Uncut Poetry

And today, I introduce you to two lovers who finally get to disengage from each other's limbs and  beings, and come out to seek some coffee and fresh air. Their smiles are soft, their skin glows.   And all I can do is to sit on the side, a grizzled veteran of many stories, and watch them with a peculiar sense of knowing and pleasure.....

Paresh Tiwari, Writer & Illustrator and Maestro of Haiku & Haibun, leads us into the minimalist, sparse, meditative and beautiful world of Haiku and Haibun.   Like the deep woods, it is a world full of mystery, seduction and contemplation.   Once there, you will not want to come out....

So much happens in our minds! Often, the adventures in our heads are more exciting than the ones happening in our real lives. But when our imaginings take precedence in our relationships over reality, and we conjure the worst, the die is cast for dire consequences. Love can survive the worst, because intrinsically it is forgiving - but how can it contest the power of imagination? When what you ima...

Growing up is a time of luxurious waste. And in that indolence often lies the true meaning of living in the moment. It's only in looking back that we realize how precious that time was, & how much of us has been built in the heat & the sweat & the coolness of that time.   We are, in later life, what life gave us in those heady days - when nothing often meant everything.  

So much of me is my parents. My love for poetry is from my mother. My practical life is from my father. And as I have conversations with them, I realize both of them are actually universe's first and the most beautiful poems gifted to me. No wonder, poetry is life.    And today I have two poems, one each for the two who mean the most to me.    The details of...

The gorgeous poetry in the song 'Main yeh sochkar' by Kaifi Azmi from the film Haqeeqat, has heartbreak written into its very fibre.   The finality of endings is often unavoidable, often known, but never ever easy.   Love's tenure is a story of irony wrapped in an unhealed scar which neither heals, nor desires healing.   

We are so quick to judge violence as communal, religion as bigoted, and protest as biased.   But do we realize the person we threw our abuses at is also a person who trudges back to a home, tired, bloodied, pilloried.   That this man does believe in the power of a prayer. And when he runs down the street with fire in his hand and screaming God's name, he is merely invoking the name to protect hims...

What is love, or love-making, worth, if it's not mischievous? It's high is a question of physics and biology, but for it to be life sustaining, it requires playfulness, good old conversation, a lot of giving and a lot of taking.   It's one of those strange things where you burn and then come out more alive. 

They say everyone is happy in similar ways, but pain catches everybody differently. Even when it is shared, pain is a burden which has to be borne alone. But pain is also a doorway to compassion, to understanding, to appreciation. And life telescopes through pain, into its most elemental. We are truth, we are awake... even as things fade away. 

So much of our mental space is spent in recrimination of those who deserve nothing less than our deepest gratitude, and for what? Small hurts, a word we didn't like, a gesture which didn't suit us?   But happily, we all have in our lives people who forget quickly and forgive generously. Their grace is what quietly gives our lives its rich textures. Can we be that person?  

Tragedy hits everybody. But it hits some at a livelihood level, others at a heartache level.   We can sneer at rich - but we are in this world with our own destinies. To feel guilty about our luck is to deny the very things which give life its beauty.     But when two worlds meet, grace appears in mysterious ways.   (And welcome Tanuja!)

So much of love is all about being in the moment.   The length, paradoxically, is of little consequence. A lifetime together might have just a few memorable moments, but just a few moments might have a whole lifetime embedded in them.    That's the joy, pain, and gorgeousness of this unhealed scar called love...    

The relationship of a father and daughter is one of the closest bonds, almost akin to  homespun spirituality. For a father, a daughter is someone so valuable, that battles could be fought for her with the whole world.   But like all realizations, children often discover the indispensable nature of their parents just when the universe makes them realize how dispensable each life is.

What is life without risk? What is life's worth if we haven't jumped into the dark not knowing anything more than that there is an invisible grace of something infinite out there which will protect us?  In the brave response to these fears lies the most beautiful offering of life we can ever hope to either give or get....

So much of our life is spent in longing. But, often, we don't even know what we are pining for, there's just that feeling of emptiness, of standing at the edge of something unfulfilled. Is it because we forget sometimes that all the important things are either beside us or inside us? 

Don't we sometimes feel that we can talk with strangers more freely than we can with those closest to us? Is it because there's a strange sense of freedom with a stranger, because we know the person in front of us is not prejudging us.    In those few moments of liberation, when we are free, not being appraised, we soar. We are our best selves. 

Our relationship with the city we have grown up in or know intimately is nothing less than a love affair. It is capable of bringing us ecstasy and disappointments just the way a lover can. Calcutta for me is that loved one.

The tragedy which follows the tragedy of a broken heart is the subsequent denial of love, a rejection. The fear of again getting hurt is so overwhelming that the one who is scorned builds insurmountable walls around one's being. Nothing can get through.   Until something does.   The details of the music used in this episode are as follows - Sleepers by Sascha Ende Link:  https://fil...

In these chaotic and uncertain times, there is so much of recalibration which is taking place, even as we grapple with new realities. This incarceration has its terrible downsides,  but for a person who loves to read and write , it's godsend.    But it is not easy to delink an old life so easily. And the daily routine which we abhorred, suddenly looks warm and fuzzy through the lens of nostalgia.

We are living in extraordinary times,  when everything we know as normal is being pulled asunder.    We need to desperately step back and relook at our lives with new eyes. And we have to  discover how much we have lost to come so far.   Is this grim time then the time to rediscover the pleasures of those pristine times?

Cities and love stories are so intimately intertwined that often the city becomes a character in the tale.    With time, memory slips into wistfulness because every place the lovers had spent time in has a story attached to it. A journey through the city becomes a haj of love.     The city becomes a map of unending unrequited love. 

Which love story isn't tumultuous? And if it is a story which spans decades, the years of togetherness have necessarily to also be years of disagreements. But the will to ride over it all, irrespective, is a sign of incredible commitment. When life ebbs, and what remains in the last moments are memories, it's always a 'feeling' which overrides all 'facts'.   

This poem is about a friend who'd lost her mother - and then her father- in quick succession. And I asked her about what the loss meant. And she could only remember the smallest things of them which suddenly had the biggest meanings.   And this is what love does - it makes us notice the smallest of quirks, which makes our loved one what she is. Alas, sometimes, after they are no more.  

'Uncut Poetry' is a podcast featuring the poetry of Sunil Bhandari, a poet from Calcutta, India. Sunil says "For me, poetry is a compulsion. It's the way I discover the world inside myself, sort out issues, and come to resolutions. In the very minutiae of my poems, lie the biggest answers of my life." 'Uncut Poetry' hopes its poetry will be the start of a conversation the listener will have with h...