coldnoon: travel poetics (mar '12, 1.3)
DESCRIPTION
International Journal of Travel Writing Print ISSN 2278-9642 Online ISSN 2278-9650TRANSCRIPT
COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING)
(ONLINE ISSN 2278-9650 | PRINT ISSN 2278-9642)
NO. 3 | MAR ‘12 | 1.3
ED. ARUP K CHATTERJEE
COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS
(INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING)
COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS
(INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING)
| POETRY – RESEARCH PAPERS – NONFICTION |
ISSUE III | MAR ‘12 | 1.3
ED. ARUP K CHATTERJEE
COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING)
| POETRY – RESEARCH PAPERS – NONFICTION |
Coldnoon envisions travel not as flux but instead as gaps in travelling itself. Coldnoon means a shadowed instant in time when the inertia of motion of images, thoughts and spectacles, comes to rest upon a still and cold moment. Our travels are not of trade and imagining communities; they are towards the reporting of purposeless and unselfconscious narratives the human mind experiences when left in a vacuum between terminals of travel.
First published in New Delhi India in 2012
Online ISSN 2278-9650 | Print ISSN 2278-9650
Cover Photograph, Arup K Chatterjee
Cover Design, Arup K Chatterjee
Typeset in Arno Pro & Trajan Pro
Editor, Arup K Chatterjee
Assistant Editor, Amrita Ajay
Contributing Editors: Sebastien Doubinsky, Lisa Thatcher, G.J.V. Prasad, Sudeep Sen,
K. Satchidanandan
Copyright © Coldnoon 2012. Individual Works © Authors 2012.
No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or copied
for commercial use, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent
acquirer. All rights belong to the individual authors, and photographer.
Licensed Under:
Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Mar ‘12, 1.3) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Delhi 110067 India
www.coldnoon.com
Contents
Editorial
Poetry
Madhumita Ghosh
Mohan Rana
Sreemanti Sengupta
Chris Mooney-Singh
Sébastien Doubinsky
Malay Roychoudhury
Nonfiction
Lotourism: Low Impact, Low Cost, Localized, & Lonely – The
Ecotourist on a Budget and Redefined – Katrin Siff Einarsdottir
Vignette – Sanchari Sur
Review – Makarand Paranjape’s Acts of Faith: Journeys into Sacred
India – Arup K Chatterjee
Editorial Board
1
6
7
15
22
29
38
44
48
49
54
59
66
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Editorial | p. 1 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Editorial
Chatterjee, Arup K. “Editorial.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.3 (2012): 1-5. Web.
Licensed Under:
"Editorial" (by Arup K Chatterjee) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING Mar ’12, No. 1.3 | www.coldnoon.com
Editorial | p. 2 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Editorial
Dear Reader,
A Coldnoon poet tells me one of these days of how he reached England. I asked
him if he was rich today or ever. He refers to his appearance. It does not seem
to me as that of a rich man. Or, so I would like to believe, just to add more
credence, or a romantic incredulity, to his story. The story is unfinished. It
begins one afternoon on a park bench. Today the park bench could be both his
and mine, you cannot trust the ownership, as I am trying to finish it with my
own strokes. Right now, the bench has already become yours. So, here, on this
bench, the poet, or I, or you, or someone was eating peanuts. As the peanuts
got over the paper bag was dropped to the ground. Here, in India, paper bags
are also made of newspapers. These travel from one city to another. Despite
never being very fond of newspapers these scraps that often hide themselves in
our Indian households often distract me. Neatly a few times have I been
delayed on family visits owing to such distractions. These bags exchange
numerous hands. They are tainted and probably that is why they provide us
with a sense of forbidden pleasure. So, these scraps that travel so much
invariably hold me back. Anyhow, so, the peanut-eater too picked up the paper
bag he had just dropped. And, in this poet’s words a new “Coldnoon was
born”. Yes, it did strike me as very unwitting in the start. I tried to amuse
myself immediately, partly because of my respect for his writings, but the
flavour of the infinitude of travel seeped in only gradually. Slowly it appears as
though there is a huge nexus between inanimate objects that move through
human agency. I do not know what is the a priori attraction of the paper bag
articles, whether it is the shared journey with so many other human agents, or
the very agency of words to have travelled some immeasurable distance.
Eventually I never came to know how he reached England. Maybe, I
deliberately forgot if he did after all tell me how. He does not look like a
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Editorial | p. 3 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
wanderer, instead he looks like someone just slowly wrinkling at one place.
The reader is not obliged to believe my description of him. Probably I am
describing the Coldnoon traveller instead, I am describing all the poets to
have written here, the ones I have known.
The Coldnoon is a surrogate noon, it is lived by another for another’s
sake, following a journey by another, for another’s sake, followed by the
perspiration of another for another’s sake. Even in the most real experiences of
travel the element of surrogacy is foregone. Here by “real” I refer to foreseen
journeys. Journeys could be planned. However, even in that there is the
unmistakable dialogic interaction between the plan and the planner, in other
words, between one planner and those to have come before. The imagination
of a journey lives behind and shapes another travelogic imagination. So,
travelling is a quest to share itself, with its past, present and future. Sometimes
objects of travelogic desire give in so readily to carried into forthcoming
desires. And, with the traveller’s agency distant objects are interwoven
organically into an autonomous world web of their own. As long as this
structure is untarnished it remains invisible. The nexus comes into sight only
when the travelogic imagination begin to conflict. As different ideologies of
travel (travelogies) creep into a homogenous travelogy, let us say from a given
family or era, the fundamental signs of these travelogical conflicts
(travelogemes) tend to approximate Coldnoon Travel Poetry. A ludicrous
instance is that I do not observe the road or the potholes or the stones or the
tyres any longer. These have been embedded too deeply into my psyche, not
solely by myself, but by imaginations outside of me as well. I have been
travelled by my generation and my history, in surrogacy. Others have travelled
for my sake, or taken me places, either borne in a rickshaw, or bearing my
luggage; either writing for flight magazines that I read or making paper bags
out of newspapers I would never have read. So, there is a grand nexus to share
me in travel and keep my travels, and the objects I have travelled, shared. I do
not know where and when this nexus starts, and where or when it ends. I do
not ascribe it entirely to technology; technology is a very small portion of it or
just one mechanism to retain its structure. However, the very structure has its
own technology, in the broader sense of the word outside of technology
understood as gadgets and wires. It is this structure that I have fondly started
calling the surrogate-infinitude. I am not here to criticize it, or not even
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Editorial | p. 4 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
criticize it under the guise of celebrating it. I look at it with pure awe because I
cannot see more than a zillionth fragment of it at a time. A newspaper article
on a paper bag, or the worldwideweb more familiar to us as “www,” are
symptoms of this structure. The structure is dynamic; it keeps adding on itself;
it keeps me passive. I am given the illusion of movement in the movement of
this structure. But when I truly move, even let us say, from my doorstep to the
bus stop, and start observing, re-interpreting and permutating objects on the
way, with an intention of seeking difference from the surrogate-infinitude I
start building up a travelogeme, a new site of my travelogic difference. This is
when I start writing the Coldnoon and living the Coldnoon.
