Tag: Prithvijeet Sinha

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Contents

Borderless, November 2023

Art by Sohana Manzoor

Editorial

Counting Colours… Click here to read.

Conversation

Banjara author Ramesh Karthik Nayak discusses his new book, Chakmak (flintsone), giving us a glimpse of his world. We also have a brief introduction to his work. Click here to read.

Translations

Demanding Longevity by Quazi Johirul Islam has been translated from Bengali by Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Moonlight, a poem by Bashir Baidar, has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.

Maithili Poetry by Vidyanand Jha has been translated from Maithili by the poet himself. Click here to read.

The Window and the Flower Vase has been written and translated from Korean by Ihlwha Choi. Click here to read.

Tagore’s Tomar Kachhe Shanti Chabo Na (I Will Not Pray to You for Peace) has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.

Poetry

Click on the names to read the poems

Michael Burch, Aineesh Dutt, Stuart McFarlane, Radhika Soni, David Mellor, Prithvijeet Sinha, John Grey, Ahana Bhattacharjee, Ron Pickett, Suzanne AH, George Freek, Arshi Mortuza, Caroline Am Bergris, Avantika Vijay Singh, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Kisholoy Roy, Rhys Hughes

Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

In A Parody of a Non-existing Parody: The Recycled Sea, Rhys Hughes uses TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ to create a new parody. Click here to read.

Musings/Slices from Life

The Theft of a River

Koushiki Dasgupta Chaudhuri tells a poignant truth about how a river is moving towards disappearance due to human intervention. Click here to read.

In Quest of Seeing the Largest Tree in the World

Meredith Stephens writes of her last day in California. Click here to read.

Beyond Horizons: A Love Story

Sai Abhinay Penna shares photographs and narrative about his trek at Chikmagalur. Click here to read.

Musings of a Copywriter

In Crush on Bottles, Devraj Singh Kalsi inebriates his piece with humour. Click here to read.

Notes from Japan

In Address Unknown, Suzanne Kamata shares a Japanese norm with a touch of humour. Click here to read.

Essays

Peeking at Beijing: The Wall

Keith Lyons travels to The Great Wall and writes of the experience. Click here to read.

Cinema, Cinema, Cinema!

Gayatri Devi writes of the translation impact of cinema, contextualising with the Tamil blockbuster, Jailer. Click here to read.

Coffee, Lima and Legends…

Ravi Shankar explores Lima, its legends and Peruvian coffee. Click here to read.

Stories

Jonathan’s Missing Wife

Paul Mirabile sets his story in a small town in England. Click here to read.

The Tender Butcher

Devraj Singh Kalsi weaves a story around a poetic butcher. Click here to read.

Book Excerpts

An excerpt of The White Shirts of Summer: New and Selected Poems by Mamang Dai. Click here to read.

An excerpt from Ramesh Karthik Nayak’s Chakmak. Click here to read.

Book Reviews

Somdatta Mandal reviews Ali Akbar Natiq’s Naulakhi Kothi, translated from Urdu by Naima Rashid. Click here to read.

Ranu Uniyal reviews I am Not the Gardener: Selected Poems by Raj Bisaria. Click here to read.

Anita Balakrishnan reviews Lakshmi Kannan’s Guilt Trip and Other Stories. Click here to read.

Bhaskar Parichha reviews Akshat Rathi’s Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions. Click here to read.

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Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

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Editorial

Counting Colours

Look around you and expand your heart. 
Petty sorrows are insignificant.
Fill your vacant life with love for humanity. 
The Universe reverberates with celestial ecstasy. 

— Anondodhhara Bohichche Bhubone (The Universe reverberates with celestial ecstasy), Tagore, 1894

Some of the most beautiful colours in this universe are blended shades— colours that are born out of unusual combinations. Perhaps that is why we love auroras, sunrises and sunsets. Yet, we espouse clear cut structures for comprehension. As we define constructs created by our kind, we tend to overlook the myriads of colours that hover in the gloaming, the brilliant play of lights and the vibrancy of tints that could bring joy if acknowledged. That ignoring the new-born shades or half-shades and creating absolute structures or constructs lead to wars, hatred, unhappiness and intolerance has been borne true not only historically but also by the current turn of events around the globe. While battles are never fought by the colours or beliefs themselves, they can harm — sometimes annihilate — rigid believers who are victimised for being led to accept their way as the only one and hate another. Perhaps, this has echoes of the battle between the Big Endians and Little Endians over the right way to break eggs in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). As the book is mere fiction, we can admire, agree and laugh at the content. However, in real life, watching newsreels has become a torture with destruction and violence being the main highlights. These detract from life as we knew it.

Writing or literary inputs seem to have become a luxury. But is it really hedonistic to play with words? Words used effectively over a period of time can impact readers to think peace, acceptance and love and also help people heal from the ensuing violence. That can be a possibility only if we self-reflect. While we look for peace, love and acceptance in others, we could start by being the change-makers and bridge builders ourselves. That is the kind of writing we have managed to gather for our November issue.

Building such bridges across humanity, we have poems on the latest Middle Eastern conflict by Stuart McFarlane and David Mellor, which explore the pain of the victims and not the politics of constructs that encourage wars, destruction of humanity, the flora, the fauna and our home, the Earth. Michael Burch writes against wars. Prithvijeet Sinha and Ahana Bhattacharjee write about refugees and the underprivileged. Reflecting colours of the world are poems from Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Suzayn AH, Radhika Soni, Ron Pickett, George Freek and many more. Rhys Hughes has brought lighter shades into his poetry by trying a new technique while reflecting on yetis and mermaids. His column tries to make a parody of a non-existing parody, using TS Eliot’s century old poem, ‘Wasteland’, with amazing results!

