Day- II of the Poetry-Film Festival @ MCC

Poetry Recital in Progress @ Sel Hall Guest Room

Day II of the Poetry Film fest at MCC, saw two renowned poets reciting from their anthology of poems. The program started at 11.45 am and saw some forty enthusiastic students who cheered, encouraged and also quizzed the poets.

Menka Shivdasani, founder member of the Poetry Circle, which began in Mumbai in 1986, read out some of her best-loved poems sonorously. Her first book of poems, 'Nirvana at Ten Rupees, was published by XAL-Praxis in 1990, and was described by Bruce King as "one of the best first books of poetry to appear during the 1990s". One of the best poems in her recital, was the one titled, "Schoolgirl No More" which goes like this:

Rules are for geometrical
designs and measurements, but nothing
measures up to what it should,
and mathematical
precision
has never been a strong point
with me. These were things
for school, anyhow,
and I have learned other lessons,
which I suspect, do not mean a thing.

I learned the mechanics
of bird-flying in Biology,
but did not possess the wings.

My atlas showed the Arctic
but three inches on paper, I found,
multiply into several miles.

History taught me not to live
in the past, and English literature
that I belong nowhere.

Juggling with physics formulae,
I realised everything was relative,
including my hatred of Einstein,
and myself.

Another poet, ... to be contd...