Travelling means changing co-ordinates. When in graph a curve moves,
two axes move as well. The curve has its identity by virtue of the axes. Is it
possible to have an identity without travel, and a travelling companion?
Travelling is the formation of identity; it also keeps identities in flux. But when
one is located and still identity is at its ideal best. So, in a case when there is no
companion and yet one is moving, one is in fact moving farther from identity.
Now, to this add the lacks of purpose and volition. It will precipitate the other
extreme of identity, that of the identity of the object of perception of the
traveller. It is this identity that Coldnoon brings to you once again in this issue.
This complex unveiling of the surrogate-infinitude and representing our daily
unrecorded oppositions of it is not a simple task in writing poetry. Besides,
such poetry also needs a conscious reading strategy of locating travelogemes.
Therefore, this issue onwards, Coldnoon will bring to you writings from
genres other than poetry. Although we call it non-fiction we understand that
there are things more imaginative than even fiction that can be regarded as
scholarly or philosophical. Non-fiction does not expressly mean that no
element of fiction will be approved of. Instead we have so named this section
to incorporate a broad area of writings that will help supplement Coldnoon’s
Poetry section, in order to enable us in the development of a comprehensive
“Travel Poetics”. So here we ask for assistance from you, the reader, to release
inhibitions and start accepting what we accept here in this section – widely
ranging from monologues to dialogues, from essays to academic papers, from
monographs to cartographs, from travelogues to travel memoirs, and so on.
Come, the new issue awaits your readership, and your acceptance.
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Editorial | p. 5 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Happy Coldnoon,
Editor
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p. 6 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Poetry
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Madhumita Ghosh | p. 7 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Madhumita Ghosh
Ghosh, Madhumita. “Poems by Madhumita Ghosh.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.3
(2012): 7-14. Web.
Licensed Under:
"Poems by Madhumita Ghosh" by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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Madhumita Ghosh | p. 8 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Madhumita Ghosh
The End
You gave me a few words.
I held on to them, to walk,
guiding my tottering feet
through rushing frenzied life...
a blanket, I hoped,
to shut out the chill
of blazing cold
petrifying gazes,
configurations
to navigate a silly paper boat
I had left behind,
in a sepia photo album.
I held on to the words,
the key to the front door
safe, deep in the recesses
of my crimson handbag,
used and cared for
everyday.
New words piled up,
a mountain of acrobats,
adding, subtracting, multiplying,
factors played truant,
till the words, misplaced,
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Madhumita Ghosh | p. 9 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
settled under the pile...
The key rusted,
fits into the keyhole no more,
threadbare blanket
thrown away,
along with the silly paper boat.
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Madhumita Ghosh | p. 10 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
A Web and a Camera
A rainbow coloured spider
Weaves a gossamer web of tales
Within my dream's reach
I spare him
As I dust murky trivialities away
A pentagon of five decades
Shimmering in the morning sun
Secrets treasured
Promises unkept
Vaulted with satin-wrapped care
In my heart's ruby-encrusted chest
A freckled face smiles
A tooth missing and doe-eyed
World's mischief carefully guarded...
Lo she walks in a siren's gait soon after
Sashaying down Park Street
Pairs of eyes following
As one eye focusses
Through a lens on a tripod
No star she is
A friend's amateur subject
Lovely Rita meter maid
She was to him
Just for the way she wore her bag
Beatles were their friends
As were Truffaut and Solzhenitsyn...
A cooker whistles
Duster in hand I run
Only to see when I'm back
The web hanging dirty and the spider gone
A gecko in its place moving its tail
I throw back my head
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Madhumita Ghosh | p. 11 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
And laugh
As from the corner of my eye
I catch a lens on a tripod
Winking at me from the mirror.
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Madhumita Ghosh | p. 12 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
For all you Lovely People
I walk the paths of eternity
Travelling to the edge of time
Tearing binding cobwebs away
That wrap themselves around my feet
Dropping breadcrumbs on the way
To keep busy the birds of prey
There blossoms a rainbow
Out there somewhere...
I promise to bring it
For all you lovely people.
For all you gentle people
I walk through shadows numberless
Crushing withered brown leaves under my feet
Counting the sapless helpless sentinels of the woods
That wait to burst out in flames
I spread my wings to hide the sun
Wring my heart to squeeze out drops of dew
To see the moist woods weep tears of joy
For all you beautiful people.
I climb up the hill in the clouds
To find space for you
Which I shall never occupy
But dust and scour
Polish and gleam
For you to come and go as you like...
The see-saw will not be a balance
The two sides are now in a plane
Joy is in the up and down
As you know all you sprightly people.
I am god
It is I who created
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Madhumita Ghosh | p. 13 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
And the same I who destroyed
Creator and destroyer
Shall I preserve it now
In a dancing gleeful brook of tomorrow
For all you lovely people.
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Madhumita Ghosh | p. 14 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Christmas
The holy night sings
Peals of laughter and cheer
Dazzle the starry sky
Fairy lights smile
Through a night very bright
Not so calm
At the street corner
In dingy rooms
Mother and child
Huddle into a shapeless form
A mass of darkness
Melting into a holy night
Blinding car lights zoom past
Mobile midnight mass
In polyphonic pristine perfection
Ring through a holy night
As Infants tender
And mothers gentle
Sleep though
Afraid to dream of a heavenly sleep
Dreaming of a miracle
A magical mystery morn
Drinks overflow
Food smashed
Polished shoes on polished floors
A holy child peers through a frosted pane
For a gleam
Of a redeeming grace.
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Mohan Rana | p. 15 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Mohan Rana
Rana, Mohan. “Poems by Mohan Rana.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.3 (2012): 15-21.
Web.
