Pune launch of G A Kulkarni's book

Urban Voice New Issue Soon

Dear Friends
Urban Voice, the literary journal we had started a few years ago, for reasons many, only came out with just three episodes.
Now, we plan to convert Urban Voice, an imprint of Leadstart Publishing Pvt Ltd, Bombay, into a quarterly exercise, to involve and feature good writings from India and elsewhere.
In our next issue, which should come out next month, we plan to focus on this theme: ‘India: What Makes Us Strong (or Weak) in This Millennium’. It would contain essays, each about 2,000 words, from distinguished and talented writers from different walks of life, on subjects as varied as Polity, Business, Sport, Literature, the Arts and Lifestyle.
In this regard we take the liberty of seeking an essay from you, on a subject you are familiar with and accustomed to. It should ideally be a new piece of writing by you, but we are also open to accept an article that might have appeared earlier, but updated or/and tailor-made for this volume. We leave it to you to take any stand and employ any style or substance.
I hope you do not disappoint us and if you have any more queries related to the same, please do feel free to write back. The deadline: asap.
Waiting for your reply.
Best
Sunil K Poolani
Executive Director, Publisher and Managing Editor
Leadstart Publishing Pvt Ltd
Mumbai
sunil.poolani@leadstartcorp.com / poolani@gmail.com
Phone: +91-9820478950

Consulting Editors of Urban Voice

Gouri Chatterjee
Has worked in many national English newspapers as a very well-respected editor and columnist. She was a senior editor with The Telegraph and DNA and is a reputed media columnist.

Ramachandra Guha
Was recently named as one of the 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. His latest book is India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy.

Taslima Nasrin
Is the controversial author of Shame. In her poems, novels, and newspaper columns she has advocated equal rights for women and attacked male chauvinism in a country dominated by conservative Islam.

Padma Prakash
A long-time editor with The Economic and Political Weekly, she is a well-known writer on economic and social issues. Presently she edits he online multidisciplinary social-science portal, eSocialSciences.com.


Sudeep Sen
Is an acclaimed poet living in London and Delhi. He is the editor of Atlas, and is on the editorial boards of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Six Seasons Review; and an associate of The Paris Review.


Shashi Tharoor
A former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, and an author of nine award-winning books, he is the chairman of Dubai-based Afras Ventures. He was termed as ‘Global Leader of Tomorrow’ by the World Economic Forum.

A J Thomas
Is a translator and writes poetry in English and Malayalam. Presently the editor of Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature, he is the winner of Crossword Book Awards, Katha Award and the AKMG Prize.


Abraham Verghese
His celebrated non-fiction works are My Own Country and The Tennis Partner, a bestseller all over the world. His first novel is Cutting for Stone and is board-certified in internal medicine and in pulmonary and infectious diseases.

Urban Voice 4: Kerala

Dear Friends
Hope this mail finds you in the pink of health and wealth.
As you would know, Frog Books (www.frogbooks.net) has been publishing a literary magazine, Urban Voice since last year and so far three issues have come out. The last one was on Bombay: New Writing. It has, as you could see if you do a Google search, got tremendous response from discerning readers and critics.
Our next issue is on Kerala: New Writing. I would like you to contribute any one of the following for the issue, which will capture the essence and spirit of the State:
1) Essays
2) Short Stories
3) Poetry
4) Play
5) Travelogue
6) Art
The contributions can be either in original English or in translation; and I leave that to you.
Hope we could get a favourable response from you soon.
The deadline is 15 December.
Please send your contributions to poolani@gmail.com
Best
Sunil K Poolani

In the City of Dreams

THAT there is a multitude of writings available on and about Mumbai, more now than ever before, is not surprising. The city forms an opinion in your mind before you can even breathe in the humid air wrapped deeply around its fish. So much so that sometimes even the most obvious bring out musings and yearnings that we hope sound different. These voices are many as Urban Voices 3 showcases earnestly.
Unfortunately, not much is fresh or newly baked. Most voices sound world-weary and worn not just with Mumbai but sometimes even with life. Is that the irony of Mumbai or the choice of writings, you decide.
But what makes this volume worth riffling through is a heart-felt attempt at bringing different genres of writings on Mumbai under a single pointed roof. An interesting selection of writers, film-makers, journalists and poets takes you through a city that is beloved to them.
Here poems mingle with ponderings and short stories meander through the narrow, clustered by-lanes of Mumbai bumping into dialogues, at turns.
The city, one of extreme contrasts, flutters between subjects as varied as Muses Over Manholes (by Murzban F. Shroff) related through the eyes of a despondent and repeatedly rejected writer standing on the rain-drenched streets and the very metropolitan Prickly Solution (by Dilip Raote) set in a typical Mumbai high-rise home. While these two writings are in no way definitive of the collection, they give an indication of the width and depth of a city constantly at play.
What is missing perhaps is a affectionate perspective, an inkling of which is offered in Vimla Patil’s Magical Memories, a warm piece that delves into a nostalgic, gentler past of this frenetic City (by Abha Iyenger) ... "enchantress, seductress, nibbler of souls, monstrous maw, et al".
However, more often than not, the selection reiterates the clich`E9s that Mumbai has come to stand though the structure and layout of this magazine-style volume is a special endeavour to break stereotypes. When viewed within this framework, the two interviews included come as a pleasant surprise and addition. Unluckily, the first one with Time Out magazine’s editor Naresh Fernandes toes a predictable unruffled line of questioning while the other with poet Sudeep Sen is too indulgent to provoke energetic debate.
Nevertheless, Urban Voices 3 is worth a look. It may not be in the same class as the must-reads on the city like Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (Suketu Mehta) or the heady-paced Shantaram (Gregory David Roberts) but it introduces something new and invigorating towards growing writings on Mumbai, much like the city herself.
-- Gayatri Rajwade / The Tribune

A Small Review

Urban Voice 3: Bombay (Frog Books, 2008, pp 185, Rs 195) Capturing the radical transformation that is occurring in the Indian literary scene, this book has provided a platform for thinkers to express themselves.
-- Deccan Herald

Mumbai, Cutting it Fine

The third volume of writings on Mumbai has pen portraits of a city that Bollywood has already told us enough about. It offers variety, but not much style, writes Shana Maria Verghis

Bombay: New Writing Volume 3
Author: Frog Books
Price: Rs 195

Roselyn D' Mello's poem 'Absolution' presents a familiar image of Mumbai to an outsider like oneself. It refers to "the enchanting sight of the sordid landscape rolling / through the barred windows of a local train;" And "....cigarettes all dangling on display in sync. ..with the / wavering sounds of a flute being played by a man with / black, painted nails at Colaba Causeway.' Then it gets more tactile, with: "the perennial confected aroma of freshly baked apple / pie (with cinnamon and raisins) at the blue-coloured Yazdan bakery; /...frankies at Linking Road, tickling sheikh pao at Premier/road Naka...pao bhaji at Khao Galli/ragda pattice at Elcos..."
'Absolution' has been included in a collection, Urban Voice 3: Bombay, New Writing (Frog Books), which picks up various strands of the city by 31 writers, journalists, poets and film makers who seem to know it well.
D' Mello we are told in the acknowledgement, is 22 years and lives in Delhi. But the first piece in the book is by Monideepa Sahu. Her short story 'Going Home in the Rain' reminds us about Ruchi Narain's short in the yet-to-be-released portmanteau film, Mumbai Cutting. Here you have a newcomer to the city and an autodriver who turns out to be less sinister than her imagination.
Rajender Menen's 'Loving and Deliverance in Kamathipura', seemed, to our jaded reading, like another of those "brave prostitute life stories." Ramendra Kumar's 'Mumbai 2020', is the only bit of comic relief in this set. He writes of Aamchi Mumbai in 2020 and thinly veiled references to 'Raja of Maratharashtra', Raj Thokoray watching an India Cup Twenty-Twenty final between Marathas and Ulta Pradesh.
By this time, the writer says, India has been spliced into 28 nations with a separatist movement by doodhwalas in Jharkand demanding new states called Doodhkhand, Dahikand and Shreekahand. There's a language problem all over. 'Rajnikaat' has been pushed out by Chennai for being Marathi. Marathis disown him for working in Bangaluru and Tamil Nadu. 'Amitabhi Bachha', now 77 is making it big in Bhojpuri movies. But back in Mumbai a Marathi version of Sholay is burnt for hurting Sena sensibilities with a line: 'Tera Kya Hoga, Sambha', which apparently insults 'Sambhaji -- the Bhau of the nation.'
Atin Dasgupta makes a point with 'Rupees 42 Profit,' where an "upright citizen" yammers on about beggars then helps himself to loose change from an elderly beggar woman's bowl.
Derek Bose's 'Stones in My Mouth' is about exorbitant fees at Nanavati hospital versus proper healing at a cheaper place, with surgery bills costing one-fourth the price.
Some pieces like Joy C Raphael's 'Local Guardian' and Anjali Purohit's 'The Subway' and 'Bombayana' by Freny Manecksha are observations about people in stations, on the street.
Murzban F Shroff's 'Muses over Manholes' reads like one of those godawfully self-indulgent I-am-a-writer-let-me-bore-you-with-my-writer-travails-and-leave-you-with-nothing-else-to-take-back meanderings. While Sunil K Poolani's 'Missing that Nagging Feeling' is written in the voice of a recently divorced man who sounds like he enjoys being a pain in his wife's arse.

