colours of Holi reflect the poet’s longing for the Lord and the joy at the spring’s arrival that symbolizes the Lord’s manifestation. The sensuous gets overwhelmed by the spiritual, as symbolized by these lines from Just You, 

“Free in all dimensions-/ no boundaries to encase; / you are the breath, the mind, / you are the thoughts that engage… Varied your many forms-/ saints and sages speak for you…”

Sanon revels in the nature’s beauty, which she interprets as a sign of divinity. Some examples:

“When I see the mist rise / to blur housetops and trees; / reach to kiss mountains, / merge with clouds flying free. (Longings)”

“When moonbeams on water waltzing so fine/ like stars that are twinkling on a mirror divine. (Is it you?)”

“Do you paint these skies/ with strokes of your thought? / These vivid oranges and blues / by your moods brought about? (The Artist)”

Harriet Monroe had described poetry as the ‘Cinderella of Arts’. Yet, it has survived and even flourished periodically, thanks to its unique capabilities for creating eternal symbiosis between truth and beauty by utilizing “fancy as sails and imagination as rudder” (John Keats). Something that you notice in this Sanon’s second offering, which has all these and much else because she has the talent for writing about both the known and the unknown. Her rich imagination is tempered with sparse and precise descriptions. Like every poet, Sanon too experiences variegated moods and expresses them imaginatively in her poems. However, the sense of wonder at natural beauty and divine presence form the leitmotif of this volume.

This volume should be an excellent springtime read.