Lines in the void: Poems by Rajeev Barua

A prism of perspectives

Translator: Krishna Dulal Barua

Publisher: Loopamudra Publications

No. of pages: 66

Price: Rs 100

Poetry provides pleasure because it is closer to the heart and emotions. Suggestions of infinite kind erupt and the reader stays engrossed within the rich kaleidoscope of images and metaphors. Small and mundane attain the extraordinariness in views and perceptions. Life and men are reread, re-envisioned, in the momentary reflection of the poet and rightfully he becomes the representative voice of man and his philosophy.

In the anthology of his translated poems Lines in the Void, Rajeev Barua captures moments of illumined nebula of perceptions in chiselled words and brilliant metaphors. The sensitivity of the poet is not wasted in fluidity of hesitant expressions but is crystallised in mature and condensed idioms. Fleeting time and transient love find a striking chord in Ballad of Dejection, where a “ripened fallen leaf” need not be directed “where to head for’. But in the poems like The Hand, the contour of a hand retains splendour of life and love; it is posed as a sculpted hand fixated “on the loom”.

This solitary figure riveted to the extent of absorption poses like the reaper on Wordsworth’s canvas. Apart from his affiliation to common folk life as projected in Morning Stroll at Bhomoraguri and Firewood, Barua’s poetry sketches individual pathos or serenity of composure of a passerby who is elated at the refreshing glimpse of the scene which is “restless” or the gurgling happiness condensed in the heart of a fisherman who “catches” the sun in his net.

But the golden hue of the sun does not connote an entire fleet of joy for the introverted soul. For, here are moments of deep immersion in the heart and the sensitive yet placid poet intermittently realises the futility of all human attempts that aim at transient merriment. So the inevitable query to his fellow poet is:

“What a poet you are

Without a pond of your own!”

He has earnestly felt the need of a “pond” for oneself which perhaps reflects his mirror image, his other self. You and I in the Office Room is a similar poem that, too, brings to the surface the idea of introspection that takes the vivid form of a one-on-one conversation between the subject and the other. Almost all poems of Barua feel and read like interior monologues. A dialogue is set forth and that brings to focus unforetold experiences and realisations to the creative artist. Life’s gusto is felt in every minute moment and the poet remains an aesthete who is able to decipher beauty in every small act of kindness or a gesture of pitiful love. Looking Beautiful authenticates this dichotomy between beauty and ugliness and real and illusory.

A thoughtful poem in the anthology is Tale of a Pair of Shoes which is full of innuendoes, stark similes and suggestive metaphors. It very blatantly evokes in the mind the image of Van Gogh’s A Pair of Boots which very urgently, as it were, condenses realised situations like the rustic and his ambience. Similarly here in Barua’s poem a few related narratives are woven around the lovers, neighbours and foes of the shoes. The most arresting line of the poem is “Both the shoes had fallen in love with a pair of brawny feet.”

Barua’s images and metaphors, as indicated earlier, are reflective in nature. The cosy security of the “home” offers a stable founding ground for all journeys that the subject undertakes and to the poet home resides on “two bullock carts” evoking along with a strain of melancholia, the reality of dislocated and migrated souls.

The poem Home draws deeply poignant pictures of hope, desperation and calamity and it seems to be one of the best poems in the anthology. Breaking Away and Ballad of the Empty Bottle-1, too, offer some intense metaphoric sonority in images like “Yours wishes are pomegranate flowers” or “The traits of a bottle grow apparent/Only when it is empty”.

The present anthology of the translated poems of Barua can claim another credit apart from the thought, cadence and suggestion of his images and rhetoric. All poems here are very well translated and each of the four translators has retained the candour of the source language. Because of their virtuosity the diction feels fresh; the metaphors tend to suggest in infinite variety of ways and the poems remain honest statements of a poetic heart.

The book will definitely thrill the avid readers of poetry.

