For Gaza, For Ukraine

All these wars shall end in one day

For those who minted the fray 

Shall have a day of nagging rest 

Long enough in a shadowy crest

For the songs of victory shall forever 

Be  chorused  in teary tributaries, for ever

Because the wars shall end in one day 

#Ukraine #Gaza 

CLOSE

 I close the lid of the merging lipids;

And I open the pourer pot of polyp

Hail to certain reference

In olfactory alchemy I thought was sufficient

In the organs, seethed interview of entrails in discordant lullaby

Never enough to lure

A sponsored somnambulist

Rummaging for the lost quarts of an inch

Of hounds

Of pounds

And the crimson flesh of Haram

Only to format a colour like a sweaty & panting painter

Honing for pulmonic wings

Of fate

Just like the fairy jerk-soul of a caregiver

Whose pecuniary symptoms are just a way of the garlands

Interred and scorched for the pilgrimage

To eternity.

I close.

ELEWELE

 

I come in peace

For an Elewele

Rustic feeling of an exhale

Not a distant feeling

Like a strainer leaking the ointment of secrecy

Not enough to distance a bedlam of hope

And the ragged paths of Elewele

Are just the harvest of hope

Like some sickled eyelashes of the mawmaw

Jostling the jigsaw notes

Of the past

And the present,

sown in tedious note ;

In ablative cesspit of honour

He raced along leeching on drenched feathers

To nag the plugging distance of strife  that has no end

So the long journey to the ignoble feat of life.

 

Elewele  laughs

Elewele threw up the jaded gourds to the beats

Elewele laughs

Elewele dances

The staccato of laughs and of dances  

To the  leap  of sudden trance

Of not knowing,

It was a dance of no return

Even when the peace will not come.

 I come in peace.

Torn …

Greaseless moments,

Torn in tearless griefs 

Like  the ointments that lit the grandma’s  lamp 

Whose lights are flickering

Like the dauntless soul of 

a lost hope!

The Families that live "in-apart". A Review of Sudhir Sakhasatyam Bisht's "THE FIRST LADY OF ROLI PETROLEUM"

Sudhir Bisht's "The First Lady of Roli Petroleum" reads like a gripping comedy rendered in a very simple, almost lyrical prose ...I smiled as I flipped through every page of this powerful satire about a group of Indian expatriates working and living in Lagos. In delicate power-plays and switches between deceit, intrigues, mudslinging, racism and abuse of sex and family values, we are opened to a world of an abrasive love of power and some inordinate desire for a world of emptiness.

Depicted through the prying eyes of an omnipresent narrator, albeit a protagonist with a sharp tinge of pride jealousy that can't be purged, we see a crafty and revengeful Sameer who would do anything to protect his family values and a beautiful job. You can only but pity the Dhanajay, the brilliant MD of Roli Petroleum who is not obviously unconscious of "sexcapades" around him but must get to the top to satisfy his wife's schizophrenic lust for power, a streetcar named Savita.

The tragic end of Savita is not a victory song, but a collective dirge that must be sung by all the occupants of Rambole House of deceit at the cremation ground. Sameer's unregretful heroic strolls at the end of the novel, in a Greco-Roman tragic fashion, hitting a bitter enemy even more when he's down, can never be a true heroic gesture. Sameer takes up the fight to pay Savita back, a fight of jealousy and vengeance designed to bring down a weak and fragile family down, already torn apart by strings of lusts and unfaithfulness . Sameer is certainly not my kind of hero.  

His other colleagues who are too timid to be confrontational but would be subservient to her royal majesty, the first lady of Roli, even at the risk of losing their family values. That is a tragedy in itself.  Jaspal's insipid deployment of his frolicking sexual deftness, firstly, to stain and demean his beautiful and loyal wife, Reema in the open glare of his colleagues; and later, to mop the already smeared hot panties of her Lordship for no other reason but insatiable greed and self perseverance. That's another tragedy of a tremendous substance. Savita on the other hand, is simply a victim of her upbringing, a weakling she calls a husband, and a heinous desire for mammoth avatar of reverence and recognition.

Sudhir's portrayal of the Nigerian police and the traffic officers on Lagos streets has a sulking note of a corrupt force, which is not too far from the situation on ground. It's however a sharp disengagement from the central plot, and obviously has no serious impact on the thematic concern of the story. I would have expected a more profound descriptive rendition from a narrator who seems to know his ways around the bustling city of Lagos and its definitive impact it has on the large population of prosperous Indians other Asians living in Nigeria. 