There are two interviews. With poet Sudeep Sen and Time Out Mumbai's Naresh Fernandes. The latter unfortunately does not give you anything new about the city. And the former is so flowery it could have done with massive editing.
Dilip Raote makes no bones about being influenced by Roald Dahl's stories about precocious children giving it back to annoying adults in 'A Prickly Solution'. His protagonist, a little girl Geetika, who puts a hole with her compass into her dad's condom, leading to her mom's unwanted pregnancy seems motivated only by boredom. Vimla Patil editor of Femina for nearly 25 years reminisces about local herbs in 'Magical Memories'. Abhinav Maurya pays tribute to 'The Oldest Bombay Bitch', the Bombay Rail. Riya Terri's 'The Day I Found The Real Me' should not have left the writer's personal.diary.
As portraits of the city, most do their job. In terms of stylistic storytelling, however the writings are a bit passé and some are guilty of being very lazily written. Several should have been trashed.
-- The Sunday Pioneer

Amchi Mumbai 2020

By Ramendra Kumar

Circa 2020. Place: Amchi Mumbai. All eyes were glued on to the telly. The Twenty-Twenty India Cup final was in progress. The two nations in the fray were reigning champions Maratharashtra and the challengers Ulta Pradesh.

The Raja of Maratharashtra, Raj Thokoray, was watching the match in Marathi while Kaya Palti the Maharani of Ulta Pradesh was witnessing the action in Bhojpuri. The game was being played in a neutral country — Dravid Nadu. (Nothing to do with Rahul Dravid who had retired long back and was now coaching Bangaluru boys in Kannada for the next India Cup.)

Dear reader, by now you have guessed that India had become a continent of 28 nations — each nation with its own language, culture, flag and currency. An idea of a common currency called indigo on the lines of the euro had been floated but had been vehemently opposed by Thokoray and Kayapalti. They did not want to have anything to do with each other. Even the cricket match was more like a war.

The splitting trend was threatening to spread like a virus. In Jharkhand, the doodhwalas were agitating for three separate nations — Doodhkhand, Dahikhand and Shreekhand.

The link language of continent India was English and even that was creating a problem. The English spoken by the Malayalis was not understood by the Biharis. The Haryana version of English did not make any sense to the people of Goa. As a result interpreters had to be hired and the sales of ‘Learn Tamil, Punjabi, Etc in 30 Days’ skyrocketed.

This creation of independent states had had other interesting fallouts. Poor Rajnikaat’s plight had become horrible. He had nowhere to go. The Dravidians from Chennai were refusing to accept him since he was a Maratha. The Marathas had rejected him because he had worked in Bangaluru and Chennai. The Kannadigas did not want to touch him since he was a Maratha by birth and Dravidian by growth!

Shacrook Khan had been banished from Amchi Mumbai and had been forced to make Dilli his home. When last heard of he was making a film in which the hero coaches the female kabaddi team to victory in the World Cup in Mongolia. The title of the film — Chak Di Dilli.

For some individuals, however, the fragmentation of India had proved a blessing.

Amitabhi Bachha had shifted from Amchi Mumbai to Ulta Pradesh and was now the biggest draw of Bhojpuri films. At the age of 77 he was acting in 77 films a year and advertising for every product ranging from tambakhu to churan and dhoti to lota. His latest hit Kabhi Bhaujai, Kabhi Lugai had been nominated as UP’s entry for the Oscars in the foreign films category.

With all the top stars fleeing Amchi Mumbai, Ritesh Pradeshmukh was now hero number one. His film Mazha Sapna, Rokda, Rokda had celebrated golden jubilee in all towns of Maratharashtra — from Pandurna to Pusla.

The Save Tiger campaign launched by NDTV in 2008 hadn’t created much impact on the survival of the four-legged mammal, but it had sure resurrected the two-legged homo sapien Balls Ihave Thokoray. Though his growl had become more a purr he was still crawling along at 95. His tirade against anything north Indians had led to some strange results.

Doodh was now a four-letter word in Marathi and even kids were denied their quota. When they cried for milk they were given Shreekhand diluted in water.

All the taxis on the roads were replaced by Victorias. To popularise the use of Victorias the Amchi Mumbai Mayor had offered tax exemption to Marathi producers who depicted a Victoria chase instead of a car chase in the climax scene of their film.

The history taught in Amchi Mumbai schools had undergone a radical makeover. The Father of the Nation was Chhatrapti Shivaji, Grandmother Maa Jeejabai and Bhau of the nation Sambhaji. A theatre screening the ‘dubbed in Marathi version’ of Sholay had been burnt since the one-line retained in Hindi had raised the hackles of the leaders of Shav Sena: “Tera kya hoga, Sambha.”

“It is an insult to Sambhaji — the Bhau of the nation,” the leaders had screamed.

With the Gujaratis, Sindhis and Marwaris having left Amchi Mumbai, it had lost its financial muscle. The stock market had crashed so many times that Dalal Street had been renamed Halal Street. Mumbaiwallahs were now looking up to the Dabbawallahs and other such success stories for inspiration.

The disappearance of Madrasis and Telugus was creating a very peculiar problem. With idli and sambhar no longer available, the Mumbaikars were on a strict diet of pau bhaji and usal pau and bloating up by the day. The buses and trains of Mumbai could now accommodate only half the number of commuters which was adding to the chaos on the streets.

But Balls Ihave Thokoray was happy. He had patched up with his nephew Raj.

He had decided on his succession in a very democratic manner. He had held a Sledgefest contest on the theme ‘Uttar ko gaali’ in Amchi Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium. The judges had been Symmonds and Hayden from Neecha-Gira Pradesh.

Well, Raj had beaten his cousin and senior Thokoray’s son Oodhav hands down. Raj’s colourful verbal and obscene body language had made even the honoured guests blush.

So Balls Ihave Thokoray had anointed Oodhav Mayor of Aamchi Mumbai, Raj, Raja and himself, Maharaja of Maratharashtra.

Nevertheless, the state of bliss which senior Thokoray found himself in did not last long. Raj started a vicious campaign against Oodhav and the other Marathas with moochh. Soon Shav Sena split up into Shav Sena Moochh or SS(M) and Shav Sena Moochh-less or SS(M-L). The SS(M) comrades started beating up SS(M-L) workers. Terrified, the SS(M-L) workers went on a mooch-shaving spree. As a result the barbers began doing a brisk business. An enterprising nai called Sharad Barber launched a Barbers’ Consortium for Cutting in India (BCCI). The BCCI launched an IPO, which was oversubscribed, and this made the barbers the richest community in Amchi Mumbai. They formed a party called Barbers’ Jagran Party or the BJP.

Statehood was declared for Mumbai and when the elections were held the result was a hung affair — with the three major parties needing 13 seats to form the government. And since none of the party chiefs was ‘well-hung’ they ended up wooing the minorities — that is the Taxi Drivers and Doodhwallahs who had managed to somehow survive in Amchi Mumbai. They had formed a Taxi and Doodh Association, or TADA, which won the crucial 13 seats. After a lot of donkey trading and auctioning the result was finally out. Aamchi Mumbai had finally a stable government: Oodhav and Raj were the deputy chief ministers and Sharad Barber the Governor. Now, I bet you can never guess the name of the chief minister? He was none other than the leader of TADA — bade bhaiyya’s chhote bhaiyya: Bhramar Singh.

Amchi Mumbai’s cosmopolitan fabric was finally restored with sattu and shreekhand coexisting in the same thali.

Mumbai Mélange

Shinie Antony

Saturday, August 09, 2008 23:02 IST
DNA

Urban Voice 3 Bombay: New Writing
Frog Books
182 pages
Rs195

There is a clamouring din out there, many voices are shrilling, the blind groping the elephant are confusing it with its tail or trunk. City-specific perspectives can make an interesting collage as never-before angles loom to the fore, dark corners are lit and one is forced to pursue visions otherwise disturbing or baffling.

A cross between a magazine and book, Urban Voice 3 zips through the much-maligned, much-adored city, well, maligning and adoring. Monideepa Sahu’s ‘Going Home In The Rain’ rides an auto through the menacing monsoons, from a crowded railway platform to a plate of hot samosas with mint chutney. “It was good to be home,” she tells us.

And Mumbai is home to millions from all over the world. They have adapted to its potholes and rains and crowds and the last local and a description of any of these may not evoke the right level of awe. These are a given, an almost endearing trait of an adopted or natural terrain. To have, however articulately forwarded, view after view dwell on karma, train travails and the overflowing drains can feel a bit repetitive despite the undeniable fact that they are true. Mumbai as a concept can stand deconstruction, but may barely be able to brave the clichés coming its way.

Thankfully, there are multiple inflections here; from the familiar landmarks like the Gateway of India to the subtle nuances of a newly-christened cowardice, the searchlight sways in its focus. Rajender Menen’s ‘Love And Deliverance In Kamathipura’ ducks into an alley where Tara twinkles among the debauched, destroyed lives around her. Jane Bhandari stirs this Mumbai mélange when she says in ‘Meri Jaan’: “Mumbai is Bombay/Sounds fatter to me”.

Perhaps it is the format — of mixing stories with essays and even an interview where we are twice informed of Sudeep Sen’s website and his poetry collection is alternately called ‘Postmaked India’ and ‘Postmarked India’ — that disorients. When Urban Voice “aims to capture the thrilling transformation (in India’s literary scene) by creating a platform for thinkers to capture ‘next-in-line’ trends and go beyond”, expectations prise open this big ugly maw.

The reviewer is a novelist.