GARIMA KALITA

Published on November 18, 2011

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1111118/jsp/northeast/story_14741806.jsp

The Cat’s Table

A memoir and an autobiography

Name of the book: The Cat’s Table

Writer: Michael Ondaatje

Publisher: Jonathan Cape

No. of pages: 288

Price: Rs 499

Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships,” writes Michael Ondaatje in Running in the Family, his record of the eccentric lives of his ancestors. Growing out of “two return journeys” in 1978 and 1980 to Sri Lanka, the place where he was born, Running in the Family is a curious mix of autobiography, reminiscence, hearsay and history. Yet, in spite of the fusion of fact and fiction, it is a work that is firmly aware of its narrative destiny: “anecdotes and faint memories... dates and asides [interlock] as if assembling the hull of a ship.” Indeed, the final vision of the book that the reader has is one of completing a heady voyage, during which minds matured, hearts were put in peril, and lives came together or fell apart.

That image of a ship afloat in a sea of voices is what comes vividly to mind as one reads Ondaatje’s latest novel, which, he admits, “uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography”. There is a travelling circus, a rabid dog gone crazy, and a cast that is straight out of the world of Running in the Family. The plot literally involves a nautical expedition undertaken by the 11-year-old autobiographical narrator on the Oronsay, sailing from Ceylon to England in the 1950s. The young Michael is going to England to live with his mother after his parents’ divorce. He shares his humble cabin with Mr Hastie, a kennel keeper who reads mystical works, and takes his meals at “the cat’s table”, tucked farthest away from the coveted captain’s table. Keenly sensitive to the pulse of life on a ship presided over by a captain who “was not fond of his Asian cargo”, Michael begins to “distrust... the authority and prestige of all Head Tables” on this three-week journey — a habit that would gradually grow into his adult personality.

In the company of his peers, the “exuberant” Cassius and the “quiet” Ramadhin with his “tentative heart”, Michael learns “about adults simply by being in their midst”. He meets Larry Daniels, the botanist who is transporting a garden of exotic herbs to Europe; Mr Mazappa, “half Sicilian, half something else”, a “Homeric” character “with his list of feminine charms, as well as vices”; Miss Lasqueti, a voracious reader who threw books she disliked into the sea; Asuntha, a strange deaf girl; and Mr Fonseka, who aspired to teach Shakespeare to schoolchildren in England, but burned hemp in his cabin to inhale the familiar smells he had left behind. But the two most arresting members of the dramatis personae are Sir Hector de Silva, the philanthropist who is cursed by a monk and dies a freak death on board, and the prisoner who makes a devastating escape while being transported to an English jail.

This is also a story of the East’s encounter with the West, of odd characters who are “half something else” going in exile to the other end of the world.

For much of the novel, Ondaatje entertains us with a sprightly account of boyhood pranks. We are reminded of the delightful always-Sunday ambience of R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends. Time seems to have been arrested by the unshaken optimism of youth. But before long, the adult voice of Michael, the writer, intervenes, and moments of great tenderness and unalloyed intimacy from the past are lit by a pale melancholic glow. After an obscurely erotic encounter with his cousin, Emily, on the ship, the boy Michael feels “a mix of thrill and vertigo”. But the older Michael, looking back on the incident decades later, wonders: “was it a pleasure or a sadness, this life inside me?” Emily, the ethereal 17-year-old who had a not-so-clandestine thing going with Sunil, “The Hyderabad Mind”, retires to an island after a failed marriage and a lifetime’s struggle for security. Years later, when Michael spends a day with her at her cottage, she tells him coldly, yet with a hint of self-pity, “I don’t think you can love me into safety.”

What gives Ondaatje’s novel its power and intensity is this coming together of many kinds of time — not only past and present, but also of youth and middle age — until the stillness of history and the tumult of flowing life become intermingled. Episodes flash upon the imagination, perspectives become intertwined, as though the life that was, the one that is, and the one yet to come are sealed together into a single arc of memory. But memory, when entrusted solely to the vagaries of the human mind, often takes flight into fiction. “For us this was an era without the benefit of photography,” writes Ondaatje, “so the journey escaped any permanent memory.” Like an Impressionist painting, the image of this era is put together with patches of colour and hazy, indistinct shapes. This shifting, protean quality of the past is also mirrored in the adult self of the narrator, who has not quite evolved from the boy who once sailed to the far shores, “someone startled, half-formed, who had not become anyone or anything yet”.

