Things have become so bad that this year I did not even realise when did the Ganesh Festival come and go. I am a big fan of these 10-days of celebration that the city puts up, year after year, with the same amount of enthusiasm. Every year, I make it a point to at least be there on Laxmi Road on the day of visarjan; it’s fun, the music, and the sheer energy is quite contagious.
This year the night disappeared somewhere; and I have no memory of it.
However, I spend the morning quite fruitfully, and read a poem, in Assamese and then in English translation, not my own, but a poet I admire— Abani Chakravarty.
It was an honour to attend the Pune version of the 100 Thousand Poets for Change (100TPC) event on Saturday, September 29 at Kala Chaya in Patrakar Nagar, for which all the credits must go to the tireless coordination of the one and only Dipalle Parmar, and her superheroic managerial skills, who not only organised this event, in association with Open Space, but did so in the last whole month, every Saturday, and at different venues each time. I had attended the first event on September 1, and then this one.
It was an eclectic mix of four invited poets, Dipalle herself, and the audience, each one literally inclined. There was R Raj Rao and Max Babi, both from the city, Marathi-English poet Sachin Ketkar from Vadodara, and Georgina Maddox from Delhi. It was great to hear Ketkar, about whom I had heard about a lot but never had the chance to read him or meet him.
And there were the up-and-coming ones, like yours truely, Huzaifa Pandit, the Kashmiri student at the University of Pune, and Chandrakant Redican, another UoP student, from Jejuri who is experimenting with Marathi rap, which I found quite fascinating. I told him, he must cut an album.
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The photograph is stolen from Georgina Maddox’s Facebook album HERE.
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