Uncut Poetry

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...