Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Indian Poetry in English, The Toddy Shop & Elsewhere City Poetry by The Delhi Walla - March 19, 2015June 3, 20153 The new life of verse. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Fancy giving somebody 2 lakh rupees because you like their poetry? That’s exactly what happened this year at the Jaipur Literature Festival. The Delhi-based poet Arundhathi Subramaniam received the inaugural Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry for her collection, When God Is A Traveller. The annual prize will be sponsored by marketing professional Suhel Seth. “If Suhel Seth is giving away money for a poetry prize, then we’ve entered the mainstream,” says another Delhi-based poet-novelist-guitarist Jeet Thayil, only half-jokingly — he was on the jury. Poetry has a rich tradition in India. It was instrumental in earning the country its first (and only) Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to Rabindranath Tagore in
Our Self-Written Obituaries – Zoya Singh, Lady Shri Ram College Farewell Notice by The Delhi Walla - March 19, 2015March 19, 20151 The 38th death. [Text by Zoya Singh; photo by Vijay Singh] Zoya Singh always thought that she didn't belong here. Even the words that she spoke carried in them some sense of oddness and misunderstanding that belonged to some other time, some other era, some place better. Ms Singh went missing a year ago after she ran away to find herself among the mountains. Her body was found swamped around a lake, in the very perfection of her being, with which she lived. Perhaps, she had found what she was looking for. Ms Singh grew up reading Plath and Poe, the two Ps that ran her life. She quoted Rousseau in school, and debated with Einstein while she was only seven. In her pastime,