It terms of colours, sounds and spice of life, the novel has not created an anticipatory desire, an expectation to an Indian reader, his primary target audience, wanting to explore  and feel so much the prosaic setting of Lagos. The African city of Lagos is not utopian but a real world that can shape the lives of any Indian family that lives there as author has  casually depicted. There are pristine and virgin beaches in Lagos, where high-hipped  pretty Nigerian ladies deck in flowery and very bright bikinis glazing in the sun, hooking up with their Asian lovers on usually bright Sunday afternoons for sumptuous bite of 'suya' and good laughters in makeshift bamboo huts. The daring ones like Jasper the stud could have explored the dark and delicate curves of Stella more romantically on those steep and erotic beaches of Lagos rather than walking hand in hand in some frantic effrontery, along Rambole Street like a bollywood desperate love scene. The discrete moves of the clandestine Donald and the angelic Savita could have been established around the red-light districts of Ikoyi and Victoria Island for those "quickie" jolly rides. The Author does not, in my view, give an explicative and picturesque punches to his gamut of sexual suspicions he populates the novel with. A writer most holds a didactic promise to his readers especially where family values are the crux of the theme should be more creatively assertive on this aspect.

Nevertheless, we have seen in this sizzling novel that marriages are never kept alive even if both parties live together in a foreign country like Dhanajay and Sameer, and certainly not when spouses live apart as in the case of the stud, Jasper and Radia. 

The author seems to be saying "power is nothing without control". And power of sex could be seemingly salutary initially,  and could satisfy some incipient desires, but hidden therein, a cesspit of some horrendous consequences and tragic stumps. Sudhir has presented a canticle about the extreme nature of power of sex and its limitations .

A good novel to read for families that live apart and those that live "in-apart".

Joshua Keating wrote" Is Okonjo-Iwealah the 'establishment choice' for the World Bank"

• IRAN

  What's With All the Wheat?

• NEW GUINEA

  Who's the Boss?

• RUSSIA

  Romney's Gaffe?

Is Okonjo-Iweala the 'establishment choice' for the World Bank?

Posted By Joshua Keating Monday, April 2, 2012 - 1:58 PM Share

On his FP blog today, Stephen Walt writes:

"When Washington gets lucky and the African Union endorses a Nigerian economist with a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from MIT, who also has ample experience at the World Bank, and who is a woman of color to boot, the smart thing to do is get behind it immediately. This course is such an obvious no-brainer that I'm amazed the Obama administration didn't leap at the opportunity."

As my former colleague Annie Lowrey writes in the Times, U.S. nominee Jim Yong Kim is still virtually assured victory because of the makeup of the World Bank's governing board, but the fact that this three-way race is even taking place -- José Antonio Ocampo of Columbia is also in the running -- marks a historic shift. It's also striking some of the voices most loudly advocating for the Bank to overturn half a century of tradition and nominate a non-American president, are some of the normally staunchest defenders of the economic status quo.

The Economist editorializes:

WHEN economists from the World Bank visit poor countries to dispense cash and advice, they routinely tell governments to reject cronyism and fill each important job with the best candidate available. It is good advice. The World Bank should take it. In appointing its next president, the bank’s board should reject the nominee of its most influential shareholder, America, and pick Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

Felix Salmon of Reuters chimes in:

Kim is still the favorite for the job, just because he has the full and awesome power of US international diplomatic pressure behind him. But in any fair fight, Okonjo-Iweala would win. And if there are any signs at all that the European vote might not be completely in the bag, we might yet have a real contest on our hands here.

The Financial Times has tripled-down on its support for the Nigerian finance minister with aneditorial, a column by Washington bureau chief Edward Luce, and a letter from economist Jagdish Baghwati supporting her candidacy.

Nationality may play something of a role here. These are all British publications and mostly British authors -- Bagwhati is Indian-American -- whereas the New York Times and Businessweek have both editorialized for Kim.

But supporting Okonjo-Iweala is also an easy "reformist" stance for economic conservatives to take. As these sources all note in their endorsements, Okonjo-Iweala is a fairly orthodox, free market, growth-oriented economist with a long institutional history at the bank. Kim, meanwhile, is an outsider and something of an unknown quantity: A public health expert with little background in economics whose book on inequality and health expresses skepticism about growth-led development and was favorably blurbed by Noam Chomsky. The Economist quips drily: "Were Mr Kim hoping to lead Occupy Wall Street, such views would be unremarkable."

While picking Okonjo-Iweala would of course be historic for bank-- she's non-American, a person of color, and along with Christine Lagarde of the IMF, would put women in charge of the world's two main multilateral financial institutions. But from an ideological point of view, she may actually be the status-quo choic

Gyrations...

Gbogbo ilu,

in wrinkled gyrations,

tapped into the sounds of tattered drums...

who cares if the beaded waists are no longer

responsive,

the gongs and the songs bound in scattered steps,

beckoning....

portmanteau of waists;

who is going to pick dispersed beads unthreaded

from the jaded waists?

II

you can still remember

the fanned dusts trailing relunctant feet

whereas,

tattered tears of childlessness,

of poor harvests,

of crippled expectations

and Gbogbo Ilu

can still celebrate

even when the gorged harvests are nurtured

on patched ridges.

III

but where are the manicured voices,

where are the strewn claps

that would nudge

Gbogbo Ilu

into frenzy of laughters once again;

those laughters long lost in drenches of tears.