Two Mixed Reviews

Hi Folks
This week saw two reviews of the recently-launched Urban Voice 3. Nothing much to talk home about, but I thought I will share them with you, patrons, as criticism is what makes one grow, not just bouquets.
So here they go:

Bombay book
This fortnight's addition to our shelves.
Frog Books' Urban Voice 3 features new writing from Mumbai. The opening piece, by Monideepa Sahu, is about an auto ride and there are pieces about riding the train, buying a train ticket and about the pedestrian subway outside Churchgate railway station. The series' editor Sunil K Poolani says it aims to be a "platform for thinkers to capture 'next-in-line' trends and go beyond."
(Frog Books; Rs 195)
-- Time Out Mumbai, 25 July 2008

Urban voice 3: Bombay (Frog, Rs 195) brings together “writings from and on Bombay”. There are short stories, poems and even the odd interview, but they have nothing new to offer, save clichéd themes depicting this bustling metropolis. Thus, we encounter (again!) tales about Bombay’s resilience after the bomb blasts, the warmth of its people, Bollywood, and so on. Vimla Patil’s “Magical memories”, surprisingly, touches a chord, with its earnest longing for a world made of tile-roofed houses, old temples and curative herbs that is now lost forever.
-- The Telegraph, 25 July 2008

Urban Voice 3: Bombay is out

Dear Friends, City Cousins and Romans,
Urban Voice is finally out (am I hearing the applause!?). As you of course now the focus is on Bombay one of the most vivacious cities of the world. Writings on and from Bombay.
The contributors include: Ranjona Banerji, Jane Bhandari, Derek Bose, Pratik Chowdhury, Atin Dasgupta, Rosalyn D’mello, Fiona Fernandez, Reshma Ghosh, Aijaz Gul, Dan Husain, Abha Iyengar, Radhika Iyengar, Lajwanti S Khemlani, Ramendra Kumar, Freny Manecksha, Abhinav Maurya, Rajendar Menen, Vimla Patil, Sunil K Poolani, Anjali Purohit, Joy C Raphael, Dilip Raote, Monideepa Sahu, Murzban F Shroff, Riah Terri and Salil Tripathi.
And there are interviews with Sudeep Sen and Naresh Fernandes.
So, folks, need your support to make this issue, and the coming ones too, a success.
Will keep you posted.
Best
Sunil K Poolani (poolani@gmail.com)

Urban Voice Cover

Dear Romans, friends, and country cousins, Urban Voice is coming out soon.
Sample the cover. Best

BI-POLAR BRILLIANCE

The Bengali, The Indian, The Internationalist

The SUDEEP SEN Interview

Critical Introduction by Shormishtha Panja, Professor & Head of English Department, University of Delhi.

Interview, Head Notes by Ziaul Karim, executive editor, Jamini, an international arts magazine.

Sudeep Sen talks about architecture, topography, music, body politics, invention, fusion and balance in his art & poetry.

˜

Sudeep Sen [www.sudeepsen.net] was born in New Delhi, India and studied literature there and in the US. As an Inlaks scholar he completed his MS in Journalism from Columbia University. He grew up in an atmosphere of cultural sophistication. His first poetry collection, Leaning Against the Lamppost (1983) expressed formal competence with end rhymes, half rhymes and stanza variations, including emblematic poems like "The Tin Can." In his next volume, The Lunar Visitations (1990), the evidence of Eliot is marked in the eye for detail and the careful detailing of the urban landscape. The moon recurs in the poems as a romantic image and, more darkly, as a reminder of madness. The locale of the poems ranges from Hiroshima to Mathura. The volume is carefully structured: the man, the woman and the child, the seer, the poet and the beggar act as uniting principles as does the movement from day to night, from season to season. This collection is followed by Kali in Ottava Rima (1992) which as its title suggests brings together the east and the west and also departs from the accepted norms for Indian English poetry. It is more ambitious than the earlier volumes, less romantic and somewhat more political. The Hindu deities, Kali and Shiva, are celebrated through occidental rhyme schemes and verse forms like ottava rima and the villanelle and unorthodox images like "God's wig." The structure of the Sanskrit sloka with its long lines and delicate rhyme scheme, suggestive of the chant, is used in "Durga Puja" but the images are resolutely grim and secular: Durga "wades her way upstream / miraculously through the ... debris, dirt, sewage and homage." "Night with Lakshmi" is an understated love poem while "Mid-Term Polls, Yet Again" expresses the poet's sense of weary deja-vu with regard to India's unscrupulous politicians. The eponymous poem in New York Times (1993) rhymes ‘abxba … cdxdc …’ (which is Sen’s very own invention), the five lines saluting the five boroughs of the city, and captures through rhyme, assonance, alliteration and run-on lines, particularly at the end of stanzas, the unrelenting pace of a New York City day:

Every morning in relentless hurry, I scurry

through the streets of New York, turn around the avenue, flee

past the red and white awning of the Jewish deli,

walk out with a bagel or croissant or spilled coffee,

disappearing underground in a flurry,

speeding in a subway of mute faces…

The city returns in "Night in Times Square" ("Late nighters like me, amblers, whores, / all gesture in silence, /…understanding / each other with an everyday skill") and at the end of "Third Week of August" where memories of the past year appear as a "long / song, sung in inseparable couplets." South African Woodcut (1994) written as Sen toured the country just before the historic elections that ended apartheid is disappointing in its political understatement. The people "tongue-tied, colour-coded, land-locked" ("Independent Homeland") are praised for their "muted, saintly serenity" ("South African Woodcut") ¾ surely a misreading of black struggle and resistance. Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames (1994) is accompanied by Peter Standen's illustrations. This poem-sequence is spare and crisp and follow the story of a couple in Pompeii from living lovers to "glass-encased" corpses in a museum. The refrain of these poems runs "Death has an invisible presence / in the Vesuvian valley, even the corpses / bear an insidious resemblance…." Dali's Twisted Hands (1995) is one of Sen's longest volumes of poetry. Along with the accounts of travelling around the world, Edinburgh, Neemrana, Delhi, Calcutta, Vrindavan, Orissa, and remembering fellow poets and artists like Jayanta Mahapatra and Louis I. Kahn, runs the abiding concern for the rival claims to reality of art and life. The man who buys a ticket to a Hindi film describes it as "ek dum dream-like" "nothing like his own life" adds Sen, sotto voce and yet it swamps his waking hours in the factory. In "Dali's Twisted Hands" he asks himself if his past "was merely part of a myth, a myth / to which the present's locked door and unlocked time / testifies." This is a demystification of the whole process of mythmaking which he had believed in in the earlier The Lunar Visitations: "A large myth was looming all around" ("The Lovers and the Moon"). "Line Breaks" turns everyday conversation into poetry: "My lover / likes it [milk] creamy, / I like it smooth, / the sheep like it plain, / and the rest, I doubt / they like it at all." The romantic in Sen appears in the misleadingly titled "The Garland of Stars" where the urges of love and friendship with a male, married friend are seen to overlap ("we / would still be woven thick in her tangail's weave, never to sever"). Postmarked India (1997) is in many ways the culmination of the first stage of Sen's poetic developments. Old themes and techniques recur: the question of location, of home ("I am going home once again from another / home" ("Flying Home"), the uses of nostalgia ("Old Room"), romantic love expressed through everyday images reminiscent of the French Impressionists ("After Sunday Breakfast"), the meeting of east and west (the rhythm of the Indian classical dance form is used in "Bharatanatyam Dancer," the second line indented to echo the tabla's beat, and the end-rhymes mapping the dance-steps). However, the expression is effortless and unself-consciousness: this is a poet sure of his voice. In the last six years Sen has translated, edited volumes of poetry and published a number of chapbooks (Bodytext: Dramatic Monologues in Motion [1999], Retracing American Contours [1999], Lines of Desire, [2000]) containing a mix of old poetry and prose and new. The chapbook, In Another Tongue (2000), is a collection of translations of Bengali, Hindi, Hebrew, Macedonian and Persian poetry. The haunting translation of Jibanananda Das's "Banalata Sen" is noteworthy: "Birds return home, so do rivers; as life's trade ¾ its give and take ¾ cease. / Only the dark stays. And just as it remains, so does sitting by my side, / face to face, my own Banalata Sen." Lines of Desire (2000) is a sequence of erotic poems in which he eschews his tone of a Bengali bhodralok (middle-class, respectable and decorous) to travel from what he calls in an interview, the inside to the outside: capture the raw emotion in all its intensity: "the silk of your shirt ¾ now transparent in heat ¾ / painting the outer circle of your nipples / to a hardened edge, tasting the sweet / skin" ("Indian Dessert"); "a languorous kiss / the faintest smell of ocean / salt-lipped breeze, pleading" (the haiku, "Kiss"). Postcards from Bangladesh (2002) is a collaborative work with the photographer Tanvir and the designer Kelley Lynch. This collection celebrates the weaves ("Tangail, Jamdani, Benaroshi, Taat"), rains ("Monsoon has arrived ¾ persistent in intent, green in jealousy"), rivers ("As the oar hits the water ¾ / it sounds like laughter"), bricks and mortar (Shilaidaha Kuthibari, Armenian Church, Lalbagh Fort), diet ("I use my finger-tips / to pry open, / feel, and sense / the hidden taste / of fish") and people (Jacquard Master Babul the weaver, Shafula Begum the feminist activist) of Bangladesh. It has the lush and sophisticated look of a coffee table book but is much more than that, including poems, lyric prose, prose poems, interviews, travel writing and information. Like Monsoon (2002), prose poems accompanied by breathtaking black and white photographs by Mahmud, this volume expresses Sen's sense of a poem being an artefact, a visual as well as an oral delectation. Monsoon came out as Rain in 2005, this time Sudeep’s text being accompanied by art by India’s top twenty artists on the same theme. The most recent book is Distracted Geographies: An Archipelago of Intent (2003) an ambitious book-length poem about the politics of body and text, the twelve sections corresponding to the twelve bones in the ribcage. The twenty-six poems, composed in sparse, short couplets, flexibly move and come together to form a whole like the twenty-six bones in the vertebrae ("I stand, / wanting /…the dream, / the wet, the salt, / the ink, the rain, / and, / the underside / of her skin." "The hair’s / fine / invisible / venom" "Bone and / bone / meet…Carpal / architecture / change their / spine matrix"). Occasionally Sen can appear sentimental; however the times when he successfully adopts the emotionally spare and verbally sparse voice ¾ and this is very often ¾ his work sounds delicate yet full, intense yet mature. Also published in 2003 is a multi-media CD/book ¾ Prayer Flag ¾ that includes a selection of his poems, his photographs, and his reading which is described by a critic as “a wonderful oral rendition of poetry by the poet in a baritone that is full of reverberating gravitas, depth, and richness ¾ and all that subtly layered with professionally choreographed sound effects and music”. His productivity, so rare among Indian English poets, is one of his greatest assets: it enables him to continually hone his skills and experiment with style and language. He is one of the main exponents of the new, global voice in Indian English poetry, admitting to influences as varied as Jibanananda Das, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Milton, Baudelaire, John Donne, Rainer Maria Rilke, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