Our translations are all poetry too this time. Professor Fakrul Alam has translated a poem discussing human aspirations by Quazi Johirul Islam from Bengali. Another Balochi poem of hope by Bashir Baidar has been brought to us in English by Fazal Baloch bringing into play the moonlight.

For the first time, we are privileged to carry poetry from a language that has almost till now has eluded majority of Anglophone readers, Maithili. Vidyanand Jha, a Maithili poet, has translated his poetry for all of us as has Korean poet, Ihlwha Choi. Winding up translations are Tagore’s ultimate words for us to introspect and find the flame within ourselves in the darkest of times – echoing perhaps, in an uncanny way, the needs of our times.

Our conversation this month brings to us a poet who comes from a minority group in India, Banjara or gypsies, Ramesh Karthik Nayak. In his attempt to reach out to the larger world, he worries that he will lose his past. But does the past not flow into the future and is it not better for traditions to evolve? Otherwise, we could all well be living in caves… But what Nayak has done — and in a major way — is that he has brought his culture closer to our hearts. His debut poetry book in English, Chakmak (flintstones), brings to us Banjara traditions, lives and culture, which are fast getting eroded and he also visits the judgemental attitude of the majoritarian world. To give you a flavour of his poetry, we bring to you an excerpt from his book, livened beautifully with Banjara art and an essay by Surya Dhananjay that contextualises the poetry for us. Our excerpts also have a focus on poetry for we are privileged to have a few poems from Mamang Dai’s The White Shirts of Summer: New and Selected Poems. Mamang Dai is a well-known name from the North-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh for both her journalistic and poetic prowess.

We are happy to host Ranu Uniyal’s beautiful review of I am Not the Gardener: Selected Poems by Raj Bisaria. Bisaria among other his distinctions, was named “Father of the modern theatre in North India” by the Press Trust of India. The other reviews are all of prose. Somdatta Mandal has written of Ali Akbar Natiq’s Naulakhi Kothi, a fictional saga of gigantic proportions. Anita Balakrishnan has reviewed Lakshmi Kannan’s short story collection, Guilt Trip. The book that gives hope for a green future, Akshat Rathi’s Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions has been reviewed by Bhaskar Parichha. Parichha contends: “Through stories that bring people, policy and technology together, Rathi reveals how the green economy is possible, but profitable. This inspiring blend of business, science, and history provides the framework for ensuring that future generations can live in prosperity.”

The anti-thesis to the theme for a welfarist approach towards Earth can be found in Koushiki Dasgupta Chaudhari’s poignant musing titled, “The Theft of a River”. Meredith Stephen’s travel to California and Sai Abhinay Penna’s narrative about Chikmagalur have overtones of climate friendliness. Ravi Shankar writes further of his travels in Peru and Peruvian coffee. Keith Lyons takes us peeking at Beijing and the Great Wall. Gayatri Devi adds to the variety by introducing us to the starry universe of South Indian cinema while Devraj Singh Kalsi brings in the much-needed humour with his narrative about his “Crush on Bottles“. Suzanne Kamata has also given a tongue-in-cheek narrative about the mystique of addresses and finding homes in Japan. We have fiction from Paul Mirabile located in England and Kalsi’s located in India. Pause by our contents page to view more gems that have not been mentioned here.

Huge thanks to our team at Borderless Journal, especially Sohana Manzoor for her fabulous artwork. This journal would not have been as it is of now without each and every one of them and our wonderful contributors and readers. Thank you all.

Wish you all a wonderful month as we head towards the end of a rather tumultuous year.

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

Click here to access the contents page for the November 2023 issue

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READ THE LATEST UPDATES ON THE FIRST BORDERLESS ANTHOLOGY, MONALISA NO LONGER SMILES, BY CLICKING ON THIS LINK.

Categories
Poetry

A Grandmother’s Lament

By Prithvijeet Sinha

Paintings by Amrita Shergill ((1913-1941)
A solitary Om circled her ablutions,
holding the pain of those post war years in her ribs,
when she was young and on her way to the bed chamber,
praying for lesser contractions of torment,
consummating a war-torn union with her eyes to the ceiling.

Broken bangles, shattered pots,
leaking vessels of the Shergill women,
severed heads of cows and crows
and approaching stilts of vultures upon the river's bank --
She escaped all that with her wedding procession,
for the countryside's doomsday was two weeks later.

Telegraphs of the carnage reach her,
from those zigzagging pole wires and squinting birds in the balcony,
her memory drawing palms towards the heads of brides and grooms,
now asking for eternal peace and her elderly wisdom.
Another marital procession seeking her ancient presence,
in the arterial vista of generations.

**

She was young once,
when her tongue limned the outline of his shoulders
and his fingers caressed the very essence of her body.
The idea of existence,
of sandalwood aromas reeling with sweat and smells of new beginnings,
all garnered few towns away from her own, 
where intimacy took beastly garbs to snap hymens
and midnight guards broke their sacred words,
to ransack humanity.

