1) A new translation wiki for Indian Poetry in here spawned by this discussion. To quotify a snippet:
…it’s only by engaging more aggressively with contemporary poetry elsewhere that we’ll be able to develop a vibrant community of our own. By focusing too much on ‘Indian’ poetry, we risk creating a community that is insulated, complacent and nepotistic.
I attended a poetry reading (it was supposed to be a slam, but I didn’t see any judging happening. Everyone clapped for everything read.) which, for a large part, focused on mediocre writing (I think the poets themselves would call it colloquial or idiomatic, I call it lazy) tailored to appeal to the young, yuppy, Ingraji audience gathered there. I have no issues with choosing to write-what-gets-applauded, as long as it does something fun and new (Yes, those are my personal judging categories. I’m a horrible critic-person.) Or maybe I’m just being picky (I grinned and chuckled my share, yea, but I was mellow).
I’d look at ways (this is where I start talking out of my hat on a topic I am very vaguely aware of) of pushing modern poetry into schools. My poetry reading’s been very, very random and disorganised 
But I know every school child in India will get more from reading the first part of Howl (if nothing, it will teach them to favor clean needles and condoms and that there’s more to life than family and money. Like peyote solidities and wild cooking pederasty)than Wordsworth’s triple-damned Daffodils. No Keats either. Baudelaire, yes. Rilke’s Elegies should be compulsory reading. They should be made to recite it in the original and interpret it for their 10th standard board papers.
They might have redesigned curricula in the 9 years since I passed out, but I highly doubt it. School is where folk are turned off poetry. You show them poetry is not a fragile little period relic in a glass case they have to ooh over to pass a test, that it is mud they can colour each other with, that they can make and break mud castles with, and they’ll like it.
2) I’ve been watching Battlestar Galactica and am struck by how there are no non-theists to be seen anywhere in it. The two major groups seem to be the believers in the 12 Gods of Kobol (which is the Greek Pantheon) and the One True God followed by Cylons. But that is not what this snippet is about. This is about the Lament for the dead from Season 4 where Chief Tyrol mourns his wife at her funeral:
I couldn’t keep you safe from harm, my love, but I kept you in my heart. You were the breath in my lungs, the blood in my veins, the light in my eye, and now that breath is gone. That blood and the light are gone. Now I am left, a voice. And the Lords of Kobol, as many and as varied as mortal men, must bend down and lean low to hear that voice and hear my lament.
I love the part asking the Lords of Kobol to kneel for mortal grief, very unlike the actual Greek songs of lament which mourned the passing of someone in more pedestrian terms, choosing to dwell on the personal loss felt by their absence. An interesting link between Greek funeral laments and marriage songs here
3) Nostalgia: The only library book in school I can remember is a copy of The Pit and the Pendulum when I was 9. I remember books were being distributed in roll number order which meant you took what you got and thanked the gods for it (A black-market cigarette ring in a forced labour camp of sorts. You smoke what you’re given.) So some folk get those happily coloured covers of kid fiction, some others got Tinkle Digests, some few lucky fucknuts, who’d probably bribed someone in the library, got a Noddy (I loved Noddy when I was aged in single digits. Nothing that wore a blue cone, bright red shirt, pink cheeks and spindly legs could do wrong. Later there would be Phantom and briefly, Tintin. Oh, and Joe Hardy.) I got a slim volume with a black swinging pendulum on the cover, the cover art showed the pendulum as it swung down into a lowlit dungeon cell. I dimly remember a man tied down on a marble slab, but that didn’t scare me as much as that ginormous pendulum. I had dreams about it falling down, crashing through the roof of my home. Someone told me it was a horror story which kept me scared. I kept the book hidden in my bag and kept my bag closed and zipped shut tight so it didn’t get out. But I could see it through the skin of my bag, waiting like a grinning skull to be picked up. At the end of a month, the book was returned and I spent the rest of the year in peace.
I haven’t read The Pit and the Pendulum yet though I have read prose/poetry/non-fic Poe’s written. That damned black pendulum with its sneering edge and slow slicing swing…won’t leave me, perhaps for the rest of my life.
4) The movie: Topsy-turvy
This was my first Mike Leigh movie and I want to see it again proper-like, with both eyes and a pause button for when I blink or sneeze. It’s about Gilbert and Sullivan and the tensions that govern the creation of popular art. Sullivan decides the comic fare being demanded of him by the partnership is keeping him from serious musician-hood and decides to compose no more for the Savoy theatre (which hosts and profits much from G&S operas). Other arcs of interest are W.S. Gilbert’s absentiminded marriage, the art of stage production seen in the bulk of the latter half of the movie which deals with the staging of Mikado, and little snippets from Victorian tymes which include a dinnertable conversation of how the Siege of Khartoum wasn’t cricket, a quaint little scene involving the 19th c. Telefone. The movie also features many stage shows of G&S’ fare, mostly quirky little numbers written for a chuckle or two.
5) Vocations:
A friend of mine asked me to go be a copywriter (and emphasized it with a punch and a nod). I have a churning in my gut says an MBA will pawn my soul. Decisions, decisions. All I want to do is fuck a Russian trapeze artiste (This has been my ambition for the past 2 hours. It will fade after a good night’s sleep, I hope.)
6) I got done watching Battlestar Galactica, but that is a tale for another tyme.