This rootless and unformed quality, together with the capacity to surprise himself and be surprised by the world, remain with Michael, the story-teller, as they seldom do in adults, who “are always prepared for the gradual or sudden swerve in an oncoming story”. “As members of an audience we should never feel ourselves wiser than [the characters],” he admits with humility, “we do not have more knowledge than the characters have about themselves.” There are, as a result, some seemingly inscrutable acts, such as Michael’s marriage to Ramadhin’s sister, Massi, and their eventual break-up.

This unfathomability is often tied to the child’s vision of things that are seen again in another light years later. “I realised only recently that Mr Mazappa and Miss Lasqueti were young,” writes Michael when he is long past his own youth. But such clarities — like Miss Lasqueti’s advice to Emily, “Despair young and never look back” — are necessarily ironic. They always come late, bearing the burden of missed chances and lost opportunities, when the moment for them is no longer ripe, but rotten to the core by the poison of life.

SOMAK GHOSHAL

Published on November 18, 2011

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1111118/jsp/northeast/story_14748583.jsp

The Macmillan Diaries Vol. II

Lacklustre diary

Name of the book: The Macmillan Diaries Vol. II

Writer: Harold Macmillan

Editor: Peter Catterall

Publisher: Macmillan

Number of pages: 796

Price: Rs 1,650

Harold Macmillan went to Eton where he didn’t finish because his mother pulled him out. Later he went up to Oxford where also he didn’t finish because he volunteered to fight in the First World War. Macmillan fought bravely and was very proud of this all through his life. The prime ministership came to him when he was a month shy of his 63rd birthday.

By all accounts, he was a nice man to know. When his son, Maurice, wondered why his own career was nowhere near that of his father, Macmillan senior retorted, “Because you weren’t ruthless enough.’’ On the face of it, his life was colourful. He carried out a ruthless political act — a drastic reshuffle of his cabinet in July 1962 — that is remembered in British politics as the “Night of the Long Knives’’. He became the Chancellor of the University of Oxford, an honour he loved perhaps because he had never finished from Oxford — “sent down by the Kaiser’’, he was fond of saying. For the better part of his life he was London’s best known cuckold: his wife, Dorothy, carried on a long affair with the politician, Bob Boothby, a well known seducer of both sexes and a cad. Macmillan and his wife met only at dinner time. In spite of his many accomplishments, Macmillan was a lonely and an introverted man perhaps because of his wife’s affair and the revelation by her that their youngest daughter, Sarah, had been sired by Boothby.

Such men make good diarists as they often tend to use the diary to express their innermost thoughts and angst. In this sense, Macmillan’s diaries are a disappointment. There is hardly anything personal and no startling revelation or gossip. But this may not entirely be the fault of the diarist, it could be a result of the editorial principles followed.

Peter Catterall writes in his introduction,“Omissions...had to occur to reduce the original text to less than half its length. It has been possible to achieve some of that by cutting out repetitions… it has also been necessary to omit Macmillan’s reading, social activities and family life.’’ This means that the man has been taken out of the diary. What has been retained is the political stuff. There is no denying that politics dominated Macmillan’s life but it certainly wasn’t everything to him. The omission of his reading is surprising. When Macmillan was wounded in World War I, he spent ten hours in a shell-hole reading Aeschylus and doping himself with morphine. Surely, such a man could not have spent his years as prime minister without reading. What did he read? That he was reading, there is no doubt as there are stray references to books in the diaries.

Macmillan, unlike someone like Harold Nicolson, was an intermittent diary keeper. During the First World War he wrote to his mother and these letters are somewhat akin to a diary of his military service. During the Second World War when he was minister resident in Algiers, Greece and Italy between 1943 and 1945, he wrote to his wife and these were published as War Diaries in 1984. From 1950 for six years he filled 22 foolscap notebooks. The 23rd, covering the final stages of the Suez Crisis, was in all probability destroyed. In 1957, he came back to keeping a diary. These diaries begin with an entry dated February 8, 1957 in which Macmillan writes, “We have now settled in No 10 [ Downing Street]. It is very comfortable. I have a good room as a study...The house is rather large, but has great character and charm. It is very ‘liveable’.’’ A quiet opening of a record of a tumultuous premiership. It is also the statement of a confident man who had been looking forward to life in No 10.