"Blessed be the union of these two souls,
prosper and progress as pilgrims on this eternal road,
in faith and in fidelity,
draw strength and make amends the first time around in brewing conflict's way, "
Her words comforting a small town that always lay outside the epicenter of her heyday.

**

Her town burned,
looted and pillaged,
sacked to become refuge of wandering ghosts
and a blot on nostalgia's subtle arc.

She remembers swings swaying past the rainbow,
the fairs bedecked with children's hoots
and parental vigils of joy
and the day before a prognosis of bloodshed doused the fire of youth.

She remembers.
The lament of her 'long ago' gone
with the last smoke of the past,
her failing memory
and the joy of the town congregating for a couple's future.

She remembers.

Prithvijeet Sinha has prolific published credits that encompass poetry, musings on the city, cinema, anthologies, journals of national and international repertoire, as well as a blog, An Awadh Boy’s Panorama, from which these poems have been republished. His life-force resides in writing, in the art of self-expression.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL. 

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Contents

Borderless, March 2023

Art by Sohana Manzoor

Editorial

Imagine… Click here to read.

Translations

A translation from Nabendu Ghosh’s autobiography, Eka Naukar Jatri (Journey of a Lonesome Boat), translated by Dipankar Ghosh, from Bengali post scripted by Ratnottama Sengupta. Click here to read.

Uehara by Kamaleswar Barua has been translated from Assamese and introduced by Bikash K. Bhattacharya. Click here to read.

Kurigram by Masud Khan has been translated by Professor Fakrul Alam from Bangla. Click here to read.

Bonfire by Ihlwha Choi has been translated from Korean by the poet himself. Click here to read.

Tagore’s Borondala (Basket of Offerings) has been translated by Mitali Chakravarty from Bengali. Click here to read.

Poetry

Click on the names to read the poems

Michael R Burch, Kirpal Singh, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, Amit Parmessur, Carl Scharwath, Isha Sharma, Gale Acuff, Anannya Dasgupta, Vaishnavi Saritha, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Pragya Bajpai, George Freek, Sanket Mhatre, Ron Pickett, Asad Latif, Rhys Hughes

Poets, Poetry and Rhys Hughes

In Indian Pale Ale, Rhys Hughes experiments with words and brews. Click here to read.

Conversation

Being fascinated with the human condition and being vulnerable on the page are the two key elements in the writing of fiction, author and poet Heidi North tells Keith Lyons in a candid conversation. Click here to read.

Musings/Slices from Life

Mother Teresa & MF Hussian: Touching Lives

Prithvijeet Sinha muses on how Mother Teresa’s painting by MF Hussain impacted his life. Click here to read.

The Night Shift to Nouméa

Meredith Stephens writes of her sailing adventures to Nouméa. Click here to read.

Musings of a Copywriter

In Simian Surprises, Devraj Singh Kalsi describes monkey antics. Click here to read.

Notes from Japan

In Multicultural Curry, Suzanne Kamata reflects on mingling of various cultures in her home in Japan and the acceptance it finds in young hearts. Click here to read.

Essays

Which way, wanderer? Lyric or screenplay…

Ratnottama Sengupta explores the poetry in lyrics of Bollywood songs, discussing the Sahityotsav (Literary Festival) hosted by the Sahitya Akademi. Click here to read.

One Happy Island

Ravi Shankar takes us to Aruba, a Dutch colony, with photographs and text. Click here to read.

Cadences in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Paul Mirabile explores the stylistic nuances in this classic by James Joyce. Click here to read.

Stories

Heafed

Brindley Hallam Dennis plays with mindsets. Click here to read.

Busun

A Jessie Michael narrates a moving saga of displacement and reservations. Click here to read.

A Wooden Smile

Shubhangi gives us poignant story about a young girl forced to step into the adult world. Click here to read.

The Infallible Business

Sangeetha G tells a story set in a post-pandemic scenario. Click here to read.

Book Excerpts

An excerpt from Robin S. Ngangom’s My Invented Land: New and Selected Poems. Click here to read.

An excerpt from Vikas Prakash Joshi’s My Name is Cinnamon. Click here to read.

Book Reviews

Aruna Chakravarti reviews Bornali Datta’s In A Better Place: A Doctor’s Journey. Click here to read.

Somdatta Mandal reviews Baba Padmanji’s Yamuna’s Journey, translated from Marathi by Deepra Dandekar. Click here to read.

Basudhara Roy reviews Robin Ngangom’s My Invented Land: New and Selected Poems. Click here to read.

Bhaskar Parichha reviews S.Irfan Habib’s Maulana Azad – A Life. Click here to read.

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Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Editorial

Imagine…

Art by Pragya Bajpai

Imagine a world without wars, without divisions, where art forms flow into each other and we live by the African concept of Ubuntu — I am because you are’ — sounds idyllic. But this is the month of March, of poetry, of getting in touch with the Dionysian elements in ourselves. And as we have said earlier in the introduction of Monalisa No Longer Smiles: An Anthology of Writings from across the World, what could be a better spot to let loose this insanity of utopian dreams than Borderless Journal!

