Saturday, March 21, 2015

A Strange Place Other Than Earlobes

No, no... This isn’t a post about my fetish for earlobes (one of the softest and smoothest part of the body). In fact it is the title of anthology of corporeal poems by five contemporary poets that includes my good friend Binu Karunakaran. The book was formally launched on the 19th of this month at a function in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014.

Here are a few pictures that I could click of the function:

Leena Manimekalai - the Chief Guest, a few moments spent together before the function
Dr. Sreelatha - one of the five poets featured in the book, giving a brief introduction of the book
Riyas Komu - initiating the proceedings
It takes mammoth effort to unravel a book
Ra Sh & Binu seem to be wondering if they will get a chance to speak
Meditating Riyas
Star of the Biennale & a fan
His moment did come
A sign of Arrival - Amol Palekar asking you to sign his copy of your book
You don't get Amol Palekar seated next to you everyday. So, just freeze the moment


Sunday, March 01, 2015

Broken Lives

It does sound like the title of a typical South Asian novel where a kid or kids growing up in poor or middle class surroundings and their family migrates to the West to improve their living conditions. But, this is not my story or to put it more clearly the story I intend to write, I wish to write a story about the people who drift away, disappear or just vanish from your life leaving you to languish in the pain of separation.

Ah! This is turning out to be some kind of meta fiction where the author or the storyteller is a part of the story yet it is not an autobiographical tale. I even posted what I thought would be the first line of the story on my FB wall to an encouraging response of likes, comments and shares. But, as it happens with me every time the vague plot did not take a solid mould.

I feel that you need a totally vacant, painfully vacant mind for a story to take root and I don’t believe in the theory that you go on typing and the story would automatically happen.


PS: I tried to write this to see if the blur picture in my head getting any clearer and, more importantly I did not want this title to evaporate into oblivion from my head.