Stealing Joy 1: Mary Oliver

Reading her is like reading a contemporary Thoreau. Or even a Whitman. A lot of her nature descriptions don’t hold particular relevance to a city-dweller like me. But the sheer joy she finds in the birds and the trees and the water bodies, the connections she establishes between the natural order of things and modern contemporary life, the importance she places on just sheer attentiveness to the world around, makes her a precious piece of extraordinariness in an otherwise ordinary Sunday evening.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In Defence of Liberal Hinduism: Tharoor's Why I am a Hindu

The politics of religion forces one to re-evaluate faith. At least, it did for me. You are born a Hindu,
you grow up conditioned in the traditions of the religion, follow the rituals almost unthinkingly. And then
there comes a time when you feel you can’t defend it in the world anymore. Not when you see terrible
things committed in its name, not when you realize the contradictions within it (the caste-ism and
sexism, for example), not when you start to despise at least some of the people who proudly claim it.
Your liberal soul revolts.
Yet you want to defend it. Because there really is so much to love about it. Those rituals, for one - the
ones you cannot do without, the ones that center you - the lighting of the lamp every morning, the
reciting of the shlokas you learnt as a child, the visits to temples where you can almost feel the power
of the idols that have been prayed to, for centuries. And then what about the sheer beauty of the idols
and the architecture? And the joi-de-vivre of …
Read more

2017: My Year in Reading

59 was this year’s number - slightly above my average of a book a week.
Poetry was a theme. It was probably that kind of a year, where you needed the consolations of verse to deal with the world. And I actually bought physical books of poetry this year, having decided poems need the tactility of paper and pen. Mary Oliver was, of course, high up there, as a means of dealing with the world - American Pastoral, her Pulitzer winner, and her New and Selected Poems, Vol 1, the best kind of self-help book there is. There was also AK Ramanujan’s classic translations of ancient Sangam poetry The Interior Landscape - gorgeous, lush love poems; and his translation of medieval Kannada Bhakti poetry, Speaking of Siva - mystical, obscure sometimes, beautiful always.
Some of my favourite reads this year were non-fiction. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me was powerful beyond measure. Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time was a very long read; but it was a heart-breaking one about the collapse o…
Read more

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness : An authentic, beautiful mess

It’s untidy. Like the India in which it is set. Characters, each of whom deserves a novel himself/ herself, drift in and out. All the causes worth fighting about, in this strange, beautiful country of ours, find their space - gender, caste, religion, class, Kashmir. All the major political events in the last three decades are there in some form or the other. Like I said before, it’s a complete unholy mess. Like watching the world in Krishna’s mouth. It works, though. Because somehow, in spite of the overwhelming political backdrop, Arundhati Roy does what she does best. Makes you care about the small people - the boy Aftab who becomes a girl Anjum, my favourite character in the book; the IB officer Biplab Dasgupta, on the wrong side of the war in Kashmir; Gulrez, the old, simple Kashmiri, who is killed and paraded as a dreaded militant; Dayachand, aka Saddam Hussein, the lower caste boy who sees his father lynched by upper caste Hindus as he clears a dead cow’s carcass; Azad Bharathiya…
Read more