Over the next 10 years, Macmillan according to the editor wrote around 5,10,000 words in the foolscap notebooks. The writing of the diaries continued even after Macmillan had stood down from parliament in the general elections of 1964. But the diaries stop after May 20, 1966. It is not difficult to guess the reason. His wife suffered a fatal heart attack the day after and Macmillan did not take up his pen again to write a diary. This is a touching withdrawal since his wife’s affair that began in 1929 had caused him enormous anguish. He hadn’t sued for divorce because he had been advised that a divorce would ruin his political career.

The diary is lacklustre. One illustration of this is that nowhere in the diary does he mention the phrase for which he is most famous, “You’ve never had it so good.’’ The historian, Quentin Skinner, has suggested that when Macmillan was writing the diary he only had the prepared text before him whereas the quip had been delivered off the cuff to put down a heckler. This about sums up the diaries: they are too much of a prepared set-piece.

RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE

Published on November 11, 2011

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1111111/jsp/northeast/story_14719637.jsp

Axamar Charai Prajyabekshanar Hatputhi

It’s all about birds

Name of the book: Axamar Charai Prajyabekshanar Hatputhi

Writer: Soumyadeep Datta

Publisher: Banphool Prakashan

Pages: 192

Price: Rs 350

In marshy areas, open fields or among twigs, generations of Assam’s people have seen so many birds of various colours and sizes that they have given the winged creature a distinct place in their literature and culture.

Sparrows, doves, crows, parrots, common mynas, cranes and herons are a few species of locally available birds that most people know about. But, there are numerous others, chirping, singing and whistling in the bushes and jungles of Assam, escaping the notice of the common people.

Nature lover Soumyadeep Datta has collected names, pictures and descriptions of 300 different bird species available in Assam and compiled a beautiful handbook on bird watching, Axamar Charai Prajyabekshanar Hatputhi, making it a mine of information on local birds.

The book is equipped with basic information on each bird species in a systematic way, which can not only help an ornithologist, but even a common reader having little idea about birds. Characteristics and habitat of each bird are described along with their local, international and scientific names.

The writer, as he says in the preface, wants Assamese youths to earn a name at the international level as good birdwatchers, for which he has laid emphasis on the birds’ international names.

The set of beautiful colour photographs of all 300 birds and eggs of some of them is the most attractive feature of the book. Capturing them on film involved an arduous and time-consuming process, which was accomplished through the combined effort of 50 photographers.

A familiar name in Assam, Datta has been working on conservation of nature for years through his NGO Nature's Beckon. He started working on birds since 1980 and collected local names of different bird species available in Assam during this period.

Several chapters of the book describe separately the wings, legs, tails, bills, eggs, nests, eyesight and sense of smell of different bird species based on which a person can classify them. He gives readers the fundamental tips that he learned from years of fieldwork, to observe the characteristics of birds, while dropping hints about the differences between the male and the female of the species.

The book is indeed a must-read for aspiring birdwatchers.

RAJIV KONWAR

Published on November 11, 2011

http://www.telegraphindia.com/archives/archive.html

Higher Education in India Growth Expansion and Issues

Name of the book: Higher Education in India Growth Expansion and Issues

Writer: Dulumoni Goswami

Publisher: D.V.S. Publishers

Pages: 150

Price: Rs 425

The 21st century has brought along new challenges and opportunities for the country’s educators and education planners. The challenges and issues before the education planners in this century lies in solving the problems of access and equity, quality, international dimensions, job-oriented education, and financing, among others.

Dulumoni Goswami has presented an analytical discussion on various issues confronting development of higher education in the country in his book Higher education in India: Growth Expansion and Issues.