Licensed Under:
"Poems by Mohan Rana" by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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Mohan Rana | p. 16 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Mohan Rana
A Patch
The forest first dried inside me
The river turned into stone
The sky became barren
The earth fallow
Desert spread
soaking up every drop like blotting paper
Every shape tumbled onto its roots,
I had crossed a sand bridge there
before putting it into words
A green shoot dried under my feet
A memory – just touched – became sand
My footprints disappeared
Crazed hot air whirled about
unravelling breath from my lungs
Past days are saved in spider webs
in the outer mirrors of the inner world,
Hopes lie around with broken spades
Sew a patch
on the torn fringes of the day
so that a door may open
This century has lost its way
in the dark lane of time
With eyes open I see
this world, all around
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Mohan Rana | p. 17 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
words turn into dust
First inside me
the sand storm has struck
Translation from the poem in Hindi: “Ek paiband kahin jodna” by Lucy Rosenstein
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Mohan Rana | p. 18 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Cormorant
In a few days will begin a season
If Spring crosses this latitude
I will change my clothes
Searching maps of neighbourhoods to stroll
Branches will leaf up
And the remaining sparrows return from far and near;
I hope the news will not announce
Some new war;
I will clear my throat to say the unfinished, and fall silent again
Let the spring be so long this time
Those memories of autumn do not haunt so soon
In solitudes of the alphabet
Spring has been growing shorter every year
Each year grows shorter in spring,
Sometimes I wish there were only two seasons
Two, just like
good and bad
joy and grief
love and fear
you and I
Divided just in spring and autumn, and a wilting rain year long
By and by I longed to transcribe
the flavours drifting from the kitchen
Caught in the fabric of my sleeve
Pondering over some mystery in the backyard
Or the quest for an inch of corner in a tiny space
A time may come in some days
To divide our world
A time for whose memory all else must be forgotten
Saving receipts of daily essentials,
Life, not chance of breath alone
But the flames of love in the mind’s shadows –
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Mohan Rana | p. 19 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
A hand that grasps before the fall
Auditing the minor debts of everyday toils
Small rearrangements in the abacus
Shuddering in the crumbling present,
groping for chapped cheeks
I am yet to witness what is past
From behind the mirror glass
As I dive into its mercurial unknown
To find some, I lose some more
Translation from the poem in Hindi: “Pankauwa” by Arup K. Chatterjee
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Mohan Rana | p. 20 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Two Feet of Land
Where have you disappeared
or maybe I am lost
in what corner of the city, where
on two feet of land
even that is not mine
No distances, nor a mind in wrath
no reason to remember you
the pretext of forgetting you is the bad weather which
like a headache
eats time up, keeps eating
but is still hungry like today
Or I am asking myself
eating time raw
why am I hungry like a headache
Thinking, I am cracking a hard nut
Now I've even forgotten
what did I ask you
Replying to my own question
on two feet of land
which is not even mine.
Translation from the poem in Hindi: “Do Pairon Barabar Zameen Par” by Lucy
Rosenstein
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Mohan Rana | p. 21 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
After Midnight
I saw the stars far off -
as far as I from them:
in this moment I saw them -
in moments of the twinkling past.
In the boundless depths of darkness,
these hours
hunt the morning through the night.
And I can't make up my mind:
am I living this life for the first time?
Or repeating it, forgetting as I live
the first moment of breath every time?
Does the fish too drink water?
Does the sun feel the heat?
Does the light see the dark?
Does the rain too get wet?
Do dreams ask questions about sleep as I do?
I walked a long, long way
and when I saw, I saw the stars close by.
Today it rained all day long and the words were washed away
from your face.
Translation from the poem in Hindi: “Teesra Pahar” by Lucy Rosenstein and Bernard
O'Donoghue
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Sreemanti Sengupta | p. 22 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Sreemanti Sengupta
Sengupta, Sreemanti. “Poems by Sreemanti Sengupta.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.3
(2012): 22-8. Web.
Licensed Under:
"Poems by Sreemanti Sengupta" by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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Sreemanti Sengupta | p. 23 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Sreemanti Sengupta
City Blues and the Crab Killers
It beaded down
Drop, drop, drop
College far away,
The tensile hair on my pain
Scratching in culinary emotion
Not rough enough the rock
The movie snores
In the beer-smelling bus
Twirling up
Running down
Crab hunters
Soup drinkers
Back from school
My cheap little comb
Three and a half
And a half Roti
The impish pillow
For a cooked up story
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Sreemanti Sengupta | p. 24 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Hassled and skimpy
Back home
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Sreemanti Sengupta | p. 25 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
From, The Wordmaiden
Day Two
God does not play dice
- Albert Einstein
Eisequaltoemseesquare. Even he couldn’t put it down to words.
Not like James Joyce. And you thought I wouldn’t catch you
imitating.
You anger and startle me at the same time. Now, how did you know that?
Ulysses. That ship. It changed everything. Joyce. That man must’ve suffered.
Coffee?
Yes. With…
Lemon and without sugar. You’re getting repetitive.
Is it morning already?
Yes. It’s the second day.
Damn it. Time’s never been my friend. What’s with all the research?
Time travel. I didn’t like the sound of it when you mentioned it in the first
place.
Ah! Don’t let my cynicism influence you. Einstein. He won it. He kept his promise.
Did you know Time’s the fourth dimension? Have you any idea that time actually
slows down with speed?
How much speed?
Too much.
Nothing we laymen can do with it?
No. Nothing. How was I last night?
Okayish. But you steer clear of the spot.
Yes. Like the cat who couldn’t decide whether to die or live.
You got to face it. It’s skin after all.
Einstein couldn’t face it. He lost it to Uncertainty. The universe, the
changeability. God, he said, was smarter than that. Smarter, organized. Had it all
sorted out.
________
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Sreemanti Sengupta | p. 26 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Is being half of something very difficult?
For me, it is.
And for the others?
It’s sheer fact to them. Imagination loses hands down to facts. It’s
nauseating.
Don’t you wish you never came across that ship with no treasure?
No. I should be. Any sane person would curse that ship for disturbing her peace.
But, it gave me the world I desired. A snatch at hope. Three days with reality.
The promise. I don’t know what to do. A poem you say. A poem.
That’s too big a demand. I can’t get past pretence. I haven’t got the ship.
Maybe it’s too early for you. Maybe the challenge came too fast. But something tells
me you’ll get there one day. You’ll find your ship with no treasure.
Do you know what happened to the cursed sailors of the ship?
Yes. They grew lazy and drowsy on the drug from the island’s exotic flower. The
captain, he couldn’t persuade them back to the wild life of the wild seas. Most of
them died in hallucination of a better life.
________
You live your life
As if it’s real
- Leonard Cohen
What’s your purpose? You loll about the bed. As if you’re waiting for the ticking to
stop.
Would coffee help? Coffee with…
Lemon and without Sugar. I’ll put the water to boil.
The promise. You’re never going to fulfil it. Are you?
Please! I beg you! Am not honest. That cleft on your waist. It turns
me to butter. I’m so helpless.
Exotic. Ain’t I? That’s what you thought when you dealt that blow with Mama
Lise. What’s a two liner for a lifetime of immortal beauty?
Yes. I deserve all that. You’re behaving human now. I don’t like the
Goddess voice of yours.
I’m not human. I’m standing on bargained legs. And Sanders loves me.
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Sreemanti Sengupta | p. 27 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Sanders? Who’s that?
The man who loved me with no more than truth. I let him down
when I came for you. Greed done the death of me. It’s night already.
