‘The M River’ (Drawing by Mayank Chhaya)
At the risk of overpraising let me praise Google Transliterate. It is an extraordinary tool which has opened two doors tightly shut for decades.
Ever since I became a journalist in 1981 English has become my default language. It is a great language which is both pure and promiscuous and that’s what makes it paradoxical. Having been the language of commerce and colonizers for centuries it has acquired that rare suppleness so necessary to advance both. I am grateful to it mainly because it has helped me create a tidy little career for myself.
Before I digress any further from the main theme of the post let me pull myself back. The point I was trying to make is after becoming a journalist first the typewriter and then the computer keyboard became an indispensable tool of my life. While I was very glad to have taken to both these technologies, one inevitable fallout was that I gradually stopped handwriting anything. So much so that I can no longer write more than a couple of lines in longhand without feeling peculiarly exhausted and disengaged.
One of the casualties of this very primitive form of technological singularity was poetry. I have written poetry in Hindi and Gujarati since my teens. However, because it required me to handwrite I practically stopped writing poetry. Of course, over the past decades there have been many which formed in my mind and stayed there.
This is where Google Transliterate and Facebook come in. Poetry is as much about actually putting it down on paper as it is about finding an audience. With these two fabulous technological advances I am able to do both. One consequence of this convergence for me personally has been that I have started writing more poetry in Hindi and Gujarati than ever before. While in Hindi my preferred genre is the ghazal, in Gujarati it is the haiku.
Google Transliterate allows me to type Hindi and Gujarati in the Roman script and simultaneously offers words in the respective scripts. Those are the two doors that I was referring to as being shut for decades and now having been opened because of Google Transliterate. So thank you, techie nerds.
There is, of course, the flip side to being poetically prolific all over again. I end up ambushing unsuspecting Facebook friends with frequent poetic updates. To be fair to myself, for a poet I do not seem to have too much of that irritating habit of buttonholing people randomly and reciting my work.
Being a weekend post, indulge me a bit as I publish a couple of my latest ghazals and three of my dated haikus. Incidentally, the structure of haikus in Gujarati is 5-7-5, or five letters, seven letters and five letters. Or at least that’s what I have understood from childhood. If that is not the pure haiku structure, so be it. I have lifelong poetic license which requires no renewal.
I have written quite a few ghazals lately but let me just publish two here with approximate translation.
What is that which is rising like a black serpent
Or perhaps it is dark smoke emanating from many hearts
The leaping flames tell but one story
There is a cavalcade of ill-will in the city underway
Covering your ears won’t change reality
Come out on the street, there is a silent revolution on
Those who are carrying lamps in the broad daylight
Are tailed by a shadow of dark smoke
Hey life, just do this much
Bless me with some craft to live it
If the feet must remain unshod
At least heal my lacerations
I accept all your hard vagaries
Spare an occasional benign gaze too
In the grimy palm of my destiny
Infuse some good kismet
If I must live in Chhaya’s shadow*
Let some light break through
(* Chhaya, my last name, also means shadow)
Now three old Gujarati haikus written in 1979.The translation is understandably not in haiku.
૧) સત્તર શબ્દો
ગોઠવી ને કવિઓ
હાઇકુ રચે
૨) બંધ બારણે
‘ભલે પધાર્યા’ એમ
તોરણ શોભે
૩) સાંજ તો આવી
પણ તેમની યાદ
ન આવી હજી
1) Seventeen words
Poets arrange and
make haikus
2) On a door that is shut
Hangs a sign
‘Welcome’
3) Dusk has arrived
But her memories
Have not, yet