Having completed three years of our Earthly existence on the 14th of March, we celebrate this month with poetry and writing that crosses boundaries — about films, literature and more. This month in the Festival of Letters or Sahityaotsav 2023, organised by the Sahitya Akademi, films were discussed in conjunction with literature. Ratnottama Sengupta, who attended and participated in a number of these sessions, has given us an essay to show how deep run the lyrics of Bollywood films, where her father, Nabendu Ghosh, scripted legends. It is Ghosh’s birth month too and we carry a translation from his Bengali autobiography which reflects how businessmen drew borders on what sells… After reading the excerpt from Nabendu’s narrative translated by Dipankar Ghosh and post-scripted by Sengupta, one wonders if such lines should ever have been drawn?

Questioning borders of a different kind, we have another piece of a real-life narrative on a Japanese Soldier, Uehara. Written by an Assamese writer called Kamaleswar Barua, it has been translated and introduced by Bikash K. Bhattacharya. The story focusses on a soldier’s narrative at his death bed in an alien land. We are left wondering how his need for love and a home is any different from that of any one of ours? Who are the enemies — the soldiers who die away from their homes? What are wars about? Can people live in peace? They seemed to do so in Kurigram, a land that has faded as suggests the poem by Masud Khan, brought to us in translation from Bangla by Professor Fakrul Alam, though in reality, the area exists. Perhaps, it has changed… as does wood exposed to a bonfire, which has been the subject of a self-translated Korean poem by Ihlwha Choi. Tagore’s poem, Borondala translated as ‘Basket of Offerings’, has the last say: “Just as the stars glimmer / With light in the dark night, / A spark awakens within/ My body. / This luminosity illuminates / All my work.” And perhaps, it is this luminosity that will also help us find our ideal world and move towards it, at least with words.

This is the poetry month, and we celebrate poetry in different ways. We have an interview with poet Heidi North by Keith Lyons.  She has shared a poem that as Bijan Najdi said makes one “feel a burning sensation in …[the]… fingertips without touching the fire”. It flows with some home truths put forward with poignancy. We have poetry by Michael R Burch, Kirpal Singh, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, Amit Parmessur, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, George Freek, Sanket Mhatre, Asad Latif and Rhys Hughes. While Burch celebrates spring in his poetry, Parmessur explores history and Hughes evokes laughter as usual which spills into his column on Indian Pale Ale. Devraj Singh Kalsi has written of simian surprises he has had — and, sadly for him, our reaction is to laugh at his woes. Meredith Stephens takes us on a sailing adventure to Nouméa and Ravi Shankar explores Aruba with photographs and words. Suzanne Kamata shows how Japanese curry can actually be a multicultural binder. Prithvijeet Sinha links the legends of artist MF Hussain and Mother Teresa while Paul Mirabile explores the stylistic marvels of James Joyce in his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a very literary piece.

We have a book review by Aruna Chakravarti of Bornali Datta’s In A Better Place: A Doctor’s Journey, a book that is set amidst immigrants and takes up certain social issues. Baba Padmanji’s Yamuna’s Journey, translated from Marathi by Deepra Dandekar, one of the oldest Indian novels has been discussed by Somdatta Mandal.  Bhaskar Parichha has told us about S.Irfan Habib’s Maulana Azad – A Life. Basudhara Roy has brought out the simplicity and elegance of Robin Ngangom’s My Invented Land: New and Selected Poems. He writes in the title poem that his home “has no boundaries. / At cockcrow one day it found itself/ inside a country to its west,/ (on rainy days it dreams looking east/ when its seditionists fight to liberate it from truth.)”. We also carry an excerpt from his book. Stories by Jessie Michael, Brindley Hallam Dennis, Sangeetha G and Shubhangi bring flavours of diversity in this issue.

Our journey has been a short one — three years is a short span. But, with goodwill from all our readers and contributors, we are starting to crawl towards adulthood. I thank you all as caregivers of Borderless Journal as I do my fabulous team and the artists who leave me astounded at their ability to paint and write — Sohana Manzoor, Gita Vishwanath and Pragya Bajpai.

Thank you all.

Looking forward to the next year, I invite you to savour Borderless Journal, March 2023, where more than the treasures mentioned here lie concealed.

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Musings

Mother Teresa & MF Husain: Touching Lives

By Prithvijeet Sinha

Mother Teresa–Goddess Of Peace by MF Husain. Photo provided by Prithvijeet Sinha

Art is often made out to be something unattainable, acquired strictly by virtue of good taste. To me that supposition has a very myopic idea of what actually constitutes art.

Art is spontaneous, sensual and immediately attractive to the naked eye simply because it is all around us in diverse forms, beginning with the canvas of nature.

From the first rays of sunlight to the final nocturnal lull of the moon, waxing and waning with our existence, a landscape is the first index of the omnipotent power of the hands that create. The stakes are just as natural when an influential figure who has provoked meaningful thoughts has her portrait occupy a space which we commit to our memory. Memory is to art, after all, what the intermingling of colours and shapes is to the structure of an artistic creation – even more than its form. Hence, beholding an artwork that inspires is a moment of personal reckoning with the feelings it evokes.

An artwork that has greatly impacted my artistic consciousness is ‘Mother Teresa–Goddess Of Peace’ by the indefatigable Maqbool Fida Husain. Mr. Husain is entrenched in the fabric of popular culture for his unmistakable, humbling style and use of colours eschewing any hint of beautification that sometimes becomes an accursed necessity in art.

