Ode For The Uprooted
Listen to excerpts from Outlook's India, Identify, Gender, Health issue by Pragya Vats
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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.