Mayank Chhaya Daily

Vinod Kumar Shukla—A man of lucid quietude

Poet, writer and essayist Vinod Kumar Shukla

PEN America has announced recipients of two monumental career achievement honors, one of whom happens to be the much celebrated Hindi short story writer, novelist, poet, and essayist Vinod Kumar Shukla. I discovered Shukla only about a decade ago and was moved enough to write a short piece on October 11, 2013. It is only opportune that I republish that piece to coincide with his PEN America honor.

October 11,2013

It is utterly joyous serendipity to have discovered Hindi poet and writer Vinod Kumar Shukla.

The discovery came this morning via Facebook, courtesy of friend Umesh Pant. Umesh posted an interview with Shukla that was done by Rakesh Shrimal, editor of “Pustak Varta” (roughly ‘Book Talk’). The interview itself was posted on a blog called ‘Pakhi’, which I suppose means bird. So Shukla has had to travel some distance to reach me. It reflects poorly on me that I was unaware of him until today.

I have a weakness for the well-spoken and the well-written, irrespective of whether I agree with the content of what is being spoken or written. I read everything first from the standpoint of whether it is readable. Substance is important, of course, but substance is like a destination and writing is like the path that leads to it. If the path is uneven, strewn with poorly constructed phrases and sentences, one tends to veer away from the substance.

It turns out Shukla is a highly respected writer and poet known for his austere yet deep rumination on life and all that happens within as well outside. A writer who can title one of his books ‘Deewar Mein Ek Khirkee Rahati Thi’ (A Window Lived in a Wall) gets my vote every time.

A very cursory look at Shukla’s works, as available on the net, tells me that he is a man of lucid quietude. He comes across as someone who has a particularly distilled creative expression. He is also someone who is very visual. In his interview with ‘Pustak Varta’he says, “I don’t think in language. Ideas come to me visually. I think visually.”

Watching a two part conversation with him on YouTube, I was struck by the opening lines of part 1. In Hindi it says, “Shuruat ka koi sandarbh nahi hota, Kuchh hona hi us ka sandarbh hai jaise bansuri ka hona hi sangeet ka sandarbh hai.” My free rendition of this would be “A beginning has no context. That it is there is its context quite like the flute is the context for music.” It is a striking thought, particularly the idea that a beginning has no context. That could well be applied to the universe presuming it had what our restricted comprehension calls a beginning. I digress.

I chanced upon some English translation of Shukla’s poetry on Poetry International Rotterdam.

And I, the city man,
separate from nature so
that I leave the tree behind and sit in the bus.
Sitting in the bus, I wish
that there were trees on both sides of the road.
In my room
I have hung a picture of an entire forest

 

A man sat in desperation
I did not know the man.
But I knew the desperation.
. . . We walked together.
We did not know each other.
But we knew walking together.

In his interview with ‘Pustak Varta’ , Shukla makes a fine point about the difference between writing prose and poetry: “Gadya likhna, likhne mein sahaj shuruat hai, par baad mein kavita ki tarh kathin. Kavita kathin shuruat hai par baad mein gadya ki tarha sahaj.” (To begin writing prose is natural but it later turns out to be difficult like poetry. Writing poetry is difficult in the beginning but becomes as natural later like prose.)

In a remarkable show of democratic generosity, in contrast to literary exclusivism and conceit of many other writers, Shukla says in the same interview, “Everybody should write at least one book. There is no person or life about whom something cannot be written. Everyone can write about themselves and others.” This view comes so frighteningly close to mine that for a moment I thought I had said it.

I find that writing of this kind, by which I mean literary interviews and essays, are infinitely better crafted in Hindi and other Indian languages in India than what one gets to see in the country’s English media. For one, it does not feel grafted. It feels to be part of the habitat and therefore more authentic. English is now an Indian language but it still betrays its otherness when its practitioners fail to indigenize it.

There is no harbinger that ushers poetry

Poets would know this well. Poetic impulses are utterly unpredictable. They rise when they choose to rise. There is no harbinger that ushers poetry. It just conjures up spontaneously. 

An example of this happened this morning on my morning walk. I have to walk indoors these days because of the winter. I do so listening to Hindi movie songs on my mobile . This morning I was listening to a Mala Sinha special on Saregama Radio's "Weekend Classic with Ruchi." Incidentally, I have no compelling reason to mention either the name of the radio station or the show and its host. I do so because it is in good taste. And, of course, Ruchi sounds cute although I have chosen not to Google her images in order to sustain my imagination about what she may look like. 

Speaking of the unpredictability of poetry, even while writing the last sentence about not searching for Ruchi's images, this line was immaculately born:

हुस्न तसव्वुर में रहे तो बेहतर
गर रूह-ब-रूह हो जाये तो मुश्किल

But I digressed. I was telling you about what happened while listening to the Mala Sinha special. One song that is almost mandatory in any show about Mala Sinha is the enduring masterpiece 'आप की नज़रों ने समझा ' ("Aap ki nazron ne samjha") from the 1962 film 'Anpadh' . It was written by Raja Mehdi Ali Khan, sung by Lata Mangeshkar and composed by Madan Mohan. 