His portrait of the benevolent social messiah is no different. Mother Teresa is someone who has graced his canvas in many iterations and the Goddess of Peace is one among the many he painted around the 1980s. As founder of Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa occupies a unique space in our cultural consciousness as we know it, caring for the neediest masses that society is quick to eliminate from the mainstream. That she was painted by another unassuming individual who was austerity personified made them equals. Mr. Hussain, on his part, dissociated his oeuvre from the elitist pretensions of galleries and terminologies of the ‘art world’, making art that touched hearts.

The artwork has Mother Teresa in the middle, in her trademark white sari with a blue border, faceless — an individual whose attire spelled a divorce from pretensions of the world. It is in perfect consonance with the painter who mostly walked bare feet and had not even a single iota of self-recognition about his position as an icon. He was an everyman. To him, it was a vocation but also a necessity to survive.

For others it is the 9 to 5 rule. For him, it was his art.

For Ms. Teresa too, it was personal duty that called for sacrifice of the ego. So, they were doing what they thought was essential in maintaining the order of who they were, in direct relation with an often imperfect world.

The central figure in the painting is surrounded by a young girl, a cow and a dove in flight holding olive tree leaves in its beak. The cow symbolises innate innocence and spiritual purity in concordance with the child while the bird signifies the efforts of people to uphold peace and effect constructive change, never shying away from the reality of poverty that millions endure.

The way her attire is spread out is as if she is holding the beleaguered world in her empathetic care (a baby in this case is on her lap) signals a last hope. She rises above the maternal role of primary caregiver alone. She is a universal figurehead, a genderless representative. That’s why her motives and actions translate so well through the brushstrokes of another. That’s the reason her faceless presence isn’t about fear but as a blank space meant to be filled with the image of any face that could set the same compassionate precedence as her.

Today, my evolution as a writer and poet owes its debts to that day when this artwork became wholly animated for me, creating a blueprint that continues to inspire and provoke thought. That’s the power of art– to create a space in memory and nudge us forward towards change, whether it’s a painter for the cause of artistic integrity and no monetary considerations, a messianic voice for the spiritual upliftment of the downtrodden or a writer preserving their collective legacies through his contemporary words.

The passion in these two people’s efforts to always strive in achieving integrity in service of the truth is soul-stirring. It is so easy to be swayed by conformity, even if it’s within the confines of an educated middle-class structure. The painting is a gateway to that natural state of mind which only creates and never jostles for accolades. I see that in myself.

Sincerity is a prized attribute which is often splayed wide open, to be attacked by a modern world where propagandas and muddled agendas defeat our simplicity of being. But people like Mother Teresa and Mr. Hussain show us the path where one walks the line, forging a map of individuality where materialism just cannot make a dent because the intent is to look at the truth of millions who cannot raise themselves from a cycle of grinding dispossession and exploitative tempers.

Art takes its imprints from the unvarnished truth. This artwork achieves that, illuminating all who dare to effect constructive actions and challenge conformity.

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Prithvijeet Sinha has been prolifically publishing works of various hues in journals and magazines like   Cafe Dissensus, Confluence, The Medley, Borderless, Wilda Morris’ Poetry Blog, Screen Queens, Rhetorica Quarterly, Lothlorien, Chamber Magazine, Livewire  among others. He believes writing to be the true music of the soul.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL. 

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Categories
Contents

Borderless, November 2022

Art by Sohana Manzoor

Editorial

We did it! … Announcing our first anthology … Monalisa No Longer Smiles… Click here to read.

Conversations

Suchen Christine Lim, an iconic writer from Singapore in conversation about her latest book, Dearest Intimate. Click here to read.

Blazing trails, as well as retracing the footsteps of great explorers, Christopher Winnan, a travel writer, delves into the past, and gazes into the future while conversing with Keith Lyons. Click here to read.

Translations

Rows of Betelnut Trees by My Window by Nazrul has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

A Day in the Life of the Pink Man is a story by Shankhadeep Bhattacharya, translated from Bengali by Rituparna Mukherjee. Click here to read.

The Clay Toys and The Two Boys is a story by Haneef Shareef, translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.

Saturday Afternoon is a poem by Ihlwha Choi, translated from Korean by the poet himself. Click here to read.

Tagore’s poem, Tomar Shonkho Dhulay Porey (your conch lies in the dust), has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty as The Conch Calls. Click here to read.

Poetry

Click on the names to read

Jared Carter, Asad Latif, Rhys Hughes, Alpana, Mimi Bordeaux, Saranyan BV, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, Quratulain Qureshi, Jim Bellamy, Sourav Sengupta, Ron Pickett, Davis Varghese, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Jonathan Chan, Terry Trowbridge, Amrita Sharma, George Freek, Gayatri Majumdar, Michael R Burch

Poets, Poetry and Rhys Hughes

In Infinite Tiffin, Rhys Hughes gives an unusual short story centring around food and hunger. Click here to read.

Musings/Slices from Life

The Scream & Me

Prithvijeet Sinha writes of how Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream, impacts him. Click here to read.

A Fine Sunset

Mike Smith travels with a book to a Scottish beach and walks in the footsteps of a well-know novelist. Click here to read.

The Death of a Doctor

Ravi Shankar mourns the loss of a friend and muses on mortality in his experience. Click here to read.

My Contagious Birthday Party

Meredith Stephens writes of her experience of Covid. Click here to read.

Dim Memories of the Festival of Lights

Farouk Gulsara takes a nostalgic trip to Deepavali celebrations in Malaysia. Click here to read.

