Poetry Session — Feb 26, 2018

Catherine Stoll-Simon, Thommo

A surprisingly large turnout — seven members plus a guest — at the first poetry session of the year underscores the love for poetry among our readers. Physical absence no longer seems a hurdle to participation, for Joe & KumKum have been virtually present throughout their sojourn in USA. They send their recorded voice files, podcasts we may say, that are played at the beginning of the meeting.

Contrary to the notion of a general decline in poetry, KRG members evince a lively interest. Sunil who expressed an unease with poetry formerly, seems now a convert, a real poetry fan. He read from the poems of a Polish poet, Czesław Miłosz. 

Saras and Shoba

The presence of KRG's guest of the evening, the French artist, poet, and writer, Catherine Stoll-Simon added to the interest. She is in Fort Kochi preparing an exhibition of sacred dresses, the first of which is titled Christ in New York, on view at the Kashi Art Gallery on Quieros Street, Fort Kochi. Priya has written an article on her work in The Hindu, and introduced Catherine, whom she met during the course of her journalistic exploration.

Preeti

Although Saras has had to move to Nemmara she will try to visit Kochi on the appointed dates for our sessions. We salute her for her commitment and loyalty, and would sorely miss her if she was not present. Pamela meanwhile on a visit to Delhi sent us news of the Delhi Literature Festival (http://delhiliteraturefestival.org/) she attended.

Pamela at Delhi Literature Festival on Feb 24, 2018

Here is a group picture of the readers after the event at the Yacht Club:

Preeti, Saras, Zakia, Catherine Stoll-Simon, Shoba, Priya (Front) Sunil, Thommo (back)

Hannah Kent – Burial Rites Jan 29, 2018

First edition of the novel

We know from the beginning of the novel that Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the heroine of the story is going to be executed. But since it is historical fiction we expect to be treated to interior feelings and scenes that go unrecorded in the annals of drab history. We aren't disappointed.

Shoba & Kavita

The novel is slow to get under way. The reader is presented with tiresome dialogue imagined by the author to be the speech characteristic of figures of authority in those times in that isolated region. It almost sounds like a remote dialect translated into stilted English. We wonder at the earnestness with which district officers sought to bring about a spiritual reformation to convicted murderers. Lutheran ministers seemed available in plenty and up for the challenge too.

Thommo reading

It is through the efforts of one such, Reverend Thorvardur Jónsson, called Tóti for short, we learn the woman’s side of the story. At first Tóti is focused on gospel lectures and one-way spiritual talk. But later in the face of defeat, the spirit leads him to stop sermonising and open up to let Agnes speak. Thus, we obtain the first-person narrative of the condemned woman; it is wide in scope and unsparing in detail about her poverty after abandonment by her mother. Then she finds a step-mother who realised Agnes was blessed with a wonderful mind and went on to make her fully literate, even well-read.

Saras

In the literature of independent women characters we often read their stories and regret they could not have been even more independent than they were — of the wayward affections of men. What was there in Natan Ketilsson to hold Agnes Magnúsdóttir in thrall? He never gave her very much at all apart from copulation, and even mistreated her. Did his money and his economic station hold out the hope she could forever escape poverty if only she could make him take her as his wife? But he never intended to. He was the randomly begetting kind, not the staidly marrying kind.

Zakia

The readers were present in strength and their evident pleasure at the end of the reading is manifest in this photograph.

Thommo, Sunil, Saras, Priya, Zakia, Shoba, Pamela, Hemjit seated with Sugandhi to his right

Poetry Session — Dec 19, 2017

 Zakia, Shoba, Preeti, Priya by the CYC Christmas tree

The very last session of 2017 commanded a good attendance. Many of the poems recited were in the spirit of the Christmas festival. Though some of the poets selected were performed before in the years of poetry celebration by our group, the poems chosen were different.

Shoba, Thommo, Zakia, Pamela reading, Hemjit back to camera

Joe and KumKum were still abroad but keen to participate, and left voice files in the dropbox that were played at the session for the readers.

Zakia

Priya who orchestrated the session brought in Christmas plum cake for the readers, and Santa Claus caps for them to wear while reading. A Christmassy spirit of peace and harmony descended over the assembled readers.

Thommo

Preeti, coming late, made a surprise entry toward the end of the session, but contributed a humorous and expressive reading of a children’s poem called Chocolate Cake by Michael Rosen. You can hear a snippet of her delightful enactment of the poem in an embedded voice file further down.

Hemjit

Preeti

Salutations and greetings to all our readers who have contributed this past year in making our sessions memorable and pleasurable! We look forward to 2018 with relish. Here are the readers at the end of the session.

Zakia, Preeti, Priya, Thommo, Shoba, Hemjit seated
(Pamela had to leave early)

Poetry Session — Oct 13, 2017

Priya

The poetry attendance was sparse, but what was remarkable was the 4 to 1 ratio of men to women in the attendance at CYC, which became 5 to 2 when Joe and KumKum from Arlington, MA, were added as virtual attendees with their recorded voice files sent via Dropbox.