— Shormishtha Panja in The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Post-Colonial Literatures [London/New York]

˜

Sudeep Sen’s [www.sudeepsen.net] Spanish edition of Rain (translated by M Dolores Herrero under the title, Lluvia) recently appeared from University of Zaragoza in Spain. Inspired by this book, a concert length score has been composed by Javier Coble Quartet in Spain, and the resultant CD is forthcoming soon. His new book-length poem, Distracted Geographies: An Archipelago of Intent and Prayer Flag: Poems & Photography, came out in America (from Wings Press) to immense critical acclaim. The British editions (from Peepal Tree) were nominated for the Poetry Book Society Choice earlier, and the Indian editions have appeared from Indialog and Mapin respectively. He is currently working on his Collected Poems & Translations 1978-2008, and editing a landmark anthology of English Indian Poetry, Midnight’s Grandchildren 1947-2007.

Sen was awarded the prestigious ‘Pleiades’ honour at the world’s oldest poetry festival in Struga, Macedonia in September 2004. As the Pleiades title suggests, seven internationally “famous poets” who have made “significant contribution to modern world poetry” were chosen to receive this prestigious honour — the other six on the year’s list included the Nobel prize nominated Chinese poet Bei Dao, Herder European Award winning Romanian poet Ana Blandiana, the Irish poet John F Deane who has won innumerable international prizes, Arturo Korkuera from Peru, Al Janabi from Iraq, and Philip Johns from Belgium.

Sen is the author of over thirty titles, including Postmaked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins) which won the Hawthornden Fellowship (UK) and nominated for the Pushcart Prize (USA). His writings have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Guardian, Independent, Financial Times, Evening Standard, Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday, Herald, London Magazine, Poetry Review, Literary Review, Harvard Review, Prague Literary Review, Times of India, Hindu, Statesman, Observer, Gentleman, Biblio, Little Magazine, Indian Review of Books, Outlook, and India Today. His poetry appears in important international anthologies published by Penguin, HarperCollins, Bloomsbury, Routledge, Norton, Knopf, Everyman, Macmillan, and Granta. As an invited author representing his country, he has read his work worldwide, and has been translated into several languages including Arabic, Bengali, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Macedonian, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

Sen’s poetry is highly rated amongst the contemporary international poets, writers and critics. The Russain Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky was an early critic and admirer of his work, as were Yehuda Amichai, Donald Hall, William Matthews, the senior Indian poets Dom Moraes, A K Ramanujan, Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra, Adil Jussawalla and Agha Shahid Ali. Peter Porter, Les Murray, David Lehman, Tomaz Salamun, Charles Bernstein, Naomi Shihab Nye, Daniel Weissbort, John Hartley Williams, Alan Ross, Ruth Padel, Kwame Dawes, Amir Or and a host of contemporary poets have lauded his work.

John Berger, one of contemporary world’s leading thinker and writer, the Booker Prize winner and author of The Ways of Seeing (Penguin/BBC) wrote, “Sudeep Sen’s poems are a present which bring — like all true poetry — so much companionship”. Amit Chaudhuri in The Statesman’s ‘Best Book of the Year’ wrote, “I read Rain with considerable admiration and pleasure. It is a word-perfect collection and its subject matter is both the measure of the rain and the spoken line”.

“Sen has emerged as a leading poet of the English language — has a painter’s eye when depicting a scene — commands superb skill,” wrote Khushwant Singh in Sunday Observer. “A highly sophisticated poet” [Kaifi Azmi, Selected Poems (Viking Penguin)]; “A wonderful poet” [Yehuda Amichai, Selected Poems (Faber)]; “A gifted poet”.[Dom Moraes in Sunday Midday] — are oft-quoted citations. John Thieme in the scholarly and exclusive Cambridge Guide to Literature in English wrote, “Sen is an eclectic poet whose understated work eschews fashionable trends, while exhibiting considerable technical virtuosity and versatility.” Gregor Robertson on BBC Radio hailed Sen as being “among the finest younger English-language poets in the international literary scene. A distinct voice: carefully modulated and skilled, well measured and crafted”. The English novelist and film critic of The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw calls him “a rich, fluent, cosmopolitan voice” in a review in the London Evening Standard. “Sen [has] extended the range of Indian verse in English to encompass a variety of alternative views of language, history and culture,” states an entry in the prestigious Penguin Pears Cyclopaedia.

Sudeep Sen has been an international poet-in-residence at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, and a visiting scholar at Harvard University. He is the editorial director of Aark Arts; is on the editorial boards of Atlas, Orient Express, New Quest, and Six Seasons Review; and is an associate of The Paris Review.

“Art in its purest form never reveals all”, writes Sudeep Sen, as evident in the unfathomable depth and beauty of a ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’. This inspired line from his poem serves as a fascinating commentary on his poetry.

Sen essentially loves to express himself in a clear, crisp, logical fashion, while building his ideas line-by-line, and stanza-by-stanza. The belief that ambiguity is at the core of poetic beauty is not true for Sudeep Sen. His poetic beauty works at a very different level.

However he may conceive a poem, the final result is always a well-knit fabric. If you try unravelling the threads of the fabric itself, it will gently reveal subtle layers, which otherwise go unnoticed to an everyday eye. It is worth comparing his poems to a treasure-chest — one that appears simple, concrete, and well-constructed but upon opening, it starts to “slow-release” its many secrets, splendours, and gifts. The voice in his poems is soft, gentle, though persuasive — one which murmurs and hums its mantra into our ear, a mantra that is, to quote the end of the same poem, “poetic, passionate, and ice-pure.” This poem, dedicated to India’s foremost ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’ — Leela Samson — is quoted below in full:

Spaces in the electric air divide themselves

in circular rhythms, as the slender

grace of your arms and bell-tied ankles

describe a geometric topography, real, cosmic,

one that once reverberated continually in

a prescribed courtyard of an ancient temple

in South India. As your eyelids flit and flirt, and

match the subtle abhinaya in a flutter

of eye-lashes, the pupils create an

unusual focus, sight only ciliary muscles

blessed and cloaked in celestial kaajal

could possibly enact.

The raw brightness of kanjeevaram silk, of

your breath, and the nobility of antique silver

adorns you and your dance, reminding us of

the treasure chest that is only

half-exposed, disclosed just enough, barely —

for art in its purest form never reveals all.

Even after the arc lights have long faded,

the audience, now invisible, have stayed over.

Here, I can still see your pirouettes, frozen

as time-lapse exposures, feel

the murmuring shadow of an accompanist's

intricate raga in this theatre of darkness,

a darkness where oblique memories of my

quiet Kalakshetra days filter,

matching your very own of another time,

where darkness itself is sleeping light,

light that merges, reshapes, and ignites,

dancing delicately in the half-light.

But it is this sacred darkness that endures,

melting light with desire, desire that simmers

and sparks the radiance of your

quiet femininity, as the female dancer

now illuminates everything visible: clear,

poetic, passionate, and ice-pure.

It might be interesting for readers interested in form to note that the line-end rhyme-scheme — a b a c c a ... d b d e e d ... f b f g g f ..— maps and mirrors the actual classical dance step-pattern and beat — ta dhin ta thaye thaye ta. Also the left-hand margin indentations match the same scheme and form.

Ziaul Karim (ZK): If I were to try and locate the central theme of your poetry — or by extension your weltanschaung — I think I would cite the line — “I love the luxury of secrets” — that is quoted as an epigraph at the beginning of Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems published by HarperCollins.

Sudeep Sen (SS): I suspect part of the reason why I was attracted to that particular line was because of what it implies — the fact that imaginative spaces occupy a zone of secrecy that is limitless, expansive, and full of mystery. It is a space that allows for creative unfurling of ideas and energies because so much of that area is unknown, untapped, uncharted, waiting to be realised, experienced and learnt. I am not sure that the epigraph entirely sums up everything I write about in my poems, or the essence of the book itself, but certainly it is true for a certain aspect of my writing.

ZK: You have a penchant for digging deep into life’s experiences, or at least the Sudeep Sen as he appears to me as a poet, loves to discover the intricate mysteries of living. You are essentially a poet whose voice is understated. Even though you are politically conscious and aware, you are not overtly political. Are you a cerebral poet?

SS: I try very hard not to sound too political or overly cerebral. In fact when I revise poetry, these are aspects that become very important to me as I don’t want to sound either overly politicised leaning one way or the other, or consciously cerebral. I think that the whole point of a poem is lost if you cannot appeal to a wide cross-section of sensitive readers.

Different readers with different backgrounds bring with them a unique personal sensibility by which they understand and appreciate a piece of art and all of them have a perfectly valid point of view. I imagine my audience as anybody who is literate and culturally-inclined in the widest sense of the words — he could be a banker, teacher, sports person, model, ice-cream seller, or working in the garment industry. I definitely do not write specifically for the English departments of universities, or students of English literature.