Musings of a Copywriter

In Strumming Me Softly with His Guitar…, Devraj Singh Kalsi talks of his friends’s adventure with the guitar. Click here to read.

Notes from Japan

In Therese Schumacher and Nagayoshi Nagai: A Love Story, Suzanne Kamata introduces us to one of the first German women married to a Japanese scientist and their love story. Click here to read.

Essays

My Favourite Book by Fakrul Alam

The essay is a journey into Fakrul Alam’s evolution as a translator. Click here to read.

The Ultimate Genius of Kishore Kumar

Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, an eminent film critic, writes on the legend of Kishore Kumar. Click here to read.

T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land: Finding Hope in Darkness

Dan Meloche muses on the century-old poem and its current relevance. Click here to read.

The Observant Immigrant

In Piano Board Keys, Candice Louisa Daquin talks of biracial issues. Click here to read.

Stories

The Funeral Attendee

Ravi Prakash shares the story of the life of a migrant in rural India. Click here to read.

A Letter I can Never Post

Monisha Raman unravels the past in a short narrative using the epistolary technique. Click here to read.

Red Moss at the Abbey of Saint Pons

Paul Mirabile takes us to St Pons Abbey in France in the fifteenth century. Click here to read.

You have lost your son!

Farhanaz Rabbani gives a light story with a twist that shuttles between Dhaka and Noakhali. Click here to read.

Book Excerpts

An Excerpt from Manoranjan Byapari’s How I Became a Writer: An Autobiography of a Dalit, translated from Bengali by Anurima Chanda. Click here to read.

An excerpt from Evening with a Sufi: Selected Poems by Afsar Mohammad, translated from Telugu by Afsar Mohammad & Shamala Gallagher. Click here to read.

Book Reviews

Reba Som has reviewed Aruna Chakravarti’s Through the Looking Glass: Stories. Click here to read.

Somdatta Mandal has reviewed Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises. Click here to read.

Basudhara Roy has reviewed Afsar Mohammad’s Evening with a Sufi: Selected Poems, translated from Telugu by Afsar Mohammad and Shamala Gallagher. Click here to read.

Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed Rahul Ramagundam’s The Life and Times of George Fernandes. Click here to read.

Borderless Journal Anthology

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Categories
Editorial

We Did It!

That good things happen despite darkness, despite prognostications of doom, that light glimmers hope if you strive to focus on your strength in hard times is borne true both in fiction and in life. Perhaps, we cannot get back the old ways (but is that what we want?) but new paths emerge. Old gives way to new. And while trying to gather pearls of human excellence — borne not of awards or degrees but of bringing out the best, the kindest, the most loving in human hearts — we managed to create with a team an outstanding anthology. Woven with the writings of old and new — we created a tapestry together that the editor in chief of our publishing house said was “classy, literary, engaging and international”. That one of the oldest and most reputed publishing houses in India with bookshops countrywide took it on was also an unusual event! We are truly grateful to Om Books International, Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri and Jyotsna Mehta along with all our writers and readers who made our anthology a reality, and to Radha Chakravarty and Fakrul Alam for the kind words they bestowed on our effort.

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Please greet our first anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles, with love and friendship. It could be the perfect Christmas gift in the spirit of the season! And as the blurb says, “it will definitely bring a smile to your face because it is a celebration of the human spirit.”

The anthology is different from our journal in as much as it has a sample of an eclectic collection that has been honed with further editing and has some new features. Most of the writing is from our first year and showcases our ethos, except for Lesya’s poetry and interview. Lesya Bakun from Ukraine is still on the run, looking for a refuge — she cannot return home like you or I can. Her family is scattered across number of countries. Her cousin, who was guarding the factory at Azovstal, was taken prisoner. We included her story in the anthology hoping to create global empathy for refugees as the numbers will increase not only due to war but also due to climate change.

The reason we felt a hardcopy anthology was a good idea was because nothing beats the joy of having a bunch of interesting reads in the warmth of your hands (especially where internet cannot reach or is unavailable). In any case, books with the feel of paper, the rustling whispers which carry voices of leaves can never be replaced as Goutam Ghose had also said in his interview which is now part of our anthology.

And that is why we celebrate more books… this time we feature Singaporean prima donna of literature, Suchen Christine Lim, with her new book Dearest Intimate, a novel that spans more than hundred years including the harrowing Japanese invasion during World War II. She shared sound advice with writers: “Suffering is good for the writer. It will deepen lived experience and expand the heart’s empathy.” And perhaps that is what is echoed through the experiences of the other writer interviewed on our pages by Keith Lyons. This is a writer who not only brought out his own books but was a regular contributor of travel pieces for Frommer’s and National Geographic traveling to unexplored destinations — Christopher Winnan. Another writer Lyon had interviewed recently, Steve Carr, has passed on. We would like to convey our heartfelt condolences to his family and friends.

We have a number of books that have been reviewed. Reba Som reviewed Aruna Chakravarti’s Through the Looking Glass: Stories that span eras spread across time. Somdatta Mandal has reviewed Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises and Bhaskar Parichha, Rahul Ramagundam’s The Life and Times of George Fernandes. Basudhara Roy has written of Afsar Mohammad’s Evening with a Sufi: Selected Poems, translated from Telugu by the poet and Shamala Gallagher, verses that again transcend borders and divides. We have an excerpt from the same book and another from Manoranjan Byapari’s How I Became a Writer: An Autobiography of a Dalit, translated from Bengali by Anurima Chanda.