I’ll come up with something. I’m a Poet. Don’t you worry. Let’s have some fun now!
It’s called making love.
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Sreemanti Sengupta | p. 28 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Cheshire Trains
I come back home with neon animals
And gasoline burning my insides
The gentleman tilts his head
To the rushing track
It carries away his brain
He leans back, and smokes a little less
By then the sands have settled down
And books are up for burning
The train rumbles in
And leaves me in rapid light years
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Chris Mooney-Singh | p. 29 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Chris Mooney-Singh
Mooney-Singh, Chris. “Poems by Chris Mooney-Singh.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.3
(2012): 29-37. Web.
Licensed Under:
"Poems by Chris Mooney-Singh" by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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Chris Mooney-Singh | p. 30 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Chris Mooney-Singh
Pantun of the Chinar Grove (Srinagar, Kashmir)
Written above the gate of the Shalimar Gardens, Sri Nagar, Kashmir by
the order of Emperor Jahangir (1542-1605)
‘If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.’
- Jami
Someone has set a bomb off in a car
where tourist buses come from foreign cities.
Disturbed, the birds alight from a chinar
and now there’s shadows running in the trees.
As well as flowing blood from foreign cities,
seeping where the leaves turn smoky purple,
the sound of running in those giant trees
brings crack troops and walkie-talkie babble.
It is the dusk when leaves turn smoky purple
with a game of hide and seek, just like a movie –
some crack troops, the walkie-talkie babble
and insurgency behind each massive tree.
The blown up bottle-bodies are a movie
that Bollywood will buy and script and make
because revolt behind Kashmir’s State Tree
insults the tranquil ripples of Dal Lake.
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Chris Mooney-Singh | p. 31 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Bollywood will buy and script and make
this upturned tale upon some pristine hillside
with song and dance, a house-boat on Dal Lake,
yet those dead tourists do not stop to ride.
What was a heaven dancing on a hillside
is now some shadow running in the trees.
The flag of peace has slipped away to hide
as Kalashnikovs bring shadows to their knees.
The final shadows fall behind the trees
here in the dying season of the chinar,
and now the mourners fall down on their knees
because a bomb was set off in a car.
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Chris Mooney-Singh | p. 32 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Coconut (Malabar Coast, Kerala)
A person needs
a tree of heaven,
a place to rest,
a place to forget,
a seat of ease,
with falling nuts
with shells for cups,
of meat and milk
and healing oils,
thickened curries,
flowers for weddings
and ceremonies
smashing the shell
inside the temple
like cracking the ego
and passing back
sweet blessed Prasad;
or on special occasions –
anointing a guru
like a maharajah.
Such a tree might
rise up slender
as a coconut tree,
a fine full woman
breasted, tall,
in her prime and
always ready
with slim, lean trunk
so boys can climb
to shake her down,
to shake her down
then greedily
drink her breast milk.
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Chris Mooney-Singh | p. 33 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
A nation needs
a tree of heaven
in a watered place,
a respected space
where love can plop
its fruit in the lap.
It must guard against
creating the kingdom
as a barren place
where belief begins
to drive its nail
into the trunk
on a moonless night,
or spit at her
while passing by
in cursing heat.
A philosophy needs
a tree of heaven
a final place
a paradise tree,
a rising myth
a kalpavriksha
to let it see what life
could be ahead
and how to make
this starting point –
a place to rest
a place to forget
a life of work–
success and loss
of milk and pain
along a beach
at morning, dusk,
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Chris Mooney-Singh | p. 34 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
and shade midday,
the shoreline saying
over and over
this is the place,
this is the place.
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Chris Mooney-Singh | p. 35 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Ber Tree (Amritsar, Punjab)
You bear such a famous name
straight from old poems,
and yet in India you’re
still the plain ber tree, laden
with poor man’s fruits,
not too sweet to spoil us
and cheap in the bazaar.
Yes, plainness is holy,
a dukh banjani tree of cures.
At the Golden Temple,
one leans over the marble tank
of water, built around
a once-upon-a-time miracle
pool. A heron once dived in
and flew out a white swan.
Seeing the remarkable,
a cripple’s faith rose
and he jumped in next.
Soon he could run a race
to show and tell. Guru Ram Das
built a temple next
and soon a city rose
from the fruit of that
faith and blessing.
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Chris Mooney-Singh | p. 36 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
And I’ve seen a ber
in the village of one saint
who sat beneath with focus
and a hand telling beads.
It’s said he had visions,
then got his orders
to cure the sick
with the shape of the story
within these branches.
The voice in the tree,
once a princess
snubbed a maharishi.
As a cure for pride
he rooted her here
for penance as this ber.
She still serves here
with yellow-green berries,
the most simple of treats
for a race of farmers
who have few rupees
for mangos or papaya.
Dropped berries are taken
with faith as medicine
and little tongues of leaves
talk to the pure-hearted,
giving them guidance,
telling them how to pray
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Chris Mooney-Singh | p. 37 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
and how to get through life.
A thousand years of penance
are set, until the tree
falls and she will be free,
but the trunk is strong
and the fruits – not too sweet;
each has the hint
of sourness at the pip.
Who knows, one day even
when teeth spill the juice,
that last tart flavour
will be gone, will be gone.
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Sébastien Doubinsky | p. 38 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Sébastien Doubinsky
Doubinsky, Sébastien. “Poems by Sébastien Doubinsky.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.3
(2012): 38-43. Web.
Licensed Under:
"Poems by Sébastien Doubinsky" by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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Sébastien Doubinsky | p. 39 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Sébastien Doubinsky
Misleading Columbus
Flying over the clouds' strange landscapes
I think of you and the limited geography of your heart
and I remember the Columbus I thought I'd be to your soul
but you gave me false maps and a rotten ship
and the new continent I thought I had discovered
turned out to be but my hometown again
with its gray skies, narrow streets
and cold hearts
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Sébastien Doubinsky | p. 40 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Bus Ride
She sits next to me
with her beautiful dark hair
and blue tourist eyes
and I can say
nothing
do
nothing
think
nothing
because I am not
in love with her
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Sébastien Doubinsky | p. 41 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Butterfly Panic
The day the butterflies invaded the city
they warned us through the radio
like in some old science-fiction movie
"Do not touch these insects, they are poisonous.
I repeat, do not..."
That night I went for a walk
in the mild worried evening
and all the people who sat outside the cafés
were watching intrigued scared amused
the poisonous snow-flakes flicker
around the bright neon globes
and they were wondering how long
they were going to live
these goddamned beautiful butterflies
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Sébastien Doubinsky | p. 42 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Foghorns
the first load of spring has finally arrived
the city slowly warms up under the hazy sunlight
by the harbour you can hear the foghorns wailing like deer in heat
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Sébastien Doubinsky | p. 43 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Essaouira
To Philippe Sendek
white walls twisting into narrow dark streets
and behind them the blue whispers of the sea
the sun crashed through the rooftops like a madman's orchestra
we talked about literature
and a thousand other useless things
compared to the wind... the wind...