I write because I enjoy writing, because I enjoy language, because I enjoy how words sound when they are strung together in an interesting manner. If one consciously tries to insert sexy politically-correct terminology or jargon, references which largely an English literature student (or an academic/critic) understands, then I think I would be terribly limiting myself. I would feel claustrophobic if I just dwell in the inward world of academic discourse. My interests are serious, and at same time much wider — sports, popular culture, alternative music and drama, underground literature, and so on.

There is a lot of politics, comment, perhaps even a pinch of intellectualisation in my poems — how can one avoid what is around you in a daily sense. However, what I try to do is not make them obvious. And that can be quite hard because having written the poem/s, subverting the obvious is a serious challenge. Being understated and quiet is much more interesting to me than the other way around.

Often one reads poetry that sound like statements, as if the only aim of poetry is to give expression to a set of ideas or agendas. In myopic terms, this kind of writing does not interest me as this could be done by a political speechwriter or ad-agency copywriter. To me, if you have an interesting thought, then how can you write about it without being obvious or blatant, there lies the challenge for me. So, it is a question of writing in a nuanced and textured way, with multiple levels, with various layers, all overlapping and distinct at the same time, as well as being lucid.

ZK: Are you obliquely referring to Coleridge’s maxim “poetry is best words in best order”, or is that subconscious when you write? From an architectural point of view, it seems Louis MacNeice has heavily influenced you.

SS: The architecture of a poem is very important to me, partly because of my own inherent interest in architecture itself. Had I not read English literature, I would have been an architect now. In fact, it was very close choosing between the profession of being an architect and teaching literature and film.

To me, a poem should not only be linguistically challenging, but how it appears visually is an important factor to me as well. There are two kinds of structures — one of course is the use of rhyme and various rhyme-schemes, and the other is visual rhymes. And then, depending on how important structure is to that particular poem, it can have a considerably significant impact.

For instance, in the poem ‘New York Times’, I invented a rhyme-scheme — abxba cdxdc efxfe ... and so on ... the middle line, i.e. the third x line, in fact is the mirror-line which reflects the first & second lines with the fourth & fifth lines of each stanza. The other reason I used the five-line stanza-format in the poem is because the city of New York itself has five boroughs Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, etc. The other thing about this poem is if you turn the poem 90 degrees on its central axis, then a different kind of mirror-line mimics the shape of the island of Manhattan itself and its reflection on the surrounding waters.

Another poem, a book-length sequence, Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames (subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio as a verse-play, and premiered in London as a stage-play by Border Crossings / directed by Michael Walling) is based on a series of eight etchings of a British artist, Peter Standen.

The entire poem is set in rhymed couplets reflecting the presence of two principal characters — man /woman, lover/other, life/death and the other essential dualities. But they do not appear as obvious rhymes (like the translucent choral refrains in the poem)—they are wrap-around rhymes as opposed to end-stopped rhymes. The four stanzas in each section reflect the four seasons, the four side of a frame, the four corner of a visual space. I also use alternating line-indentation for each couplet and stanza with the idea that the entire poem works on a cyclical principle. So, if you join all the stanzas together using the left-justified margin as a reference plane, they in fact fit in a perfect dove-tail joint.

The poem ‘Single Malt’ is one grammatical line, without any full-stops, mimicking the way when whiskey poured gently in to a crystal glass, caresses its sides and subsequently the tongue’s palette. Therefore the slim verticality of this poem’s structure:

The single malt

explodes

from its husk,

swirling

in the cranium

of its own

shell,

flooding

the mind

with images

that alternately

switches

shutter speed

and lens,

distilling

sight,

that whisks

away

from the mundane,

what is

absolute

and essential,

and leaves out

what is not.

However, in the end, typography and structure of a poem are just as vital as the inner-spirit and content of any poem.

ZK: Right from the beginning of your career, your poems are brilliant examples of great control as regards rhythm and syntax, which is a testimony to your own interest in poetry as a craft. Later you went through creative writing programmes at American universities. Did your interest in the architectural aspect of poetry inspire you to go for a Masters Degree in Creative Writing?

SS: Thank you, those are very kind words. The creative writing classes I took in the United States were much later. I first started writing during my boyhood in Delhi. In India in those days, creative writing was only deemed as a hobby, albeit a laudable one. Nobody took it seriously, certainly not in a career or an academic sense. So by the time I went to America and took my first creative writing class, I already had a typical South Asian bias against the teaching of creative writing itself. I thought that how can anybody teach you how to write poetry you either had it in you or not or so I was led to believe until then.

But what I did learn when I was enrolled in these workshops were aspects of craft, prosody, stylistics, and technique. It is very important to know and learn these things, and I cannot over-emphasize their importance. We also read sheaves and sheaves of contemporary poetry which is very exciting for me. A lot of bad name to modern poetry has come about because people think that they can just write a sentence, break it up, and then rearrange it in a column-format. It may be poetry for some people, but for most it is not. These amateur poetasters do not necessarily have the skill, technique, or the inclination to actually write in formal stanzaic patterns. When I say formal, I do not necessarily mean that it has to be always rhymed there is blank verse, free verse, concrete poetry, other kinds of structures involved. I think creative writing classes are useful both if you are particularly interested in the aspects of prosody, as well as it teaches you to think seriously and critically about contemporary writing itself.

ZK: In the post-colonial literary scene, poets and novelists writing in English from the non-English speaking world, do suffer in most cases, from a sense of displacement this is a strong phenomenon in the writings from the South Asian diaspora. You are remarkably free from such feelings of being uprooted. One discovers that in the pages of your various books, you move smoothly between one home to another.

SS: I think the reason why you don’t see any sense of displacement in my writing is because I’m actually a very rooted person. My rootedness comes from my family and the way I was brought up. I’m first and foremost a Bengali writer, who just happens to write in another Indian language that is English. So, my cultural and intellectual spaces are very much defined by the fact that I come from a thoroughly Bengali milieu.

I am also fortunate to have grown up in a tri-lingual situation—I spoke Bengali at home, Hindi on the streets, and English at school not by design but by circumstance. So, this wonderful tripartite situation was such that I could slip in and out of several mother-tongues and languages at the same time it certainly made it linguistically richer, and we as South Asians are very lucky because of that.

I also come from a typically liberal educated middle-class Bengali family who have always been an immense source of strength for me. So, that kind jargon-ridden “post-colonial” displacement you are talking about is very alien as a concept to me, and even more difficult for a person with my background to rationally understand.

The other aspect of this is that I grew up in the capital city of Delhi which is a very cosmopolitan place it has a curious mix of the First and Third World atmosphere depending on where or what you are engaged in at any given moment. So wherever I have travelled subsequently, be it a cosmopolitan place or a rural one, I was in some manner or the other, somewhat familiar with that new place from before at least I was never in a state of cultural shock, however remote.

We, in India, have been exposed to the western culture, along with our very own, from our early childhood so neither of them are unfamiliar to us. So, when one is actually inhabiting these so-called Western (and Eastern spaces), they are places one feels equally at home. In fact I quite enjoy being in both worlds. I love the taste of singara, sandesh, kabab, and phuchka; and at the same time I love blue cheese, smoked salmon, wine and single malt. I do not personally see any conflict in these two worlds, rather I feel lucky and infinitely richer in experience, since my taste-buds as well as my intellectual and emotional terrain, can accommodate all of that happily and simultaneously.

ZK: Is it then, your trans-national self, that writes “I / am going home once again from another / home, escaping the weave of reality into another / one, one that gently reminds and stalls / to confirm: my body is the step-son of my soul”?

SS: The poem ‘Flying Home’ partly reflects the trans-national quality I have been talking about. Many writers and artists nowadays are in this sort of situation. When I’m going from one home to another in a plane, which in itself is such a peculiar kind of controlled space, it is a sort of perennially-transitional home, a home that is elastic it all depends on how you visualize space and how you demarcate geography. To me, that in itself is an interesting concept, one that allows for an expansive canvas. So, I suspect there is something inherent in me that makes it very difficult for me to feel displaced. Here, let the poem speak for itself:

I meticulously stitch time through the embroidered sky,

through its unpredictable lumps and hollows. I

am going home once again from another

home, escaping the weave of reality into another

one, one that gently reminds and stalls

to confirm: my body is the step-son of my soul.

But what talk of soul and skin

in this day and age, such ephemeral things

that cross-weaves blood and breath

into clotted zones of true escape.

What talk of flight time and flying

when real flights of fancy are crying

to stay buoyant unpredictably in mid-air

amid pain, peace, and belief: just like thin air

sketches, where another home is built

in free space vacuum, as another patchwork quilt

is quietly wrapped around, gently, in memoriam.

ZK: Poetry and dance are constant sources for your poetic inspiration. Through your poetry you constantly refer to other forms of art and its architectural beauty, e.g. in the poem quoted earlier, ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’.

SS: Absolutely. It accurately reflects my penchant for various sorts of art-forms, in this particular case, the South Indian classical dance. But I’m equally interested in music, film, theatre, live and performance art, and more. If a particular dance or a particular painting, or even a particular piece of dramatic writing moves me, I may write about it directly or obliquely. And this poem ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’ is a clear case in point.

An aspect of the poem that may interest you is the architectural and topographical mapping of its poetic structure. I invented another rhyme-scheme for this poem that reflects the actual dance-step pattern on stage that is in consonance with the bols and tals, in this case—ta dhin ta thaye thaye ta …abacca dedffd ... —the actual rhyme-scheme of the poem itself. That of course is only one thing. The more important thing is that I was completely moved and entranced by the performance, skill and beauty of the dancer herself, Leela Samson so I had to write the poem. It was almost written for me by her, I didn’t have a choice... the whole process was quite magical really.

As is perhaps evident, I do enjoy writing about other art-forms which have inspired or moved me in some way or the other. In fact, my new collection of poems I am currently working is called Blue Nude. The title poem is a sequence that has been inspired by Henri Matisse’s cobalt-blue cut-out figures by the same name. Then there are other poems in that book that were inspired by photographs, drama, film and other media. So one can say that the central unifying theme of this book-in-progress, comes from my pleasure and response to the genre of creative arts itself.