The book is an attempt to put across 10 relevant themes for higher education in a simple but exhaustive way. The author needs special appreciation for documenting the history of Indian higher education from the ancient period to the 21st century.

In the second chapter, the author presents a comprehensive discussion on the recent reforms in the higher education sector.

While discussing quality issues in the third chapter, the author stresses development of quality in higher education to make it relevant.

The role of the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) in maintaining quality higher education is also critically discussed.

Globalisation and its impact on education have been comprehensively documented in the fourth chapter.

The author raises issues like commercialisation, internationalisation and privatisation of higher education from a critical angle.

The fifth chapter contains an analysis on the financial issues of Indian education in relation to public expenditure on education. He opines that public expenditure on higher education should be enhanced for access and equity in higher education.

Extension, the third dimension of higher education, plays a decisive role for disseminating useful information and ideas to the people outside the regularly organised schools and classrooms.

The UGC’s initiatives are elaborately discussed and a brief picture of the current scenario of extension education is discussed in the sixth chapter.

The last chapter is devoted to the status of college education in Assam. The author, while noting that the NAAC visit has compelled Assam colleges to develop their infrastructure and academic activities, says that the state’s colleges are far behind from a global point of view.

Overall, the book’s presentation is admirable, It is also affordably priced. A good pick for researchers, teachers and students of social science, especially those involved with research on higher education.

MOYURI SARMA

Published on November 4, 2011

Jiban Juktira Bahare

A life beyond logic

Name of the book: Jiban Juktira Bahare

Author: Pankaj Thakur

Translator: Mona Lisa Jena

Publisher: Kahani

No. of pages: 164

Price: Rs 125

Depicting a life and an era that defy logic, Pankaj Thakur’s Jiban Juktira Bahare is a series of autobiographical sketches that reveal life’s paradoxical realities.

The translator, Mona Lisa Jena, brings alive all the shades, the landscape, and the uniquely staid yet volcanic life of the Northeast to life.

Thakur’s bittersweet experiences truly go beyond life’s humdrum logic and allow us to expect the unexpected with a little bit of ease.

A student of economics, the author has been a teacher, a journalist and a corporate executive.

Many other sundry occupations have resulted in a mélange of experiences and these diverse experiences have helped him face life’s many-hued experiences and portray them in a series of vivid narratives.

Ellen, The Tiger and I reflects the innocence and raw courage of Ellen, a Naga girl.

Benari Lotha, Manju, Chumang and Others depicts the violent face of the raging unrest in Nagaland in a gripping account.

The Definition of Statistics presents the abject neglect of rural Northeast and exposes the bureaucratic lies responsible for it.

About Three Artistes is a tribute to three great artists of Assam — Benu Mishra, Naal Paban Barua and Pranab Barua — and their humaneness.

There are three episodes involving Mumbai, where the author was a student — Ellie Marcello, Atil Sitkara and I, About Two Hippies and The Parsi Girl.

The episodes are reflections on the twists and turns of human emotion.

The writer is dragged into one experience to merge with another.

The experiences offer great insight into the pliant human mind and its unfathomable machinery.

A sketch about Calcutta, Those Characters in Search of a Story, shows the bonhomie of the common man but after an unfortunate incident, the middle class tattlers float a number of unsavoury theories or stories which hurt the author.

An episode in Madras, in One Bangle, is an unexpected experience the writer faces during a bus journey.

The Python; Arun Basumatary’s Management portrays the skills of Basumatary who had to let loose a python in the courtyard of a warehouse to prevent thieves from stealing motor parts and to keep the security guards on their toes.

However, the narrative stutters at times when the translator treads the perilous path of translating word for word.

Meanings blur at times in a bid to render an exact translation.

At times, words defy sense when perestroika becomes “pestroika” and Larsen and Toubro becomes “Larsen and Tube”.

Matters are compounded when the printer’s devil runs amok and words run into one another.

Ultimately, however, one must acknowledge the translator’s efforts at recreating for us the zeitgeist of the region and the search for identity.

ALIPTA JENA

Published on November 4, 2011

http://www.telegraphindia.com/archives/archive.html