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Malay Roychowdhury | p. 44 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Malay Roychowdhury
Roychowdhury, Malay. “Poems by Malay Roychowdhury.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics
1.3 (2012): 44-7. Web.
Licensed Under:
"Poems by Malay RoyChowdhury" by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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Malay Roychowdhury | p. 45 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Malay Roychowdhury
Local & Global
Who has smeared
On your groin
The ink of love
Abantika
Who has scratched
On your cheeks
With thorns of rose
Abantika
Who has drawn
On your waist
Whipped up clots
Abantika
All your lovers
Gnaw at you
In every spot
Abantika
What I love
Is complete you
Top to bottom
Both your sides
Abantika
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Malay Roychowdhury | p. 46 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Translation from the poem in Bangla: “Local aar Global” by Arup K Chatterjee
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Malay Roychowdhury | p. 47 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Six Haikus
Gravitational force
Wave, particle, calculus –
Womanless Newton
Someone turns around
Inquiring about the time
Earth stops for a while/ Earth stops in orbit
Call it the cell-phone
Colourful, with video games
Foreign lady’s voice
Footprints on sandbank
Lone river fears to wash it
Lives in Autumn’s drought
First dawn of monsoon
Dad’s sandals in balcony
A peon rings the bell
Wife leaves the clothes drying
Kite stuck in the terrace wires
Song of afternoon
Translations from the haikus in Bangla by Arup K Chatterjee
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p. 48 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Nonfiction
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Lotourism | Katrin Siff Einarsdottir | p. 49 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Lotourism:
Low Impact, Low Cost, Localized, & Lonely – The Ecotourist on a Budget and Redefined
by Katrin Siff Einarsdottir
Einarsdottir, Katrin Siff. “Lotourism: Low Impact, Low Cost, Localized, & Lonely –
The Ecotourist on a Budget and Redefined.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.3 (2012): 49-
53. Web.
Licensed Under:
"Lotourism: Low Impact, Low Cost, Localized, & Lonely – The Ecotourist on a
Budget and Redefined" (by Katrin Siff Einarsdottir) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0
Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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Lotourism | Katrin Siff Einarsdottir | p. 50 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Lotourism: Low Impact, Low Cost, Localized, & Lonely – The Ecotourist on a Budget and Redefined
by Katrin Siff Einarsdottir
I studied ecotourism and wrote my masters dissertation on the discrepancies
between defined and actualized ecotourism since I have always battled with
the ‘ecotourist’ identity. I liked to think I was an ecotourist, also called an
alternative tourist, sustainable tourist, or an environmentally friendly tourist.
But then these terms lead us to more definitional inconsistencies, since "eco"
and "environmental" and "sustainable" are all buzzwords overused and often
misunderstood.
After completing my thesis, I realized the term ecotourism is a vague,
green-washed term, whose definition is undecided among academics, and
sometimes unidentifiable in practice. I like to travel, and I love the natural
world we live in, but often-times carbon emissions and ecological impact
contradict my obsessive compulsive desire to go all over the place, taking
boats, planes, cars and buses at an unsustainable rate. It’s easy to feel guilt
about my carbon footprint in spite of being unclear where I can accept
accountability for planes and buses that will take their routes with or without
me.
However, it is possible to have an ethical travel consciousness without
identifying as an ecotourist. Ecotourists pay more for greener experiences and
off-set their flights by planting trees. But for sustainable tourism to become a
thing of elitists is unfair. Ecotourism has also been set aside from culture
tourism, offering strictly nature and adventure getaways in wild areas, but
humans are an intrinsic part of nature and the true ecotourist should still be
touring the cities and villages people call home. Mass tourists take their flights
and book their all-inclusive hotels or cruises but travel intensively for only one
or two weeks. My travel style has fused and forgiven aspects of both styles of
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Lotourism | Katrin Siff Einarsdottir | p. 51 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
tourism, into something I have coined “lotourism”. It is a philosophy of travel
for the weary backpacker who wants to see the world and everything in it.
They do not pay more, but pay less, and see more, over longer periods of time,
with fewer modes of transport taken by traveling locally and avoiding long-
haul flights.
I had the idea to invent a new word to describe the way I travel since it
doesn’t suffice to say I’m a backpacker, just a traveller, a tourist, or an
ecotourist. I want a word that describes my travel mentality and approach to
seeing the world in a more sustainable way. I have a dialect of English my
friends call Katrin-speak, but this isn't a word I'm pulling from that English
vocabulary - it’s more like a philosophy of travel that I've adopted and want
more people to share. "Lotourism” is a theory of tourism that isn't captured by
any other one word.
I like to think I travel sustainably, but not just sustainably natural-
resource-wise. I am financially resourceful, traveling with minimal luggage,
staying with locals, and traveling slowly but steadily over short-haul distances.
I can live off $10 a day or less in some places. I never stay in hostels or hotels,
but couchsurf and make new friends everywhere I go. I have one small
backpack and all my possessions and necessities for 3 months in it, a 35L-20kg
bag.
I’m not really a backpacker, since I avoid backpacker hostels and hate
being defined by the stuff in a bag on my back. I’m not always a tourist, since I
try my best to camouflage into my surroundings and see things from a local
perspective. I adopt the local way of living, eat where locals eat, dance the way
they dance, dress as indiscriminately as possible, and don’t say much unless
I’ve learned the local language since I never want to be that white girl
screaming English in slow motion to someone who has no idea of what I’m
saying. I'm definitely a traveller, but so is the American guy sitting in business
class flying to Dubai for a 2 hour business meeting before returning to London
via Dakar for dinner in England's most authentic Turkish restaurant. So I've
realized there are different types of travellers, performing different types of
travel, and when asked how I travel, my new answer is "I'm a lotourist."
Lotourism, in a nutshell, is like ecotourism, but redefined and on a
budget. It is travel that is low-impact, low-cost, localized, and lonely.
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Lotourism | Katrin Siff Einarsdottir | p. 52 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
1) Low-impact: your footprint on the natural environment is minimal,
which means your carbon footprint is low, your use of exhaustible or non-
renewable resources is low, you create minimal or no waste, you do not
contribute to the degradation of natural environments, your touristic activities
and choice of transport/accommodation/or anything else travel-related is
based on an educated, informed decision to be of as low-impact as possible.
Your footprint on the local or host culture is minimal, which means you learn
and engage in cultural exchange so far as you do not negatively impact any
local traditions or customs, you are a low-profile and low-maintenance guest,
imparting little change or judgment excepting what is beneficial or desired for
cultural exchange.