ZK: By the time Postmarked India was published by HarperCollins, you had already polished and crafted you own poetic voice. You were awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Fellowship in the UK and nominated for the Pushcart Prize in the USA bears testimony to that fact. But somehow I detect that Louis MacNeice’s influence still seemed to linger on.

SS: I am not entirely sure whether I agree with that last comment, in fact I don’t, various critics have said various things I believe you in this case you are referring to the poet and literary critic, Angus Calder, who compared me with Louis MacNeice in The Scotsman. It was an interesting comparison, but Calder perhaps was referring to the “variousness” in my writing, its range and latitude. I never thought that I was ever inspired by him or wrote like him.

Similarly, other people have written that they have found influences/similarities of T.S.Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Hugh MacDiarmid and W.H.Auden in my poems. This could all be temporarily very flattering, but at the end it is completely up to the reader or the critic as to how and what they feel about a particular piece of my writing. I don’t think I have at all been influenced by any one of them, even though I admire their writing enormously.

No one poet has directly influenced me, and this is evident in the kinds of poetry I like which tends to be rather varied and eclectic I adore the poetry of Jibanananda Das, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Milton, Donne, Wordsworth, the French symbolists like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Verlaine; Rilke, Neruda, Paz, Walcott, Heaney... it is too varied to list them all. Also the ticker-tape is so dissimilar and expansive that I can’t think of any one or two who, could have possibly influenced me.

Again, if have to find one source or fountainhead of influence it would actually be Bengali culture that has affected me ultimately, directly and indirectly. For instance, my interest and sense of rhythm and rhyme comes from my very early childhood through my mother and grandmother. They used to recite stories or sing lullabies to me, and I regularly heard them chant their prayers with a typical Bengali rounded lilt. All these were very inherent rhythms which quietly slipped into my psychological system by a curious process of osmosis. So, these perhaps are my influences very localized and genetic, completely spontaneous. However, the received and learned knowledge as well as the exposure they subsequently lent what I was talking about earlier is a very different sort of thing altogether.

ZK: Your voice as a poet is very subdued. And your poems are soliloquies?

SS: I would just replace the word “subdued” by the word “understated” which is perhaps more apt. I find that there is a lot of power in understated writing. If you write in a dramatic fashion then you are just advertising the superficial, and often there seems to be nothing very much beyond that.

To me, writing ought to be a quiet kind of a thing where the reader can read and then take in its effect in a slow-release fashion, much like time-lapse photography. It this sort of style I am personally attracted to. It is so much more effective, because once you influence a person gently over time, then the effect is a lot more permanent and effective, rather than someone who is impressive one minute and altogether forgettable the next minute like certain fashions or trends, or even like a loud noise which soon disappears. A slow well-paced murmur, or an elongated baritone of a hum, actually stays in the sensibility of a human being a lot longer and is perhaps more meaningful.

ZK: Does emotion compel you to write? Or do you wait for the right mood to inspire you?

SS: I think it is a combination of both. Being a writer is like being a strange kind of a beast. Writers tend to have invisible antennas on top of their head which pick up radar-signals odd-things while you are looking at ordinary scenes, snatches of other conversations, a glimpse of something somewhere so the ordinary everyday scenario acts as a rich well-spring of ideas for me. Even as I speak to you, I might be simultaneously processing an entirely different idea or thought that might have just struck me it is a complex parallel process. These, of course, may be just fragments, or overheard figments, voices, or images. If it is something strong and compelling, I generally try and make an effort to write it down. I don’t necessarily carry a note-book, so it could be on the back of a bill, or on the palm of my hand. If I am in a restaurant I would write it down on a piece of napkin, or find an excuse to get some toilet paper to scribble on it.

So when I sit down to write, I have all theses ideas and phrases in front of me. Sitting down and writing requires discipline because writing doesn’t just come from the middle of nowhere that is just the inspiration perhaps. But having had the inspiration you need time to put it all together and build the piece brick by brick. I sit down with poetry two or three hours everyday and it is not necessarily that I write a new poem every time very often I don’t, but I could be revising poems that I have written before, or maybe review a book of poetry, or simply just reading and enjoying a book of poetry. It’s my own quiet way of staying with poetry.

It is quite important to write things down when they first strike, because often I find that if I don’t do that and try to remember it later, it might altogether leave me, go away or vanish. Sometimes of course, it might happen at the most oddest and inconvenient time when I’m already in bed at four o’clock at night / morning especially if it is winter you really do not want to get out from under the duvet and go to the desk and write it down. Sometimes I feel lazy and postpone writing it down until the next day, and very often it has completely gone by then. It is always worth that extra effort to swiftly pen it down and keep it for later.

ZK: Does contemporary literary theory in any way come between you and your writing of poetry? Do theories influence your outlook?

SS: I find intelligently argued theory interesting and worth a rigorous read, but a lot of what is churned out does not inspire me at all. In some odd way, I even dislike theory especially when it is presented to a literate public making simple things overly complicated for no apparent reason. If theory has an intellectual positive base, original and rigorous, then I’m keen on it, only then. But it certainly never influences my creative writing at all. In fact, it stays very far from it.

I’m constantly surprised when I read a review, critique, or an essay on my work, as to how much theory is being used these days, especially in the so-called post-colonial circuit. I am not impressed by writers who put poly-syllabic jargon just for effect. Frankly this sort of writing is of no interest to me.

ZK: But certainly you have theories of your own. Just because you don’t adhere to contemporary literary theories, doesn’t mean that you don’t have a theory of your own? Certainly your responses to different stimuli are not passive.

SS: You can’t be passive when responding to different stimuli, especially if you posses the invisible antennas I had mentioned before if you are passive you cant be writing at all. All the writing I have done over the past fifteen years are responses to various stimuli. The published results are in front you, clearly then one is not passive.

But when it comes to literary and critical theory, of course I’m aware of what is going on around me. But I don’t let that tarnish or complicate my writing, because as I have said before they are completely separate categories and disciplines. Art should really exist independently on its own merit. Intelligent analysis and critique is surely exciting, but the two genres and purposes are entirely different.

At the end, what excites me is a piece of original writing that is well-written, thought-provoking, intelligently argued. But ultimately it needs to move me, it needs to create quiet indelible waves that constantly haunts me, changes me in some slight modest way. Otherwise it is simply a cerebral exercise like playing and solving a Rubic’s Cube which only has limited pleasures.

ZK: You have a strong liking for fluids—its intricate flow and glide. There are plenty of references to milk, wine, blood, juices of passion, in your poems such as ‘Single Malt’ that is quoted earlier, in the long poems ‘Line Breaks’ and ‘Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames’, [and most recently in Rain,] for example. It seems you want to achieve some kind of linguistic fluidity in your poems.

SS: The concept of fluid itself is I think quite interesting. In a sense it is a cross-over phase, or point the of intersection, between the liquid and solid states. So, we are talking about an in-between state, a state that has its own definite rhythm, flow, deliberateness, and so on. It also is a state which typifies the unobvious. The clarity of liquid is very clear and the concreteness of solid is equally concrete.

But the fluid state is almost like a penumbra, which is the title of a poem I have written. It is a space which allows you to do a lot because it is infinitely multi-layered—it is much more textured, as much depends on the viscosity and density of the fluid itself. It is certainly a worthwhile, languorous, languid space to control and be creative with it.

ZK: This brings me to your superbly written, inspiring treasure of a book, Rain [first issued as a limited edition as Monsoon]. This is at the same time beautiful poetry, prose poem and fiction, one that is balletic and precise, poetic and minimalist, stylised and wise, combining the virtual and visual — coalescing to convey the intensely special magic of monsoon rains as felt in the Indian subcontinent. In such a bold celebration, Derek Walcott, the 1992 Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, wrote: “At the end of this sentence, rain will begin”.

SS: Monsoon is a reflection on rain — its passion and politics, its beauty and fury, its ability to “douse and arouse”. I ultimately explore the various moods that water and fluids inherently unravel.

It is a sequence of twenty-two tightly wrought pieces set in three sections — ‘the first octet’, ‘the second octet’ and ‘the only sestet’. When it was first published as a limited edition in Dhaka by an arts foundation there in 2002, it was accompanied by wonderful pictures by a young Bangladeshi photographer, and the entire book was a duotone production. The new four-colour avatar with Monsoon reborn as Rain is published by Gallerie & Mapin in India and Grantha in USA. This book contains artwork by twenty leading contemporary Indian artists, such as Paritosh Sen, Paresh Maity, Jehangir Sabavala, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Jatin Das, Gieve Patel and many others.

The evocative art that accompany my writing in this book isn’t meant to illustrate the text, but simply to act as an aesthethic counter-point, leit-motiv, and antithesis — thus creating a fine tension and balance between words and images.

ZK: Your taste as a poet is very broad, open, and wide-visioned. You are a poet who cannot be conveniently pigeon-holed.

SS: Is that a good thing or a bad thing, i.e. the fact that you can't put me in a pigeon-hole?

ZK: As a reader, I have enjoyed the varied landscapes that you portray, the stream of emotions and themes that you give expression to. The good thing about all this is that Sudeep Sen is not a prisoner of a specific style, or a set of images, or even an agenda.

SS: Well, I suspect you have answered your question yourself. Which is precisely why I was trying to ask you the question back. I'm glad that one can't pigeon-hole me, because my interest, my themes, my forms, my rhythms are very varied indeed.

I still think in spite having written a fair bit for the past 15 years or so, I am still in the continuous process of growing and learning new things. Every time I work on a new book, I realise that there is so much more to learn, and so much more to explore.