Thommo

The choice of poets was all modern. Therefore penetrating the meaning posed a challenge to the readers and listeners, but that is just as well. For it makes one ponder the words of the poet, recite it aloud to discover what may be hidden in the sonority, and examine the possibilities. As Ashbery explains, obscurity can convey more in the same number of words than crystal clarity can.

Priya and Ankush

As before Priya was responsible for gathering the readers and reporting on the session. The readers responded and pictures of the occasion testify to the draw of poetry.

Sunil, Thommo, Sugandhi, Priya, Ankush, Hemjit (seated)

Julian Barnes — Sense of an Ending Sep 21, 2017

Julian Barnes is the author of the 2011 Man Booker Prize winning novel The Sense of an Ending. It is an intriguing novel with an ending that many of our readers found unsatisfactory, like the ending of a mystery novel which the author deliberately wishes to leave unresolved.

Priya

It is also a novel that speculates a great deal on philosophical matters, starting with Albert Camus’ fundamental question: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” That schoolboys in senior classes are not only seized of such questions, but also incisively dissect matters of memory and history is credit to the school system.

Thommo

Adrian Finn is the precocious youngster whom the schoolmasters recognise as scholarship material from the start. Tony Webster, though not as bright, becomes his friend and they have a fateful shared relationship with the same girl, Veronica. Tony gets off unscathed, but Adrian who gets second dibs ends up a suicide; we never learn why, but are encouraged to surmise by Veronica who repeatedly says about Tony that he never ‘gets it’. Neither do we readers, in spite of the algebraic relationships Adrain leaves behind as cryptic clues.

Cake for Priya's Birthday!

An alluring feature of Barnes’ writing are the numerous allusions to the poems of Philip Larkin, scattered throughout. Joe and KumKum saw the film of the novel, but it deviates so widely toward the end that it carries the sense of a different ending, made more palatable to the reader by the director, Ritesh Batra, who made his debut with The Lunchbox in 2013.

Poetry Session – August 4, 2017

Pamela, Ankush

The poetry session began with a surprise phone call from Kumkum in Boston, wishing the group a great session. She was sad she could not participate and her health issues did not permit her to submit poems in the Dropbox via a voice file, as Joe managed.

Onion Bhajjis for refreshment

Priya took the notes for this post and administered the session, and Hemjit contributed many of the live pictures of the readers during the sessions. Ankush showed up having missed the previous one on Pnin for family reasons. Onion fritters, tea and coffee were served.

Saras

Thommo informed the members that the tea and onion bhajis would be his treat for his belated birthday, which he shares with George Bernard Shaw! Saras suggested that KRG should have a birthday list of its members and we could celebrate birthdays at the reading sessions. Pamela made a note of the birthdays of members present – many of whom share theirs with literary personalities: Shoba with Shakespeare, Thommo with GBS, Hemjit with Muhammad Ali, but Priya would like to hide hers for it’s an infamous date in modern times.

Thommo, Priya, Zakia, Pamela, Saras, Ankush, &  Hemjit (seated)

Independence Came Seventy Years Ago

I belong to the generation born just before World War II, who arrived at the age of awareness around the time of India’s Independence. I was in the school bus being ferried to San Thome Convent when I first heard the word ‘Dominion Status’ applied to India (it was splashed in huge font on the front page of the newspaper a teacher was holding). The term conveyed little to me beyond the sense of a new era beginning. I didn’t know yet that I had been living in a subjugated country all my life. Lord Mountbatten, and then C. Rajagopalachari, were to be the Governors General before India became a Republic.

Lord & Lady Mountbatten with Gandhi

Chakravarti Rajagopalachari

Uncle Louis, in whose house we stayed in Madras, had spent time in Alipore jail in Calcutta as a political prisoner after he was a student at Scottish Church College. The morning routine for the warders was to call out to the inmates, “Sarkar ko salaam bolo!” to which they would defiantly respond in unison “Jail ka darwaza kholo!”

From his house we all bundled into his cream Chevrolet to go to the Island Grounds in Madras, because Gandhiji was coming to speak. There wasn’t enough seating for my uncle, and aunt Kuttiamma, my mother and sister, my portly ayah, Dhanammal, our man Friday, Munuswamy, and our erudite driver, Damodaran. 

Uncle Louis in 1946

So my sister and I sat on stools at the back. I remember nothing of the speech or the voice, but can see the posts on which the loudspeakers were mounted, and the bamboo partitions to corral the crowds. It was a sea of vermilion and green, with white Gandhi caps on nearly every head. I don’t remember what songs were played, but there was music relayed to the furthest expanse of the grounds.

When Independence actually arrived there was a celebration at school. I was clad in white shorts, a collarless shirt and Gandhi cap and stood somewhere along the West Coast of the outline of India painted white on the long sloping flight of black granite steps rising from the playground to the Form classes (Forms I to VI) above. We had little paper flags pinned to our chest and a rousing chant of the Jana-Gana-Mana arose as we held candles in our hand — there on the steps, we enclosed the virtual extent of Bharat, that is India, metaphorically uniting the whole country.

