Ode For The Uprooted

OutlookIndia

Listen to excerpts from Outlook's India, Identify, Gender, Health issue by Pragya Vats  #OutlookIndia #Podcast #OulookMagazine

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00:00 I am Pragya and I bring to you excerpts from the current issue of Outlook,

00:04 which looks at two cover stories.

00:06 One, ground reports from five states going to polls through three vectors of identity,

00:11 gender and health.

00:13 And will the outcome decide which way the wind will blow in the 2024 general elections?

00:18 Second cover story continues to be on Palestine, titled "From the River to the Sea."

00:24 Ode for the Uprooted, book review by Kabir Dev, a writer and poet,

00:29 based in Karimganj in Assam.

00:31 Word chakmak in Devanagari Hindi refers to the process of glowing.

00:36 The word is often used to describe the most beautiful and significant things

00:41 we notice in our surroundings.

00:43 Ramesh Karthik Nayak's debut book of English poetry, Chakmak,

00:47 is all about observing what deserves to be observed.

00:50 Nayak is the first writer from the Banjara community to share its rich literature,

00:56 heritage and lifestyle with contemporary readers.

00:59 Nomads, painters, writers, architects, poets,

01:03 have built the foundation of human civilization since the beginning of time.

01:08 The notion of a nomad lies in seeing through every journey to its destination.

01:13 It is becoming easier for regional writers today to journey into the mainstream because of

01:18 translations and gain a wider readership.

01:21 Still, society and its obsessive need for classification

01:25 forces many regional writers to stay in the shadows.

01:29 Nayak's poetry is all about the creation of smaller stories around the larger ones.

01:34 The charm lies in the different triggers of awakening.

01:38 Some of them growl with grief.

01:40 Some take on the reality that consumes our dreams.

01:43 The rest mold the images of detrimental and developed situations.

01:48 When a poet who is celebrated as a master of his language

01:52 writes a book for a larger circle of readers of the English language,

01:56 the responsibility is to outshine the yesterday.

02:00 Chakmak successfully pierces through the expired shards of our silence and finds its own voice.

02:06 The truth of going back to the origin in folk culture is considered something holy,

02:12 but in urban cultures, it becomes a cliché even though it does retain a poetic element.

02:18 Worshippers of the fragments of the urban and the rural

02:22 now buried under the constructs of the conspiracies and capitalism.

02:27 Nayak holds dear those who believe in an ideal world with entities influenced by horizons of

02:33 assemblage where eternity is a result of symbiosis of the fragments of the urban and the rural worlds.

02:41 The marriage of the two have created some of the finest works of art in history.

02:46 Nayak writes, "Horizons appear and disappear.

02:50 Creatures fall ill in this polluted world.

02:53 Trees change into idols, are drenched with blood.

02:56 Islands and museums of tribes are bottled in glass jars.

03:01 O Earth, eternal of all, take back everything into your womb."

03:08 When the writer George R.R. Martin mentions the old and the new gods in his magnum opus,

03:14 The Song of Ice and Fire, it speaks a great deal about the evolution of the supreme one.

03:20 Indian tribes understood the idea of godly evolution a long time ago, but most of us

03:27 have lost track of it on the way to becoming who we are today in the modern world.

03:33 In the poem Celebration, Nayak writes about the idea behind peripheral rituals,

03:38 the everyday ones that exist around but are largely ignored, and why a major part of them

03:44 rests on making it a point celebrating their existence.

03:48 He holds a mirror before a world that manifests joy and celebration while clutching class and caste

03:56 and staying detached from the community's reality.

03:59 For this and more, read the current issue of Outlook.

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