When it comes to writing itself, it is always a progression—you start from point A, to point B, and onwards. One of the most interesting grammatical punctuation for me is actually the ellipse, the three dots [...] which simply says—as such, nothing ends. It makes one's way of looking at things as well as one's own writing organic. I feel it is a good thing because otherwise if you work in a very myopic kind of a way then you are only narrowing your scope further and further. Whereas simply being open to growth, you have the entire canvas and palette open, to choose from. And that is very useful and at the same time unconstraining.

ZK: Your early interest in the external architecture of poetry, i.e. the overt formal construction of poetry over the years has grown and graduated into an internal, much quieter, perhaps spiritual, and sparer organization of poetry.

SS: You have put that quite well in fact. In my early poems, the architecture of the poem itself was visually much more apparent. Whereas over time, I have been able to be much more subtle in my writing. It is essentially because of a greater experience, both in life and writing itself. You learn how to use craft and words, and hopefully you get better and better to a point that you can in fact hide very complex formal-constructs in a poem to an uninitiated eye, one that is only apparent if you dig deep into the skin and tissue of the poem.

Of course, there is also a shift in sensibility, in the sense that I was much younger then. Life's circumstances change, with that your sensibility changes and grows. I think these aspects are also reflected in my later poems.

ZK: Your poems are visually rich, but they do not just end there. You have been influenced at the same time by ancient Prakrit poetry, Japanese haiku, Chinese poetry, Imagist and Metaphysical poetry. But you don't just try to stir your reader with only images. Your frames and conceits cast a deceptively soothing spell, one that goes beyond the physical as well as metaphysical reality.

SS: Certainly that tends to be very true. There is an immense visual quality in my poetry, partly influenced by the fact that I worked for many years as a film-maker. Besides, I do have more than a part-time interest in photography. As I mentioned before, architecture was an important area of interest of mine, a field I might have actually pursued as a career, but circumstances took a different turn. But I still am interested in visual and graphic art, and in the whole nature of light, photography, and fibre-optics. So all that somewhere along the line must permeate and stain my poems.

However, that’s only one aspect of the poetry—only the stretched-canvas, only the surface of the parchment where the colours you see are brightly dabbed upon. Once you go beyond that level, there is an intensely quiet, an inwardly deeper depth of field in my writing—an aspect of my poetry which perhaps what you are alluding to. I don't know whether it is spiritual or not, but certainly it is an introspective kind of writing. So in that sense, you are right.

ZK: One of your recently published chapbooks, Almanac, contains poems corresponding to the twelve months of the year. What inspired you to write poems on the different months?

SS: It was completely accidental actually. At the time, I was trying very hard to write poems for my new-born son Aria, and I increasingly found that writing poetry for children very difficult. One of the things that I was experiencing in my writing was—when I was consciously trying to write for a child, I realised that I was speaking down at them rather than to them as a colleague. So, I thought the other alternative could be poems about each month of the year as a calendar so that my son could learn the different months of the year in a creative way. Part of it was that.

Part of it was also that I realised that I had enough poems that had some reference to some month or the other. So, when I pulled all those poems together, some published and others unpublished, I realised there were poems that represented about eight of the months. Since I already had eight poems, I thought why not try and write four new poems relating to the remaining four months to complete the sequence. From reading the poems you would realise that not all the poems are directly related to month concerned as such. They are obliquely related to the months. For instance, there is poem called 'April's Air' which is set in Japan and about rice-harvesting that takes place in April. So, the poem conveniently fit into the April month-slot.

Similarly, ‘One Moonlight December Night’ obviously comes in the December section. But the poem, for instance, which refers to the month of May is a recent poem which I wrote for my son whose birthday falls on the 21st of that month. Even though the poem is titled ‘Aria’, the reference to people who are in the know is to the month of May. So, I had quite an enjoyable time putting this volume together.

ZK: The most difficult task for any reader of your poetry is that there is no one specific geographical location or boundary to associate you with. The landscape, seascape, and airspace that fill your poems are borderless and trans-national. There is practically no one central location that can be identified as your own personal territory in the broad sense of the term.

SS: That’s the way I have been brought up. I was brought up as a Bengali within a Bengali family-milieu, but in a non-Bengali landscape of cosmopolitan Delhi. I spoke English in school, Hindi on the streets, and Bengali at home. So, it was an essentially and inherently multi-lingual and multi-cultural space that I started from.

Also the range of landscapes and topographies that influenced me were both Eastern and Western at the same time. Through literature, art, and film, I had access to the Western culture, but at the same time I was immersed in my own in India, and the East so to speak broadly. So, obviously it is very difficult to pin me down in one place. And I’m glad that is a difficult thing as it also relates to the earlier answer I gave you.

As you travel both vertically and horizontally, perspectives change. It is not just the diverse landscapes in terms of different countries and topographies, but it’s also diverse in terms of different levels we are talking about—whether it is purely visual, purely cinematic, purely structural, purely architectural—moving from one level to the other, moving from one plane to the other, some time it is two dimensional, some time it is three dimensional, some time it is much more.

The only thing that links me to some sort of centre is the ‘centre of gravity’ itself. Otherwise, the only tangible thing that links me to a centre is my own family and the Bengali culture, something that is either obliquely or directly omnipresent in my work.

ZK: The volume, Retracing American Contours, takes us back again to an American landscape, a terrain that you explored in your highly successful third book, New York Times. Why the return to the United States?

SS: The poems in Retracing American Contours are poems that were originally written in the period from 1987 to 1990, much of it around the same time as the poems in New York Times itself. Originally, I had planned for all these poems to have come out together as one volume. But since the book became very large, my British publisher thought it would be a good idea to cull out the New York based and New York related poems, to form one independent book. I went along with that idea and was very pleased about the eventual results.

So the poems in this new volume Retracing American Contours are the ones that I want to preserve from that original group that were not published in book form. Publishing them now, almost after a decade they were first born, is also a private way of visiting those places again. There are so many important events and significant memories attached to those places that it is almost like a journey down memory-lane, but with a fresh considered perspective.

ZK: Your volume, Lines of Desire, is stunning — quite a stylistic revelation. As a poet you strike similes and evoke metaphors that are original, cool, untainted, soothing, and the same time, urgent. In addition, they also remind one of conceits in metaphysical poetry.

SS: That is an interesting observation. Lines of Desire is basically series of very tightly written short erotic poems. In fact, I re-reading and savouring the poetry of John Donne, Sappho and the erotic Sanskrit poets quite a lot while writing some of the poems in this volume.

It is very difficult to write about love and passion in an original and fresh way because it is one subject that has been completely exhausted. So I wondered, how does one write about it without actually sounding old. My way of getting into it was to turn them inside out, rather than going from outside into the inside which is usually the case as it is a much safer and controllable route. I wanted to capture the raw passion and essence of the particular range of emotions, and at the same time be subtle and unobvious. Also I wanted to give these poems a meditative and chilling quality, an edge that is at the same time sharp and well as mesmerising.

ZK: Tell us about In Another Tongue — an impressive volume of translations you have recently published, something quite new for you.

SS: In Another Tongue is my first volume of translations that gathers poetry from well known and lesser known poets from Hebrew, Macedonian, Persian, Hindi and Bengali languages. Since its publication, I have translated more — from Dutch, Slovene, Swedish, and others.

William Radice, one the foremost Tagore translators, pointed out that this volume is quite a departure from what I have been engaged in the past. I have enjoyed this relatively new process a lot. Translation is at the same time very different and similar to writing original poetry. But the dynamics and energies are completely unusual and difficult to quantify when translating.

One of my favourite pieces of translation include Jibanananda Das’s poem, ‘Banalata Sen’. Clinton Seely, the authority on this poet, commented that this is one of the best translation of the poem he has seen to date. Here is my translation:

For thousand years I have walked this earth’s passage

by day and night—from Lanka’s shores to Malay’s vast seas.

I’ve travelled much—been a guest at Bimbhishar and at Ashok’s courts,

stayed in the distant nights, in the town of Bidharba.

I’m long worn-out; around me waters of sea and life have endlessly swirled.

My only peace—a fleeting moment snatched with her—

Natore’r Banalata Sen.

Like the dense ink-night of Bidhisha, her hair—black, deep black;

her face—like the delicate-weave of Shrabasti’s filigree-frieze.

Just as a lost boatman, rudderless, tossing in the far seas

chances upon a lush-green Isle of Spice,

I too caught a sight—saw her, a mere glimpse in the dark. Gently, raising

her eyes like bird’s nest, she whispered: “Where were you, all this while?”

[And there she stands at my dream’s end—my own Banalata Sen].

With soft-settling hiss of dew, evening closes the day’s end;

kites erase from their wings, sun-stain smell of flight.

When colours of the earth gently fade, fireflies light up their palette,

and old songs find new lyric, old stories new score.

Birds return home, so do the rivers; as life’s trade—its give-and-take—cease.

Only the dark stays. And just as it remains, so does sitting by my side, face to face, my own Banalata Sen.

­— Jibanananda Das, ‘Banalata Sen’ [Translation © Sudeep Sen]

I especially enjoy translating from Bengali and Hindi—languages I know well. Growing up in Delhi was truly trilingual—Bengali, Hindi, and English are the languages I use (but understand quite a few Northern Indian languages—Punjabi, Rajasthani, Urdu, even Gujarati and Maharastrian from Western India). When I am in the West, it is predominantly English that I am using — though in non-English speaking countries, one realises that English can be so redundant, and thank god for that.

ZK: Let us talk about Postcards from Bangladesh, a lavish 300-page full-colour coffee table book — elegantly written, beautifully photographed and designed. It is really a high-calibre literary book in the guise of a illustrated book!

