Speaking of bird-watching and poetry, I've noticed that bird-watchers, at least on the few Indian bird-watching lists I subscribe to, adore ornate, flowery, Victorian-sounding prose. They applaud it when they see it in other people's reports, and do their best to put it in their own.
Last week, Hassath took me to the Siri Fort auditorium to watch my first Rajnikant film, “Sivaji, The Boss”.
I came across a quotation from Nissim Ezekiel's poem, "Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher" in a book, and the title was so interesting that I just had to look it up. I found it in the minstrels archive, and it's such an intriguing poem that I'm quoting all twenty lines here.
Poet, Lover, BirdwatcherTo force the pace and never to be still
Is not the way of those who study birds
Or women. The best poets wait for words.
The hunt is not an exercise of will
But patient love relaxing on a hill
To note the movement of a timid wing;
Until the one who knows that she is loved
No longer waits but risks surrendering—
In this the poet finds his moral proved
Who never spoke before his spirit moved.The slow movement seems, somehow, to say much more.
To watch the rarer birds, you have to go
Along deserted lanes and where the rivers flow
In silence near the source, or by a shore
Remote and thorny like the heart's dark floor.
And there the women slowly turn around,
Not only flesh and bone but myths of light
With darkness at the core, and sense is found
But poets lost in crooked, restless flight,
The deaf can hear, the blind recover sight.— Nissim Ezekiel
I have read
some other
poems by Nissim Ezekiel (one was a part of my high school English
curriculum), but I can't remember another one that made me sit up and
pay attention. I love the idea of tying poetry, love, and bird-watching
together through the patience and caring that each requires; and I love
the unhurried, graceful way the poem segues between each activity and
the feelings it evokes. I think the ending is a bit forced (did anyone
mop the heart's dark floor
or were they too busy eyeing up
the slowly turning women?), and detracts from the light tone established
by the first stanza. I notice, too, that poetry, love, and bird-watching
are presented as implicitly male pursuits.
Myths of light with darkness at the core
? Not so much. But
patient love relaxing on a hill is a different feeling, one that I can
recognise and will remember.
A brief review of the cheapest Nokia handset ever manufactured.
I encountered a nasty surprise in the form of a carelessly-written shell script disguised as an ezmlm command.
A “Talking Point” piece in The Hindu Sunday Magazine explains all you need to know about domestic violence.
I couldn't photograph any peaks or see any birds on our camping trip, so I was able to appreciate the other creatures lurking around us.
I was able to install CentOS 5.3 remotely using a VNC client.
This winter, I may get an opportunity to act as a guide to bird-watchers visiting India. I've done it before, but this is the first time I've thought of it as a possible part-time job rather than just an occasional distraction. With this shift in perception comes a difficult ethical question.
I've seen scammers send mail from someone's account to ask for help, but I've never seen one reply to a mailing list to reassure everyone that it wasn't a scam.