The crowd-puller on the second day of Bengaluru Poetry Festival was undoubtedly the session by actor, writer and composer Piyush Mishra of ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ fame.
The hall in Leela Palace was packed as Mishra recited from his latest book Kuch Ishq Kiya Kuch Kaam Kiya, poems on love, restiveness and his battle with alcoholism. The audience could not get enough of Mishra and his candid sense of humour. Everyone cheered enthusiastically as Mishra sang his most famous songs, Aarambh Hai Prachand from Gulal and Husna from Coke Studio. He advised youngsters to not fall into the trap of alcoholism as it affects the family and friends too. Mishra added, “I was like an unguided missile before, without an aim. But in the past six years, peace has been my source of creativity.”
In a session titled ‘Words Without Borders’, poets discussed the difficulty of translating poems from one language to another while maintaining the meter and rhythm of the work.
Rakhshanda Jalil, who writes in English, Hindi and Urdu spoke about how translating poems from Urdu to English often results in dangling sentences which sound incomplete. A Bengali translation of Lewis Caroll’s Jabberwocky by Satyajit Ray titled Jaborkhaaki was recited, eliciting laughs from those in the audience who understood the language.
Bengaluru-based writer Anjum Hasan read a few poems from her book ‘Bangalore Diaries’ which she described as an attempt to “capture the experience of living in this city in a direct, simple, yet poetic language”. Her prose-poems talk about things that Bengalureans could relate to, like the rush at City Railway Station, the wedding hoardings on Palace Road with ‘different names but the same wedding’ every day.
Poets seek inspiration in unexpected sources. The ideas for most of the poems in Anand Thakore’s upcoming book Seven Deaths and Four Scrolls, came to him from newspaper articles. Based on a report about the hanging of Ajmal Kasab, Thakore imagined the poverty Kasab’s family might have lived in, in Faridkot, Pakistan, and wrote a moving poem on it.
Subodh Sankar, co-founder of Atta Galatta and organiser, said, “The response we got is exhilarating. We expected about 600 people to turn up on the first day but instead we had nearly 1,500 participants and on the second day about 1,200 participants.” Bengaluru is a great city for poetry and with great encouragement from all who participated, Shankar says that BPF will definitely be back, bigger and better, next year.
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