Category Archives: Random Thoughts on Literature
Chand Bardai (1149 – 1200 CE)’s Epic Poem
Ask any student of Indian history about Prithvi Raj, and you will know that he was a great king who lived and ruled in Delhi and Ajmer in the twelfth century. He was a generous king and patron of arts and poetry. The legend of his taking away princess Padmavati, daughter of an opposing king …
Sa’di’s Gulistan
Once in Persia there was a king who had condemned a wrong-doer to death. The angry man abused the king in his native dialect which the king could not understand. So he asked a vizier to translate what the had said. The vizier said” “This man is saying that those who control their anger and …
On Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
Exactly two hundred years ago today, on July 18, 1811, there was born in a house on what used to be called Freeschool Street in Calcutta, not far from St. Xavier’s College where I once studied, a child to an English couple serving the East India Company. That child was to become one of the …
Ghazals
Poetic forms know no cultural or linguistic barriers. Thus there are not only rhymes and meters, but also odes and sonnets, elegies and story-poems in English and French, in German and Italian and more. Likewise, one can find ghazals in many languages: not just in Arabic and Persian where they originated, but in Turkish and …
Thoughts Provoked by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 -1400)
Many decades ago I had skimmed through some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in the modern intelligible version, for sure. I recall how that reading, with a version of medieval English on another page, made me aware of the way languages change with time. What we write today will be hardly understood by people five hundred …
From Daodejing
Laozi, known by a dozen like-sounding names, is said to have lived in the sixth century BCE. He is remembered by the classic Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) which is a treasury of capsule wisdom. There are jolting insights in this work. Tao is the Way. Here we read (in rough translation) yjr following: Way that …
Sivapuránam (Civapuránam)
Caiva-ciddántam is a metaphysical-philosophical-spiritual school which takes the Civa (Shiva) Principle as the fundamental substratum in the world. It is very ancient and has a North Indian version as well as a South Indian. In both systems Civa is transcendent as well as immanent, but it also has a personal form, helpful in the worship …
RTL: Evolution: Spiritual Perspective
Grass, shrub, worm, tree, have I been. As cur, bird, and snake, the world have I seen. Stone, human, goblin, good and ugly, Demon strong, life mobile, saintly, and godly: I’ve been born in such forms on this sturdy earth I am tired, oh Lord, of all this birth. Truly seeing your golden feet …
Jhansi ki Rani (The Queen of Jhansi)
Warning: Long piece! As I was reading about Joan of Arc’s Martyrdom, I remembered the Indian heroine Jhansi ki Rani, the young queen of the kingdom of Jhansi who bravely fought the British in 1857, defending her kingdom, and in the process lost her life. This was another young woman who fell victim to the …
RTL: Joan of Arc of Robert Southey
After reading Southey’s The Inchcape Rock, I was drawn to his epic poem Joan of Arc, written in the last decade of the eighteenth century. I was struck by the fact that this English poet was writing so beautifully about a woman whom his own countrymen had bought as a slave and allowed to be …
