Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Manika Dhama, Connaught Place City Poetry General by The Delhi Walla - January 10, 2013June 3, 20154 Poetry in the city. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] The Delhi Walla arranged to meet poet Manika Dhama in the Outer Circle of the Colonial-era Connaught Place. In her late 20s, Ms Dhama is an investment consultant in a Gurgaon-based real-estate firm. A resident of Noida, she runs the blog framed by wanderlust. Talking of her loves, Ms Dhama says, “With poets I have more of a poem-related rather a complete-repertoire-of-one-poet sort of relationship. But Emily Dickinson has been an inspiration for a long time. I have carried these lines in my wallet for years now: “One need not be a Chamber to be Haunted/One need not be a House/The Brain has Corridors surpassing/Material Place… Ourself behind ourself, concealed/Should startle most/Assassin hid in our Apartment/Be Horror’s least.”” Ms Dhama imagines herself more of a prose person. “Poetry, when it does come is usually triggered by something big; it is when my emotions are too overwhelming for prose. I write when I can sit through the whole of it, only seldom second guessing the first instinct. When the entire piece is out on paper I step back and make amends before sending it out into the world. I’m still learning to be a stricter judge of my work.” Fond of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, Ms Dhama shares a poem with us. Season’s Grievings There is something sick in the pit of my stomach There is something stuck in my chest There is pain from something I’ve lost Wound around in place of my heart. I search for hope in the clamour of noise Ban skirts, bring to justice, no short of death The voices in my head are out on the streets Did you hear what I said? Scream in a dream and be done with rage Breathe in silence, find your answer Mistress of my own destiny? Permission please to walk this way. Read aloud, talk nonstop Wring my hands in the air if I must Be like the lotus, flowering among the filth Smile through the worst for something to give Stay calm, hold still, this will hurt a bit Walk away and wait for dawn to break Nothing happy about this New Year Can tomorrow be another day? As part of the series Delhi’s Bandaged Moments, The Delhi Walla is searching for poets in the city. If you are one, please contact me at mayankaustensoofi@gmail.com. Poet Manika Dhama 1. 2. 3. FacebookX Related Related posts: Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Poet Manika Dhama, Delhi & Outside Delhi Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Manika Dhama, Delhi Metro – Blue Line Our Self-Written Obituaries – Manika Dhama, Sector 51, Noida Delhi’s Proust Questionnaire – Manika Dhama, Barakhamba City Series – Delhi’s Bandaged Heart, Around Town
The prophet TS Eliot said that poetry requires a writer who is depersonalised, who transcends the mundanities of one’s own actual life and reforms them into a universal voice like that of a spirit hovering a little over the ground. But all you hear in your poets is the direct voice of I-I of their own piddling struggles without the levity of irony, humour or tragedy that can only come by taking a distance. You will never get poetry out of these earnest middle-class MBA, sociology (hons) types, they lack the ‘depth-of-soul’. And for that you need, as Arundhati Roy more picturesquely put it, someone as ‘reckless as a suicide bomber’.