SS: It is a unique and personal account of Bangladesh as seen through the eyes of three creative professional — Tanvir (a Bangladeshi photographer), Kelley Lynch (an American designer), and me. The book revolves around the idea and metaphor of a postcard — snapshots, snippets of life in one place that capture a moment in time — reflecting something larger about the culture as a whole. It is not meant to be encyclopaedic or all-inclusive. Rather, it portrays what Bangladesh means to us from alternate focal point — things off the beaten track, aspects left out of final frames, unused notes scribbled in the margins — all forming the glue that binds the book together. Postcards from Bangladesh traces journeys that are both interior and exterior using prose, poetry, and photography to create a poetic documentary — a film in freeze-frames.

The heart of Bengali culture — its sensibility and charm — is underscored in chapters that highlight the essential Bengali diet and livelihood provided by rice and fish; the unique six seasons of the Indian subcontinent, especially the monsoon rains; crafts and artefacts like rickshaw paintings; indigenous clothing like lungi and sari; the great rivers — the Padma, Meghna, Jamuna, and Buriganga; the nuances of religion; the bricks and mortar that form the country’s backbone; and Bangladesh’s popular music and culture. All these seek to give the reader a sense of the country that is outside the purview of development manuals, disaster media stories, and government tourist guides.

Postcards from Bangladesh is the first book published in that country to creatively fuse literature and art, photography and documentary, travelogue and dialogue, prose and poetry into an organic narrative whole.

ZK: Among your newer work is a major book-length poem, Distracted Geography: An Archipelago of Intent. It is a highly unusual and inventive work, a tour de force. How did it begin? Tell us something about its form, and the journey itself.

SS: The book-length poem — Distracted Geography: An Archipelago of Intent—began on a wet August morning, as I sat in an half-sunken basement space of a partially restored fifteenth century mansion ‘Gartincaber’ in Doune (near Stirling, Scotland). Almost drunk under the spell of this space, both interior and exterior, dactyls were dictated to me by photons in the surrounding electric-charged air. It was here where my journey began.

My journey continued leaving a winding trail of foot-steps, pug-marks I tried to hide, but could not. It is still an uncompleted journey, a journey that cannot be completed ... perhaps, it is part of one's own fallibility. This journey has infinitely long lines and many miles left to traverse, but I know my blood's inadequate crimson may prevent such an ambition. So I take all this as a gift, a dream. I feel constantly grateful that I have been allowed such a dream.

Along the way, I have been coloured by many sources, interests, passions, and obsessions—some obvious and others oblique. Among them, there are overheard phrases, paintings, photographs, fragmented images, films, music, memory, poems, women, fluids, and the intoxicated air.

My alter-ego wanted to be an architect and a cartographer—I have a more than part-time interest in science—all these must have, in some way, influenced this poem.

I reread many of my favourite poetry books at the time—classics like Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and Baudelaire’s Fleur de Mal; volumes by contemporary masters like Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and others.

Walcott’s Omeros, Brodsky’s To Urania, Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares, Donald Hall's The One Day, Jaan Kaplinski’s The Same Sea In Us All, Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri, Dom Moraes’s Serendip, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Middle Earth, A K Ramanujan’s Collected Poems, especially kept me company. I have used fragments from many of these poets' work throughout to punctuate the narrative, so that readers can get some sense of their world as parallel asides, just as it did for me on my journey.

I was also immersed in Gray’s Anatomy, Encarta’s BodyWorks, Louis Kahn’s Sounds and Silence, Matthew Arnold and T S Eliot’s essays, John Frederick Nim’s Western Wind, .... At the time, I relied on my grandfather's trusted old compass that helped navigate my way, imaginatively plotting a course through my National Geographic map collection that lay in disarray .... My memory provided calm, as I struggled, translating Jibanananda Das’s ‘Banalata Sen’ to recreate its music and passion. All of them have been guiding companions—and so, the journey went on.

The sparse elongated structure of the poem partly reflects the strength and surety of the human vertebra and spine; much like Neruda’s Odes that reflect the long-thin shape of Chile. The sections and sub-sections join together like synapses between bone and bone. The titles are translucent markers or breath pauses, not separators.

The short two-line couplets echo the two-step foot-prints, a pathway mapped on the atlas. The 12 sections correspond to the 12 bones in a human rib-cage, the 12 months in a year, the two 12 hour cycles in a day .... There are 26 bones in the human vertebrae, and the 26 parts in the poem slowly assemble themselves from a montage of tenuously strung lyrics. The 206 pages in this book match the exact number of bones in a human body.

This poem leaves a footprint from a perennial walk that meanders through public and private spaces—making sense of the vicissitudes of our loves, losses, wants, desires, inadequacies—as it maps the matrix of living and dying.

ZK: Prayer Flag is an unusual CD sized-book with your photography, poetry, translations of your poems in Bengali, an audio CD with reading by you, and music.

SS: Prayer Flag was a really enjoyable project to put together. I have been seriously taking photographs for many years, and­ many have been published individually and as sequences on book covers, magazines, etc. This is the first time that some of them have been put together officially in book form along with my poetry and audio reading by me and my translator. The photographs are meant to stand on their on and do not illustrate the text, rather they show different sides of my work — text and design, words and the visual, orality and musicality.

The celebrated actor and author, Tom Alter, reviewing the book in Biblio wrote: “Prayer Flag is Sudeep Sen’s stunning book of poetry, photography and live audio reading by the poet accompanied with music (that is included in a CD with a generous selection of 55 poems ranging over two decades from 1983-2003). This multi-media compilation is a first for a poet from India to be published internationally. Gregor Robertson on BBC rightly places Sen “amongst the finest younger English-language poets in the international literary scene. A distinct voice: carefully modulated and skilled, well measured and crafted” — high and rare praise indeed, and rightly so for our own Indian master of words…. Prayer Flag is not a conventional poetry collection, but an unique object of art that reveals the two intrinsically linked artistic sides of Sen’s work and talent — words and images. It is an album of Sen’s poetry, his wonderful photography and design, his recorded ebb and flow in his own voice — with it’s play of colours — the drifting in and out of Bengali, Indian and international ethos, and then back again. … The book is a total experience, just as a cup of fine tea becomes so much finer when imbibed with a friend so close at hand, and delicate scones with a dab of honey, and an evening sighing and singing into the night … Prayer Flag is lifelong friend I will keep with love and admiration, with smile and wonder — a gift from a master artist”.

ZK: What about other artistic collaborations — with musicians and dancers, theatre and film actors?

SS: Rain too has had many musical collaborators — a young fusion group ‘Advaita’ led by Abhishek Mathur and some members of ‘Artists Unlimited’ band led by Annette Phillips came together in a live concert at the British Council. While the actor Tom Alter and I read the original text from my book, they provided a wonderfully intricate and understated soundscape they had specially composed for Rain. Infact, half a dozen of my earlier poems were sung out loud by Abhishek and Annette in styles as varied and reminiscent as Pink Floyd, Eric Clapton, Dire Straits, Ella Fitzgerald, Diana Krall, in rhythm & blues, rock, pop, and minimalist modes.

Further collaborations saw jazz flautist Rajeev Raja join Tom Alter and me at the India International Centre in New Delhi and The Times of India Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in Bombay; the same duo performed in Ahmedabad at Sarabhai’s Natarani Amphitheatre with the classical flautist Keyur Balkrushna; and also in Hyderabad, the ‘Charminar Jazz Collective’ collaborated with me in wonderfully improvised live concert.

At the India Intenational Centre’s prestigious annual international Festival of the Arts, I presented ‘Wo|Man: Desire, Divinity, Denouement’ collaborating with the wonderful classical voice of Vidya Rao and classical bamboo flautist Srinibas Satapathy, accompanied by the young Odissi dancer Moumita Ghosh, a disciple of legendary Madhavi Mudgal.

The Spanish edition of Rain (translated by M Dolores Herrero under the title, Lluvia) recently appeared from University of Zaragoza in Spain. Inspired by this book, a concert length score was composed by Javier Coble Quartet in Spain, and the resultant CD is forthcoming soon. The world premiere concert in Jaca (Spain) with Javier Coble and Kepa Oses as musicians, and M Dolores Herrero as Spanish reader and I in English went down very very well. Since then we have had invitations from various organizations and festival directors. Plans are afoot for a national multi-city tour in India (sponsored by the Spanish Embassy), the Singapore Festival, venues in the United Kingdom, and more in Spain.

I have always been interested in the other arts, so collaborating with outstanding world and Indian artists is a real treat, pleasure, and a satisfying experience for me.

ZK: Finally, Sudeep Sen as a literary publisher and editor. You are the editorial director of the publishing house Aark Arts with an impressive list of over 50 prize-winning authors. You edit Atlas, the critically acclaimed international ‘book[maga]zine’ of ‘new writing, art & image’. You serve variously as contributing editor, poetry editor, literary advisor for the Literary Review (USA), Orient Express (Oxford), Sheffield Thursday (Sheffield), International Exchange for Poetic Invention (USA/Holland), New Quest (Pune), Urban Voice (Bombay), Six Seasons Review (Dhaka), facebookpoetry, and others. In addition, you are a photographer, filmmaker, visualiser, and designer Do these innumerable roles not distract you and interfere with your poetry? I must admit that you are a true modern day polymath!

SS: That is terribly kind. As you already know, I was always equally and simultaneously interested in certain sciences and the arts — architecture, fibre optics, print & 3D design, moving and still image, music and dance, oral and printed literature. So performing the other roles is simply an extension of me as an artist in its holistic sense. I enjoy the stimulus and challenge these other genres and roles offer, and the wide experience they bring to my writing.

As an editor, critic and literary reviewer, I have to read so much new writing everyday — and stumbling upon and reading good writing is always inspiring and uplifting — so my role as a traveller, literary editor and publisher fits in with me comfortably, and complements and enriches my life enormously as a full-time writer. I am grateful for the opportunity where my passion has turned out to be my profession.