More translations from Bengali, Balochi and Korean enrich our November edition. Fazal Baloch has translated a story by Haneef Shareef and Rituparna Mukherjee by Shankhadeep Bhattacharya. We have the translation of an inspirational Tagore poem helping us find courage (Shonkho Dhulaye Pore or ‘the conch lies in the dust’). Another such poem by Nazrul has been rendered in English from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. He has also shared an autobiographical musing on how he started translating Tagore’s Gitabitan, which also happens to be his favourite book. More discussion on the literary persona of TS Eliot and the relevance of his hundred year old poem — ‘The Waste Land’ by Dan Meloche adds variety to our essay section.

Evoking the genius of another outstanding artiste, Kishore Kumar, who happened to pen thought provoking dialogues in some films, is Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri’s essay, review of a recent book on the legendary actor-singer and an interview with the authors. Infringing the boundaries of literary with popular culture and art and integrating all forms into a wholistic bundle has been part of our ethos. In that spirit we have a musing by Prithvijeet Sinha on Edvard Munch’s famous painting called Scream. We have non-fiction from Australia spanning Meredith Stephens’s recent brush with Covid, Mike Smith visits a Scottish beach in the footsteps of a novelist, Ravi Shankar has given us a poignant piece for a late friend and Candice Lousia Daquin talks of the existence of bi-racial biases. In contrast, Suzanne Kamata sent a narrative that bridges divides showcasing a German wife of a Japanese scientist that draws us to conclude that biases erode over time to create an acceptance of bi-racial people. Devraj Singh Kalsi brings in humour with his funny narrative about a guitarist. Rhys Hughes writes in a lighter vein on Indian cuisine in his column and spouts more funny poetry bordering on the absurd.

Jared Carter has shared beautiful poetry on murmuration in birds and we have touching verses from Asad Latif for a little girl he met on a train — reminiscent of Tagore’s poem Hide and Seek (Lukochuri). Michael R Burch has given us poems setting sombre but beautiful notes for the season. We host more poetry by Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, Quratulain Qureshi, Jim Bellamy, Gayatri Majumdar, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Alpana, Jonathan Chan, Saranyan BV, George Freek and many more. We have stories from around the world: India, France and Bangladesh.

Gathering all of your thoughts in strings of words from all corners of the world, we present to you the bumper November issue of Borderless Journal . Thank you all for sharing your thoughts with us. Thanks to Sohana Manzoor for her fantastic painting and more thanks to the whole Borderless team for seeing this issue through. We would not have been able to do the anthology or these issues without each one of you — writers and readers.

Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

There is always hope for a new tomorrow!

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Categories
Musings

The Scream & Me

 By Prithvijeet Sinha

Scream by Edvard Munch (1863-1944). Courtesy: Creative Commons

Dignity of expression is an underestimated phenomenon; in times like ours where everything has to be blurted out loud from the biggest amplifiers, subtlety has become a jaded mode of creative power. What can be understood in two words and understatement needn’t be stretched to a point of vulgar oversimplification through metaphors and symbolism anyway. The sorry state of affairs obviously then finds an outlet through the arts.  Ideally, painting should capture the world as a beautiful sanctuary, where our place as heavenly creatures endowed with virtues galore and innate innocence, is sanctified. This it does in thousands of visual motifs.  But painting also evinces an ample canvas on which our internal world of chaos finds an adequate representation. That is where ‘art’ finds its footing.

For me, one artwork that will always stand the test of time when it comes to representing our internal implosion affected by socio-cultural, political consequences is Edvard Munch’s ‘Scream’ (1893).

I don’t know when exactly I discovered it because it seems to bear such an omnipresent place in our cultural consciousness. However, to the best of my memory, my tenacious relationship with ‘Scream’ commenced more than a decade ago when I first set sight upon its hollowed out, skeletal figure, a personality who, it seemed, had placed us instantly in his/her shoes. Munch’s work thus has gone on to frame every moment that has blown the lid off societal hypocrisies and depravity, for this writer. It’s a scream that we all innately identify with because so much of our lives is spent repressing our self-expression, our sense of self-esteem and by extension, our rights. As our mental health, a culturally coded reality ignored throughout modern humanity’s materialistic stride, becomes a perennial victim of that repression, we yearn to speak. Recount our potential lost chances. Claim our minds, bodies and souls as our own. Retaliate at the status quo and in fair essence, scream.  Scream at the void, at our preceding generations, at calloused authority.

If you ask me then personally, the painting’s stance of an individual left in the middle of nowhere, imploding with the gesture of putting his hands on his ears and crying out, melting with the weight of the world, is most likely to be identified with my journey till now. That literal and oftentimes implicit scream is attached to parts of my whole being where nothing of prejudice, repression or even plainly documented neglect from our adults and guardians should reside. Yet they do.

I scream when my talents as a writer are taken to be temperamental or above careful analysis, as only an individual feat. I scream when a writer’s sensitivity doesn’t translate to a real vocation in the eyes of the world. I scream when my sustained silences groan and moan for days on end, only to be met with a premise of being ‘physically weak’ on my part; when my insides churn with inflaming pain attributable to chronic stomach troubles and indigestion since that day in 2000 where I was cursed with a bout of jaundice. When the strength to write gets overpowered by my depressive disenchantments; when gender roles are used as a rapier in common discourses, I scream.  I scream. I scream. Never audible enough to be heard. Always observing a kind of bourgeois tact that makes me come undone. I scream when the men tail me in moments of solitude at riverside parks, put hands on my body and refuse to acknowledge that there are asexuals out there who don’t crave the crassness of physical pleasure. Or even verbal grooming and cajoling.