Deep in the south we knew nothing as children of what went on at the borders. The vast population migration, and the towns and villages being cleansed of the people who had been living there for centuries was unimagined, unknown. Being children we were insulated from the savage surgical pain by which two countries came into being, cast adrift by a feckless colonial power.

Of all that I came to know only later when we transited to Calcutta in the summer of 1948 and witnessed the tail-end of the bloody riots in that city. The internecine killings were only doused when the army came out in flag marches with infantry and armoured cars. Periodically there would be an eruption, but never again on a thousandth of the scale that happened at Partition.

Much literature has been contributed by those who experienced the birth pangs of India (and Pakistan) — from Pakistani writers like Manto and Indian writers like Khushwant Singh. Later, others who grew up with no consciousness of Independence have brilliantly imagined aspects of it: Salman Rushdie, for example.

In South India there was joy and a blissful distance from the tragedy up North and in the East. Independence was only good news for the millions south of the Vindhyas. There was a rebellion by the razakars in Hyderabad (Deccan) attempting to make the province accede to Pakistan. It was quickly put down by a ‘police action.’ But we heard nothing of the massacres, and I do not recall any shadow cast on Independence Day by the hatred and pogroms that convulsed the Punjab and Bengal. Later in my youth I learned Partition caused the largest migration known to humans in recent times, perhaps ever.

But even in the South we experienced loss, the terrible loss which came so soon after freedom, when Gandhi was assassinated. At this distance of sixty-nine years in time I can see Uncle Louis sitting forlorn, head bowed, hand over forehead, in the living room of our Mowbrays Road house. All India Radio was announcing the death of Bapu, as he was called. From Nehru’s lips, in words more moving even than his Tryst with Destiny speech, issued the words: “The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere.”

The difficult days of Independence lay ahead.

Vladimir Nabokov – Pnin, July 7, 2017

Pnin - first edition cover, 1957

Pnin is the novel that most nearly reflects the life experiences of Nabokov: as an émigré from Russia living in Europe, an immigrant to America, and a professor at an upstate New York college. Pnin and Nabokov are both possessed by an intense nostalgia for the Russia and St Petersburg of their youth, and a revulsion for the totalitarian regime that followed.

Vladimir Nabokov, lepidopterist

The novel also allows Nabokov room to indulge some of his pet peeves, such as psychiatry (Pnin‘s first wife is a psychiatrist). He lampoons the ridiculous investigations that go by the name of research in academia. This novel belongs to the campus genre, but its unique feature is the character of Pnin. The reader will sympathise; Pnin is not a fool but a victim, partly of his own eccentricities and obsessions, and partly of the strange land in which nothing comports with prior expectation.

Thommo & Pamela

There is a rich vein of humour, accompanied by a quiet sadness, and relieved by an optimism nowhere revealed as well as when Pnin meets Victor, the son of his ex-wife. Pnin delicately welcomes him with a football. Without any obligation he is going to take care of Victor's pocket money at the expensive prep school.

Hemjith & KumKum

This novel which Nabokov wrote as a sequence of stories for the New Yorker magazine, beginning in 1953, became a successful English novel when published by Doubleday in 1957. He was writing Lolita during this time, and when that novel came out, Nabokov could give up his teaching at Cornell (aka Waindell) and retire to the Montreux Palace Hotel in Geneva to devote himself to writing, lepidoptery, and composing chess problems, for the rest of his life.

Hemjith & Shoba

 There are many memorable quotes:

Some people – and I am one of them – hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam.

There is an old American saying ‘He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.’

Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?

No jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rosy lips.

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.

Joe, Pamela, Priya, Thommo, Hemjith (seated) Sunil, KumKum, Shoba, Zakia

Romantic Poets Session – Jun 15, 2017

It was a record attendance – all but one of our readers attended and we had a lovely guest, retired professor of English from St. Teresa's College, Betty Kuriyan.

Shoba, Betty, KumKum

We all enjoyed the occasion, which was celebrated with sandwiches and cakes with tea and coffee. Our special thanks go to KumKum who proposed the happy idea of a session of poetry devoted to the English Romantic poets. She then followed up with the readers to ensure attendance. Kudos to her; and to Priya for arranging the splendid refreshments.

Saras (back) Hemjith, Kavita, Shoba, Betty, Joe, KumKum, Zakia

Although Thommo and Ankush were recovering from medical issues, both participated with abandon.

Saras, Hemjith

In our family I am allowed to decide whether Keats or Shelley is the greater poet, but there is no evidence from this session for a conclusion either way. Other contenders among the Romantics seem equally eligible. What a marvellous group of poets to have arrived in one place within a generation and elevated poetry to Himalayan heights!

Priya, Saras, Hemjith, Kavita

This time Sunil was missing; his absence has a generally downhill influence on the gathering for lack of wisecracks and laughter. As we are reading a humorous novella next time (Pnin) his attendance is a must if we are to derive the full experience.

Betty, KumKum, Zakia

Zakia, who came but did not read, is missing from the group picture below.

Ankush, Saras, Thommo, Priya, KumKum, Shoba, Pamela, Betty Kavita, Preeti, Hemjith (seated)