The third and final antara in the song begins with "पड़ गईं दिल पर मेरे,आप की परछाइयाँ ". 

What I am about to tell you is exactly how it happened. I froze mid-step at परछाइयाँ and scribbled the following lines behind an official letter from the Department of Health Services, State of Illinois, as if they were fully formed. If it sounds magical, because it is. If the handwriting is not fully legible, that is because I scribbled the lines in a hurry lest they evanesced. 

सिर्फ मैं ही था मौजूद
फिर इतनी परछाइयाँ क्यूँ थीं

सिर्फ मैं ही था अकेला
फिर इतनी तन्हाईयाँ क्यूँ थीं 

--मयंक छाया

It is not my case at all that these lines are great poetry (actually, they are) but only an illustration of how a creative mind works.

I played a song likely composed in 1961, the year I was born in Ahmedabad. The song was composed by Madan Mohan in Bombay with the lyrics by Khan. That era was obviously much before the internet, mobile phone and instant musical gratification.  I listened to it 61 years hence in Naperville on a wintry, foggy morning on my mobile phone while walking inside my apartment.

And then these lines were born. Brilliantly exhilarating. 

 

 

Hungry, hungry hominins ate hippos some 3 million years ago

Stone tools found at Nyayanga, Lake Victoria in Kenya (Photo courtesy: Science)

Many of you might have heard of the popular toy 'Hungry Hungry Hippos' where four toy hippopotamuses eat toy marbles. It is a fun game. 

Well, this post is not about hungry, hungry hippos. It is about hungry, hungry hominins who ate hippos instead some three million years ago. And that does not sound like fun.

Hippo--MC

A paper published in the journal Science says that an archaeological excavation on the shore of Lake Victoria in Kenya has found hundreds of stone tools and fossils dating back to as early as three million years ago. This is the oldest known case of tools being used by hominins, which is a group of primates including us, homo sapiens. Until recently the use of stone tools was believed to go back to between 2.6 million and 2 million years ago. The Nyayanga, Lake Victoria excavation pushes that time back to between 3 million and 2.6 million years ago.

The paper by Thomas W. Plummer of the Department of Anthropology, Queens College, New York and others, says "Oldowan tools were not only present, but were also being used to process a variety of foods, including hippopotamus."

"Thus, it appears that these tools were widespread much earlier than previous estimates and were widely used for food processing. Which hominins were using these tools remains uncertain, but Paranthropus fossils occur at the site," the paper says. The find suggested distribution spread over an area of 1300 kilometers. 

Hence my characterization of hungry, hungry hominins eating hippos. The team found tool-damaged hippo bones clearly suggesting that hippos were on the menu of Nyayanga hominins. I was just trying to visualize a bunch of hominins roaming around the lake with those tools butchering hippos. 

"The behaviors preserved at Nyayanga are at least 600,000 years older than prior evidence of megafaunal carcass and plant processing and substantially predate the increase in absolute brain size documented in the genus Homo after 2 Ma," the paper says. Ma, for your benefit, is mega annum, the unit for one million years. 

Of Quaoar and a meaningless universe

At 6.5 billion kilometers from us exists a dwarf-planet called Quaoar. The trans-Neptunian body has a radius of just 555 kilometers or a diameter of about 1110 kilometers. The dwarf-planet is part of the Kuiper Belt and is half the size of Pluto which was demoted from a ninth planet to a dwarf-planet by the International Astronomical Unit in 2006 much to the chagrin of Pluto lovers. So Quaoar is really dwarf.

Scientists at the University of Sheffield in England led by Professor Vik Dhillon have now found that Quaoar has rings around it and that too at a distance they should not be. They are similar to Saturn, which, incidentally, is 116,500 kilometers in diameter, making it 104 times the size of Quaoar. What this means is that planetary bodies and dwarf-planetary bodies can have rings notwithstanding such a massive difference in their sizes. 

A paper published in Nature says what is extraordinary about the Quaoar rings is that they are located outside what is known as the Roche limit. Given its distance from us, it is nearly impossible to view it directly. Hence scientists have to do it during what is known as occultation when it passes directly in from of the sun giving it a silhouette that we can observe. As it passed in front of the sun, there was one sharp dip in the sunlight was observed which was expected. What was not expected was that there were two smaller dips in the sunlight, one before and the other after. That indicated the presence of rings.

What has intrigued scientists is that the rings are at a distance more than seven planetary radii or in other words they should have been at about 3885 kilometers but in reality they are twice as far away. The seven radii limit is known as the Roche limit. The distance of the Quaoar rings have confounded scientists.

Beyond these specifics, I have always marveled at how we are so blissfully oblivious to billions of parallel worlds that exist in the universe with no apparent purpose or meaning at all. That brings me to my eternal question in Hindi addressed to Jupiter but one that applies to everything in the universe. "Yeh Jupiter karta kya hai, yaar? (What does Jupiter do?). Add to that "Yeh Quaoar karta kya hai, yaar?"