2) Low-cost: you travel on a tight budget, which requires you to avoid
tourist traps like all-inclusive vacations, hotels, and organized tours. You avoid
shopping and buy almost nothing but necessities, spend your money on simple
travel (preferably terrestrial, like trains or buses, going short distances rather
than long-haul flights), and stay with locals that you know through friends,
family, or travel communities like couch-surfing. You don’t buy souvenirs or
foods made of unsustainable resources (i.e. rare wood products, turtle shell
jewellery, eating rare or endangered animals) but contribute to local arts and
crafts or culture in other ways. You avoid renting cars or hiring taxis and take
the local transportation, or better yet, walk more. Cycling or hitch-hiking are
also lotourism friendly.
3) Localized: you stick around in an area long enough to know it, see
every corner (especially outside the city centre or touristic attractions) and the
surrounding suburbs or country side. You stay where you want to be, living a
day approximating the usual life there. You spend your money in such a way
that financial resources go directly into the pockets of locals (locally-owned
businesses, local guides, surrounding farms instead of imported/mass
produced foods) and you support the local economy (avoiding international
tour operators or foreign-owned companies in all your purchasing decisions).
4) Lonely: last but not least, you travel alone, travel by yourself to be
better immersed in your surroundings, alone with your thoughts and feelings
to fully absorb, process, and understand your new environment. Be vulnerable,
meet local people, avoid speaking your own language, catering to the needs of
a travel companion, or doing anything that you don't feel like doing or going
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Lotourism | Katrin Siff Einarsdottir | p. 53 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
anywhere you don't feel like going. Leave your Lonely
Planet/Frommers/Fosters/etc. at home and just ask people for help as you go,
talking to as many strangers as you can. Don't stay in hostels where you'll get
swallowed up into a group of other tourists, don't travel with a tour group or
on a big bus with "rich tourists, coming your way" printed on the license plate.
Travel more spontaneously, irresponsibly even, at the mercy of a local tip, with
the adrenaline-rush of taking the wrong bus or the long bus, ending up on the
wrong train, showing up in a place you have no clue about, learning from
scratch and not a guide book. You can go for as long or short as you want, book
one-way tickets, have undefined destinations, a flexible schedule, and a trip
planned only one day ahead at a time
So, for any other lotourists out there, get the word out on the new word.
And, if you understand the idea, agree with the philosophy, and like the way it
works in travel, spread the word so more lotourism can exist in this globalizing,
traveling world of ours.
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Vignette | Sanchari Sur | p. 54 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Vignette:
by Sanchari Sur
Sur, Sanchari. “Vignette.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.3 (2012): 54-8. Web.
Licensed Under:
"Vignette" (by Sanchari Sur) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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Vignette | Sanchari Sur | p. 55 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
Vignette
by Sanchari Sur
It was still not morning yet. Calcutta was slowly waking up to a day that would
be as busy as any other day in the life of the city. Close to the tram depot, the
newspaper boys busily sorted their shares from a vendor. In a while they would
all be on their way, aiming rolled papers perfectly to land in verandas of any
floor possible. The chaywalla boiled milk in a large pan. This would suffice for
his day’s sell-off tea. The roads smelled of the night gone by of sleep; of peace.
And yet she had woken up very early and walked all the way to the Tram
Depot. She had to take the first tram down Chitpore Road, not on compulsion.
It was her desperate bid to get back to what she believed were her roots – her
city, her old, laid back, backdated Calcutta.
Sitting at this old, run down tram depot waiting for her tram to start,
she looked around. Even the driver and conductor gave her strange looks when
she asked when the train would start. With her appearance and gait, she was
perhaps the least expected passenger, particularly at this time of the day. She
The wooden seats, the bell, the rope hanging from it passing from one
compartment to another, the dented steel bodies, the numerous half torn
advertisements inside the compartment! All misfits in the fast pace of the
metro city! She was in a system that no longer held heritage as one of the
important things. Business was like any other system, that made money and
had no connection whatever with heritage, unlike what they claimed. Perhaps,
it was her in selfish interest that she had proposed a joy tram ride for a group of
donors who were coming for a visit to the city.
“A joy tram-ride?” everybody had looked at her as if she had gone mad.
“And what would we sell them this way? Broken vehicles, drooping wires, 18th
century fans that hardly work, snail’s pace? For heavens’ sake, Lady!” It was a
heritage that no other city in India had. It was a heritage that this mystic city
had continued to nurture over centuries. True, it might have lost its old glory,
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Vignette | Sanchari Sur | p. 56 First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650| Online ISSN 2278-9650)
but Calcutta Tramways still remains a heritage that makes any Bengali proud.
But it did not appeal to the bosses. They genuinely felt that it was not
necessary to make them go through the torture of a heritage ride. A well
prepared presentation in an air conditioned banquet hall should be enough,
they had said. But she was not convinced. And when she went on arguing, they
had said, to her surprise, that it was time to leave heritage behind and go ahead
with time.
She did not have to give them any more answers, but she had to find
answers for herself. Slowness, as is the greatest complaint against the heritage
vehicle, is what stood at a stark contrast with the life around the city which
outgrew it. And yet, like an old yet steady man, the tram both runs and walks
considering the speed of modern vehicles around it. Riding a tram, she had
always felt was like going back in time! As the tram left the depot, the loud
rumbling of the metal wheels on the metal tracks drifted her mind to a time
when she could or could not have been there. Back in the time when this semi-
dilapidated piece of vehicle was not considered useless and a burden! And it
stands as a silent witness to all the changes the city has gone through over a
century and more. It connected her to history. The glory of those days filled
her with a strange optimism that she had not felt in ages. It was a time when
the adjoining areas had no resemblance to their modern day appearance.
As her tram ambled past Lal Bazar, she could almost smell the blood,
tears, and breathings of the many who died in the gibbet that had once stood
right on the place her tram was crossing – some innocent, some guilty. This
part of the city always left her a little unnerved, be it the uniformed policemen
or the rows of black police vehicles standing around the gate. She had not
known a policeman, not even talked to one in all her life and she wondered
how they were. Would they be like any of us? Or would their uniforms add to
their personality a certain weight that becomes difficult to understand for the
rest of us mere mortals?
As she pulled her mind away from the uncomfortable feeling, she heard
the faint and melancholy strains of the Azaan at the Nakhoda mosque just
down the road. She realized it was a Friday, hence her luck at this hour. It grew
louder and more touching. Even though she did not understand a word of it,
almost instinctively she pulled the dupatta over her head. The green columns
that could only partly be seen from her seat shimmered in the morning sun.
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The architecture of this grand building always filled her with a certain
reverence that she could never explain. Being out of reach, perhaps, made it
even more enigmatic and inviting. She wanted to feel the peaceful silence of
the prayers that reverberated across each pillar and wall of the age old mosque.
