Anindita Sengupta

So, I wore pink. I had planned to wear black but an ironing disaster got in the way. Maybe it was a good thing because the book is black and white and it would have looked like I don’t know any other colours. The launch went as launches go–I read for about half an hour. Then Sridala and I conversed, which means she asked intelligent questions and I tried to answer the questions and I remembered to ask one question back between saying lots of things about my writing, half of which I don’t remember and half of which, I will change my mind about. I’m always envious of people who work out a theory around their writing and seem like they will stick to it forever. I will get very bored if I have to stick to any theory forever. So the writing will come as it comes. And I’ll say different things about it at different times.

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Picture:

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As of now, the books are available at Sahitya Akademi outlets in major cities and in Crossword at Residency Road in Bangalore.

Also, in Bombay, People’s Book House at Fort will apparently source it from SA if you ask. Phone: (022) 22873768 , (022) 24362474. Address: 15, Ground Floor, Meher House, Cawasjit Patel Street, Fort. Landmark: Near Meher House.

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One more picture:

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I was badly prepared for the signing. I had left my pen in my bag so I had to use other people’s pens. And they were not interesting ink colours like pink or green which I generally use at home. I must remember to keep my pens ready next time. I am hoping there will be a next time in another city some time soon.

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The most difficult question Sridala asked me was to do a Kolatkar-style telling of influences. This is Kolatkar’s list:

Whitman, Mardhekar, Manmohan, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Kafka, Baudelaire, Heine, Catullus, Villon, Jynaneshwar, Namdev, Janabai, Eknath, Tukaram, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Han Shan, C, Honaji, Mandelstam, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Babel, Apollinaire, Breton, Brecht, Neruda, Ginsberg, Barth, Duras, Joseph Heller … Gunter Grass, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Nabokov, Namdeo Dhasal, Patthe Bapurav, Rabelais, Apuleius, Rex Stout, Agatha Christie, Robert Shakley, Harlan Ellison, Balchandra Nemade, Durrenmatt, Aarp, Cummings, Lewis Carroll, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Godse Bhatji, Morgenstern, Chakradhar, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Balwantbuva, Kierkegaard, Lenny Bruce, Bahinabai Chaudhari, Kabir, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Leadbelly, Howling Wolf, Jon Lee Hooker, Leiber and Stoller, Larry Williams, Lightning Hopkins, Andre Vajda, Kurosawa, Eisenstein, Truffaut, Woody Guthrie, Laurel and Hardy.

I had real trouble with this because any list like this has got to be flippant and fun like Kolatkar’s and I wasn’t really in that sort of mood. I named some eclectic things like Ghalib, Bollywood and Neil Gaiman besides various poets–Ramanujan, Rilke, Plath, Kolatkar, D’Souza. In related news, see Aditi’s post on mood boards which I thought was a cool way to keep track of influences. I think it makes more sense than a definitive, immutable list of influences. At the moment, my mood board has Anne Carson, WG Sebald, Selima Hill, Arun Kolatkar, The Single Man (though I thought the movie was just so-so), Edward Said, heat, rain, the smell of fresh dung, Hanuman, various travel stories, a Scottish loch, some sculptures from the Louvre, some scientific concepts. Or at least, these are the things I’m conscious of.

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Toto Funds the Arts
is pleased to invite you
to the launch of Anindita Sengupta’s
first volume of poetry, City of Water, where she will be
‘in conversation’ with poet/writer Sridala Swami

Venue: Crossword Bookstore, ACR Towers, Ground Floor, 32 Residency Road, Bangalore – 1
Date and time: Friday, 7 May 2010 at 6.30 pm

Anindita Sengupta’s poetry has been published in several journals including Eclectica, Nth Position, Yellow Medicine Review, Origami Condom, Pratilipi, Cha: An Asian Journal, Kritya, and Muse India. It has also appeared in the anthologies Mosaic (Unisun, 2008), Not A Muse (Haven Books, 2009), and Poetry with Prakriti (Prakriti Foundation, 2010). In 2008, she received the Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing, annually given to two writers under thirty in India. In 2010, she was the Charles Wallace writer-in-residence at University of Kent in England. Sengupta, who lives in Bangalore, is also a freelance writer and journalist and has contributed articles to The Guardian (UK), The Hindu, Outlook Traveler and Bangalore Mirror. Her personal website is at http://aninditasengupta.com.

Sridala Swami’s poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals including Chandrabhaga, Pratilipi, New Quest, Wasafiri, Asian Cha, Desilit and the Creative Writing Issue of The South Asian Review (28:3, 2007). Her work also features in The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe, 2008); in the anthology, Not A Muse (Haven Books, 2009) and in First Proof: 4 (Penguin Books, 2009). Her book of poems The Reluctant Survivor was published in 2007.

“City of Water is remarkable for its supple language and tensile strength. Her images are sharp and there is integrity about the core of feeling that propels the poem. One cannot spot any weak moments either in terms of emotion or language….Anindita Sengupta never lets a poem run away with her. Like all good poets, she is original both in her way with words and her personal angle of vision.”

–– Keki Daruwalla in the Preface to City of Water

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Okay, I’ve been lazy and just pasted the official invite but really, would love to see you there. It’s more fun to be nervous in front of people one knows. Even if it’s online. Know what I mean?

So yes, City of Water is out. It’s my first collection of poems and do write to me if you’re interested in a copy. Or you could look for it in the Sahitya Akademi shop in your city. Under the matter-of-fact tone, there’s a swell in my throat. It could be happiness and not the remnants of a sore throat. One can’t be absolutely sure though.

The cover photo is by Sohrab Hura, one of last year’s winners of the Toto Funds the Arts award for photography. I really like his work in general and this photo in particular because it has crows by the water, the ocean to be exact, flying into the wind. Are they a murder? I’m not sure. But they are a certain number of crows in flight and crow flight is a measure of things. Then there’s the thing that they are flying into the wind. Walking into the wind is difficult for us so we may impose a connotation of struggle to the picture. But  for some birds, it’s what helps them fly.