Happy New Year

As the old year winds up, we wait for the new year in anticipation… We wait to see how the new born blossoms as each year takes a unique form. This year, while we strengthened the population with vaccines, other kind of politics set in, which finally found fruition in a war that has perhaps been one of the saddest events of human history — people made homeless, towns erased, lives lost, nature polluted with gunpowder and shreds of machinery along with the ultimate threat of nuclear weapons erupting every now and then. What could possibly give hope amidst the darkness of the receding year with price hikes, the threat of looming hunger, joblessness, more conflicts and fear?

The fact that we have survived for more than 200,000 years in our current form is heartening. That we have lived through wars, plagues and disasters without being erased out of existence only highlights the resilience of our species to adapt to all kinds of contingencies. Perhaps, with the current crises, we will move towards new world orders…perhaps, we will find hope in creating and evolving new ways of living in consonance with nature and more by our need than greed.

With that hope in heart, we wish you a wonderful start to the New Year with a few interesting pieces from our journal, including a highly entertaining piece by Suzanne Kamata on how the Japanese traditionally, literally make a clean start each New Year and Michael Burch’s fun poems and a translation of Tagore’s adaptation of the traditional year-end Auld Lang Syne. We have sprinkled more humour in poetry by Rhys Hughes and Santosh Bakaya and, in prose, by Tagore, translated by Somdatta Mandal, Ruskin Bond and Devraj Singh Kalsi. Laughter at the this juncture will hopefully give us a year with more shades of happiness.

Poetry

Tagore’s Purano Sei Diner Kotha or ‘Can old days ever be forgot?’ based on Robert Burn’s Auld Lang Syne, translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.

Fun Poems for the New Year by Michael R Burch… Click here to read.

Kissing Frogs by Rhys Hughes… Click here to read.

The Recliner by Santosh Bakaya… Click here to read.

Prose

Travels & Holidays: Humour from Rabindranath: Translated from the original Bengali by Somdatta Mandal, these are Tagore’s essays and letters laced with humour. Click here to read.

A short tale from Friends in Wild Places: Birds, Beasts and Other Companions by Ruskin Bond. Click here to read.

In A Clean Start, Suzanne Kamata tells us how the Japanese usher in a new year. Click here to read.

In The New Year’s Boon, Devraj Singh gives a glimpse into the projection of a new normal created by God. Click here to read.