The hymns continued as she passed the red ornate gates of the
illustrious Jorasanko Thakurbari. She curbed her instincts of entering the gates
and take a stroll in the lawns that she worshipped. She remembered how she
had aimlessly roamed around the various rooms and terraces of one of the
many houses wrapped in history. Again, she thought, a silent testimonial to the
years gone by and the times that the city and the country has seen. She was not
a student of history and her sense of dates and events in the past would
probably not have been immaculate, but she had a strange connection to the
years gone by. She could somehow always connect to those times.
She smiled to herself. The sounds of the Azaan, these old city streets,
the history – it was all seeping inside her. And then her smile broadened as one
by one she saw the strangest names on huge posters on both sides of the road
as her tram passed the Jatra Para. It had always remained the same, except for
the newer trends of names and faces. Long Live Chitpore Road and Long live
Calcutta Tramways, she prayed silently! Smiling and overdone faces of actors,
less and more known, adorned both sides of the roads while other hoardings
announced forthcoming live performances. The concept of Jatra had always
been a mystery to her – the sheer grandeur and overdoing in terms of make-up,
acting, voice modulation and all other aspects – and how it had kept
generations of spectators in awe in all of rural Bengal! She wondered what
brought actors even from Mumbai all the way to Bengal to be a part of this
tradition. “Tradition,” the one word that wove all the feelings from the
moment she started her journey, was what kept her going and rooted in this
century old city, with an equally old transport system, heritage architecture
from an age long gone, a tradition of acting that has remained in its own glory
even after so many ages have passed – it all culminated into her being, a true
Calcuttan!
As she approached Kumortuli she realized that it had not struck her that
Durga Pujo was round the corner. The entrance to the potters’ colony and all
around it had been strewn with half made images of unadorned Durga idols
slaying their respective Demon King. She loved the smell of wet earth as
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slowly, layer after layer it created the goddess and her carrier, and it had always
remained the same. Just like the huge ‘Bahon’ that was now carrying her
through her trip down history and heritage! From one of the by lanes she
could see the river that had been the life blood of the city for centuries, and her
mind leapt in joy. She would complete her journey in a while and she knew
where it would be. A cup of tea at the Kumortuli Ghat and she could start life
again; older and wiser like the many existences she lived through her ride
today.
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Review –
Makarand Paranjape’s Acts of Faith: Journeys into Sacred India
by Arup K Chatterjee
Chatterjee, Arup K. “Review – Makarand R. Paranjape’s Acts of Faith: Journeys into
Secret India.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 1.3 (2012): 59-65. Web.
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Review – Makarand R. Paranjape’s Acts of Faith:
Journeys into Sacred India
by Arup K Chatterjee
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have
been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a
falcon, or a storm, or a great song. (Rilke, 76)
“I realize unexpectedly that I have become a pilgrim without a God,
a wanderer from city to city and from village to village seeking a
place where the mind may find rest, but finding none”…Travel, at
this point, takes on a totally different dimension, resembling the
age-old metaphor of the round of lives that we go through,
travelling from birth to death. This is no longer the travel of a
European adventurer visiting distant shores in search of conquest
or wonder, but the travel of a soul from life to life, in search of
everlasting peace or freedom from process. (Paranjape, 91)
And here comes the turning point in Paranjape’s travels.
The subject in the excerpt is Paul Brunton’s book A Search in Secret
India, published in 1934. Brunton’s travels in India follow a travelogy of
lavishness. In the beginning of the book, according to Paranjape, Brunton
attributes “higher powers of observation and logic” to the Western traveller.
This prepares the ground for the dialectic between the Orientalist, who is
Brunton, and the Oriental(s), especially Ramana Maharshi, which is soon to
follow in Paranjape’s analysis. However, another crucial matter is how
Brunton’s estimation of the Western traveller qualifies the latter as the rightful
colonizer of the land. Colonialism, to begin with is not an oppressive force. It
begins with the independence in economic and political subjectivities to travel
and trade. This is also the birth of the technical. It is this technique that
Brunton prides his nation with, that to reinforce and reinscribe he visits India.
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Yet, quite the opposite is to be faced with. Braced with the complacency of Raj
Brunton is forced to a realisation of his loss of svaraj. In his encounters with
Ramana Maharshi that follow he undergoes bhanganyaya, “the deconstruction
of the body itself”; he is drawn to the brink of a nervous breakdown. His
pursuit of the picturesque or the spectacular weakens considerably as he
begins to travel inwards. The sacred and the secular or the colonizer and the
colonisable are no longer entities that lie outside of his body. They are no
longer objects of his speculation. They are the constituents of his very spirit, as
they always were. “Brunton is no longer a traveller; paradoxically he is no
longer a pilgrim”. The traveller has been transformed into the spirit that
impregnates objects as they are seen in the eyes of a traveller. This spirit is
consciousness itself. One cannot be conscious of it. As soon as Brunton claims
consciousness over it, and in turn his own sagehood, he loses the spirit. He
becomes “boring” and “incomprehensible” in Paranjape’s terms; in effect he
loses the very journey on the road to svaraj.
Paranjape’s next subject of inquiry is Roger Housden’s Travels Through
Sacred India. It is sharply at odds with Brunton’s text. Housden’s travels do not
trail the classic bildungsroman that the average European traveller in search of
the picturesque populates. His India is the most secret insofar as it is the most
open. It is susceptible to globalization and liberalization, both that bring in
illusions of its progress and purdahs on its naked demographic, economic and
as such spiritual disparities. Housden does not discover, establish, or revive
spirituality. Neither is Indian spirituality presumed as an a priori space. Instead
it is treated as a manifestation of the individual spirit. “‘The sacrality of the
place is interior to the pilgrim, as well as being externally located at some
physical place’”. With regard to this Housden’s Travels problematize the
metamorphosis of the concept of pilgrimage into one of tourism, in the
Hinduism of this modernity. The spirit of such pilgrimages having now
become a secularizing force merely adds to the utility of the site or the
monument. Housden therefore celebrates not the promise of the unknown but
the unknown in the ordinary. While the standard practice in any travel
discourse is to specialize or glamourize the travel site Housden functions
through a deglamourization of it, or by delineating the deglamourizing effects
of modern touristic consciousness. However, he does not discriminate either
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the pilgrim or himself from the tourist. No travel itinerary can be without
mercenary suffixes.