I scream when the river gets dirty, filled with pollutants. The trees fall down. When a peaceful day is brutalised by the ancient prophecies of time; when concrete balls, lances of disease and traffic blasts produce a most grotesque symphony of the nature of the world, a preserve of noise, sound and fury signifying nothing especially as our mental states are poured out into doctors’ tables for consultations and fees, I scream. Gulping the air around me and melting with all the foregrounds and backgrounds this world can assist me with, to no avail, I get hollowed out.

Peace is a luxury to us mere mortals. Chaos is the lightning rod that governs us throughout. Since truth can never be shortchanged, Scream always haunts us with its presence, intimately involved in our implosions through the clogged networks of time and memory. I felt its echoes in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’sMemoria(2021), as Jessica, the protagonist, travelled along a network of vibrations emanating from aural worlds around her, dictated by the stillness of nature holding more than it dares to reveal; or, in that eight-minute unbroken piece de resistance in Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning(2020) where her central figure drowns out the pandemonium of sexual defilement by laying her head on the ground, to keep herself sane and from death’s purview.

That scream is released in the final two minutes of the lyrics of Phoebe Bridgers’ breakout single ‘I Know The End’ (2020) where an apocalypse of the mind finds its literal projections compounded by rock guitars and drums, where the serenity of the preceding passages leads to an honest overflow, where aggression is supplanted by an exhausted sigh in the final coda. But also one, where silence is not an option. To me, Munch’s imprints let me reconcile with the fact that more than the politics of life and death as well as class, we are eternally doomed to imparting a facade of silence and repression to our ethos. It’s the inescapable truth and when bigotry such as the ones we encounter infects discourses, The Scream gags to be left out. It should, must be let out.

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Prithvijeet Sinha, has built a prolific published corpus based on the intersection of poetry, cinema and culture. He hails from the cultural epicentre that is Lucknow, India.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Categories
War & Peace

Cry, Our Beloved…

The fakir sings a love song
for peace in times of war.

Can peace be the voice of dissent?

-- Mitali Chakravarty, A Love Song for Peace
Courtesy: Creative Commons

With an openly-declared call for nuclear alert blaring in the headlines of newspapers, we bring to you reminders from the past of what hatred and war, nuclear holocausts can do to humanity. Recalling the need for peace and for solidarity with all of the human race, we have here a selection of writing from different parts of the world — people who have been writing for peace even without the war that now darkens our own Earth and further impacts humans, living conditions and the climate.

Here is what climate experts said way back in 2017: “The climatic consequences would be catastrophic: global average temperatures would drop as much as 12 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius) for up to several years — temperatures last seen during the great ice ages. Meanwhile, smoke and dust circulating in the stratosphere would darken the atmosphere enough to inhibit photosynthesis, causing disastrous crop failures, widespread famine and massive ecological disruption.

“The effect would be similar to that of the giant meteor believed to be responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. This time, we would be the dinosaurs.” How much worse will it be now, five years later while we are already impacted by rising water levels and climate change?

We start our presentation with the past impact of a nuclear blast on humans and nature.

Nuclear Holocaust

Surviving Hiroshima : Kathleen Burkinshaw is the daughter of a woman who survived the Hiroshima blast. Burkinshaw suffers neural damage herself from the impact of the bomb that her parent faced. She has written a book called The Last Cherry Blossom recounting her mother’s first hand experiences. Her novel has been taken up by the United Nations as a part of its peacekeeping effort. She has been actively participating in efforts to ban nuclear weapons, including presenting with Nobel Laureates. Click here to read the interview.

Commemorating Hiroshima: Poetry by Suzanne Kamata that brings to life August 6th and the impact of the bombing on the victims and the devastation around them. Click here to read.

Oh Orimen! A poem in Nepalese about a victim of the blast written by a sculptor, Manjul Miteri, who while working on the largest Asian statue of the Buddha in Japan visited the museum dedicated to the impact of the blast. The poem has been translated to English by Hem Bishwakarma. Click here to read.

Mushroom Clouds: Poetry by Michael Burch that reflects on Enola Gay and the Bikini atoll. Click here to read

Surviving More Wars…

Our Children poetry by Bijan Najdi, translated from Persian by Davood Jalili. Click here to read.

How Will They Know by Sybil Pretious commemorates the Remembrance Day that mark the end of the first world war. Click here to read.

Soldiers & Missives Poetry by Prithvijeet Sinha. Click here to read.

In a Land Far From Home: A Bengali in Afghanistan, an excerpt from an account by Syed Mujataba Ali, translated from Bengali by Nazes Afroz. Click here to read.

Unveiling Afghanistan: In Conversation with Nazes Afroz, former editor of BBC and translator of a book on Afghanistan which reflects on the present day crisis. Click here to read.

Bundu, Consoler of the Rich is a story based on memories of the Partition by Nadir Ali, translated from Punjabi by Amna Ali. Click here to read.

Ukraine bridge blowing up
The Great Patriotic War: Painting in Moscow Museum
Ukraine Soldiers
Courtesy: Creative Commons