Situated today in globalization, or an order of fragmenting nationalities,
travel writing is on an untenable course. Such is the popular doubt, and
consequently there has been a huge decline in theoretical and philosophical
writings on travel and travel literature in the last ten years. The reason behind
this is that the travelled is seen as calculable, and therefore exhaustible. That
globalization is detrimental to travel literature is a surprising notion. Topology
is finite while experience is not. While representations of racism, colonialism,
imperialism or linguistic and cultural jingoism that emanate out of travel
writings are symptoms of a temporal disturbance of identities, the moment of
the travel experience is timeless. So, racism for the other, for instance is nothing
but a trope to identify with what the ego recognizes as the privileged self. This
however, follows in the deferral of the transcendental ego and the
phenomenological intersubjectivity that is at the heart of a travelling
consciousness. Tourism thus becomes not only “predatory” as Housden and
Paranjape call it, but also cannibalistic because it feeds on the human essence
that has been de-subjectivised and de-linked from the essence that the
travelling self is a part of. In other words, the spirit of a non-dual human
consciousness undergoes an endless series of dualistic differentiations and
categorizations as othered from the self. So, the self rather occupied in
differentiating itself from the other starts substituting the other with whatever it
travels. Even the individual other becomes a constant signification of a persona
or an identity of a class. Subsequently, from the traveller’s eyes cultures,
communities and traditions get essentialized. And this is something that still
happens, something that is as true of the foreign as the native traveller. “‘What
matters – what will set apart a pilgrim from the ordinary traveller – is whether
you are willing to make the tirtha, from this world of mundane reality to one in
which the journey, the goal, and the pilgrim himself, are all expressions of the
One Divine Whole’”, where the finite and differentiating self is just a part of
the infinite other, the spiritus mundi. “‘(T)he divine, rather than being
somewhere above and beyond life, is…even in the squalor that seems to be its
very antithesis.’”
Paranjape’s comparative analysis of Brunton and Housden is just
preceded by a chapter that describes the general politics of travel writing. In
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Rushdie’s words “‘Adventuring is…by and large a movement that originates in
the rich parts of the planet and heads for the poor’”. Looking retrospectively at
this chapter neutralizes the perils of such a thesis. To say that largely the only
travellers have been people with wealth or patronage is historically true.
However, it is an aggressive thesis that delegitimizes the phenomenological
development of the anonymous pedestrian. So, the thesis is true only insofar as
it has crushed those travels that did not undertake passages across oceans,
rivers, continents or constituencies. In the modern imagination travel is
undoubtedly a matter of prosthetic movement over distances traceable on a
small scale map. It does not account for daily travels to and from the school or
the workplace. Paranjape metes out justice to those pedestrians by
hierarchizing the humilities contained in travel. He privileges the pilgrims and
“other humble travellers”. And it is clear to us, now in hindsight, that not
merely the destination of a sacred place makes the traveller a pilgrim – it is the
spirit whose toils and spiritual development do so. The pilgrim is never pre-
qualified as one. Yet, far from privileging religious processions to holy shrines,
Paranjape deconstructs the very idea of the presumed certainty of this holy
site. There cannot be any certainty principle behind spiritual fulfilment;
sacrality is not an object of discovery to be found on a treasure hunt or at a
given location. Its attainment lies purely in its elusiveness. The point where
svaraj seems to be complete is the point when the toil for it comes to an end.
So the spiritual is in travelling and every travel is spiritual.
Paranjape centres his book by these three chapters which are,
exceptionally, not based on his personal spiritual or physical journeys. In the
rest we find the writer himself travelling. The centre acts as a zone of his
consciousness of history and literature. It is a fulcrum that governs his own
circlings around a God, that is at once sacred and profane. And at the core of it
comes the turning point that was also the beginning: the horrific anxiety of
“Who am I?” Brunton is shown temporarily resigned or reconciled or content
with the charisma of the Maharshi. He is saved from self-destruction, and is
revived. But Paranjape does not resolve, redeem, or explain Brunton
completely, even when he counterpoises him against Housden. The reason
could be Paranjape’s own psychological identification with Brunton that he
uncannily reveals towards the end in his Epilogue, in the form of a partial
disclosure that his student makes to him about his own book of poems which
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is itself titled Partial Disclosure. This book, we are told, comprises three
sections. The student reports that in the third section although there is a shift
from the “physical to the metaphysical” and the “carnal to the spiritual” this
dynamic spirituality does not “erase the unresolved tensions of the more
ordinary kind (of love)”. So while Brunton has been a traveller Paranjape has
been the lover. While Acts of Faith definitely makes a “forward movement”
post-Brunton it inevitably makes a “backward” one too by eventually uniting
the higher and the lower quests of the spirit, in the traveller and the lover. As
Paranjape himself says, “‘the republic of the spirit’ is a democracy, not a
dictatorship”. There is no hierarchy here among the low and the high. So, just
as it is noble for Paranjape to live and die as though love mattered, it is noble
for the traveller to live and die as though the travel mattered more than the
arrival. Like ideal love is the renunciation of control over the object of love, so
is travel at its spiritual best when control over its object of travel is renounced.
Both clinging on to life and the site of travel with gaze, superstition and a
temporal eros, are instead moments of thanatos. They secularise life and travel.
They hasten death of the body and the shrine.
Travel literature on India has both seen a boom and a philosophical
decline recently. In that context Paranjape’s Journeys to Sacred India is a
refreshing oddity. The community of spirits is not entirely welcoming, if not a
catalyst of xenophobia, for those interested in secular forms of travel. To them
the book does not glorify the sacred at the cost of the secular. It does not even
differentiate between the two. In this regard it is a modern Indian pioneer to
trace the spiritual cartography of the nation within dynamic system of love and
faith. Objects, spaces and faces reappear in our journeys, not as the same
anymore, but as new personae, for, we ourselves have grown in the process of
our circling journeys.
Round and round we go; what determines whether it is a sacred
journey or not is the quality of our intention (Paranjape, 98).
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Acts of Faith: Journeys into Sacred India: Makarand R. Paranjape; Pub. by
Hay House Publishers (India) Pvt. Ltd., Muskaan Complex, Plot No. 3, B-2
Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, 110070. No. of pages 232; Rs. 299.
Other Work Cited:
Rilke, Rainer Maria. “I Live my Life” in News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold
Consciousness, ed. Robert Bly. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995.
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Editorial Board
EDITOR
Arup K Chatterjee
Poet, Critic and Researcher
Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Delhi, India
ASSISTANT EDITOR
Amrita Ajay
Researcher, and Teacher of English
University of Delhi, India
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
K Satchidanandan
Poet, and Former Professor of English,
University of Calicut
Former Editor of Indian Literature,
The journal of Sahitya Akademi
New Delhi, India
Lisa Thatcher
Writer
Sydney, Australia
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Sudeep Sen
Poet, and Editor of Atlas Magazine
Editorial Director of Aark Arts Publishers
New Delhi, India, London UK
GJV Prasad
Poet, Novelist, and Critic
Professor of English, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Vice Chair, Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language
Studies
Editor of Journal of the School of Languages
New Delhi, India
Sebastien Doubinsky
Poet, Novelist, and Critic
Researcher, and Lecturer, Aesthetics and Communication
Aarhus University, Denmark
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