The World of Words Starts Spinning

Poems

Mind Matters
Vanisha Srinidhi.K BBMT 3rd Year

This day may be filled with smoothness,
This night may beget nightmares.

This day may be to rejoice,
This night may be to mourn.

This day may be a choke,          
This night may be a start.
This day may be to cherish,
This night may be to perish.

This day may be a celebration,

This night may be reprobation.

However the situation is-
The Only required Element:

To Overcome all Hurdles-
CONFIDENCE   

Eventually, the mind that matters the most

LET IT GO! 

 
My Heart's New Dawn

Juveria Tabassum B.Com Ist Year

I awoke one morning with a mind in a mess too deep.
After a stormy night and a stingy sleep.
On my bed, I lay,
Just tossing and turning,
My heart simply lamenting.My eyes burning.  

I had learnt that night, a hard tough lesson:
That a broken heart's no lullaby for any alive person.
I knew not whether,

I wished for a night's sleep.
Or maybe never to wake
From a slumber too deep.

But my heart, it's a stubborn fellow.
It woke me up while all was dark.

However, I saw,
The starlight fading,
As I felt the breeze rustle my hair,
As I watched the first drop of dew falling,
I sensed it, quite miraculously,
Drowning my despair.

There it was,
The first flock of pigeons,
Preparing for another day of flight,
A determined hunt for food,
Was the only thing in their sight.

"Did they care?", I wondered,
"About the heart breaks of the day by-gone;
"Did past failures, ever haunt their secret slumber?" 
The answer as I watched them,
Was a conclusion, so foregone!
 
That their will to survive the day and live,
As long as they could, 

Surpassed every despairing feeling, every sorry thought.
 

And as I watched the sunlight,
Peering through the clouds
I just plainly, understood

That just like the mighty sun,
Cared not for the storms of the past day,
And turned up to shine, hard and bright,
I knew, I should let,
My sorrows take a flight.

I am ready to fight,

I'm prepared to be happy
And to make others glad too.
Like the rays of a bright, young,
Morning light...

Home

Juveria.T

Never felt so left out before,
So alone and so ignored.

This place is so new, so unknown.
Just too different, Oh so forlorn!

"Bring back!” wails my heart,
"The haven you've left behind",
"The lordly palace, the lovely companions,"
"The place that felt so divine"
"Where life I saw through beauty's eye,"

"Where I strolled unstrained,"
"Unbound by panic or by strife"
"With a fearless spirit that soothed all pain."

And each time now my heart cries this lament,
It does through my memories completely comb
And come up with that honest answer,
"It is not, after all, easy, to leave Home."

Book Review

Incredibly Funny and Thoroughly Enjoyable

Review of Anurag Mathur's The Inscrutable Americans (1991)

Chani, Department of MBA

I enjoyed reading Anurag Mathur’s depiction of American culture through the eyes of Gopal Kumar, the naïve, Indian boy. I have many things to say and share about this widely read and analysed novel.  However, in the following article, I have collected and represented some of my favourite reviews on the novel. All of them together, highlight the important aspects of the novel in an interesting, perky and creative way.

The author describes the experiences of Indian student Gopal Kumar in the American Heartland, as he comes to the US to continue his university studies. A good student from a family that has been very successful in the hair oil business for generations, he comes from the boondocks in India, too- even if his hometown is known as the “The Paris of Madhya Pradesh”- and hasn’t been exposed to much. Barely ever having had any contact with girls, much less being intimate with one, he nevertheless anticipates that penthouse letters will prove ‘’the finest possible guide to surviving in America’’ (Orthofer 2012).

Gopal complains in a letter to his brother about the local language: “It is not English, it is American” (Orthofer 2012).

This is a fairly typical tale of a naïf abroad. Mathur (author) who spent some years as a student in Eversville- like Tulsa, Oklahoma) does a reasonably good job of presenting how Gopal sees and navigates this foreign word, from the first time he sees snow to his shyness to go to a party. Gopal also learns a little about America’s racial problems (Orthofer 2012).

If you want to laugh out loud then this is the book for you. The cultural reference to an Indian boy’s upbringing is bang on. The letters written by Gopal, the protagonist are hilarious. Mathur’s description of New York City will flash right in front of your eyes. His experiences of cultural shocks and immigrant experience will make it hard to put this book down (Nijhawan 2015).

The novel is a discovery of himself and of America, with a little of Christopher Columbus and a lot of Eddie Murphy, where shallow humor rubs shoulders with touching observation (Shetty 1990).

It is an amusing variation on the way too familiar theme of the innocent abroad, and remains of some interest, both how foreigners see the United States and how Indians (of a particular time and class) fared abroad. Gopal is sure to find a soul mate in every Indian arriving by the planeload at American airports every day, head full of preconceptions and heart full of hopes(Shetty 1990).

Sources:

M.A. Orthofer. http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/india/mathura.htm. 6 February, 2012.

Surabhi Nijhawan. http://www.indiatimes.com/lifestyle/self/12-books-by-indian-authors-you-need-to-read-now-230548.html?fb_comment_id=833732943364005_941632899240675#f1801c0d0ad5261. April 23 2015.

Kavitha Shetty. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/book-review-anurag-mathur-the-inscrutable-americans/1/316036.html. December 31 1990.

Note on Author

Remembering Enid Blyton

Juveria.T

"It is partly the struggle that helps you so much, that gives

you determination, character, self-reliance – all things 

that help in any profession or trade and most certainly in 

writing".

–Enid Blyton

 

Her stories taught us just that and so much more.

Blyton’s world of adventure, friendship, wonders and of

course, baskets upon picnic baskets loaded with

delicious food, introduced millions of children

worldwide to the joy of reading.

Enid Mary Blyton was born on 11^th of August 1897 in

East Dulwich, London, England. As a child, she was

fascinated with nature and often took long walks along

the scenic English countryside along with her father.

Enid attended St. Christopher’s School in Beckenham,

where she enjoyed physical activities and was quite an

active lacrosse and tennis player, though her academic

exploits, were relatively modest.

Enid loved writing even as a child. She participated in

a poetry writing competition for children and her

triumph there, encouraged her to take her talent for

writing further. She trained to be a teacher after

finishing her school as head girl. She qualified in 1918

and accepted a post at Bickley Park School. By this

time, she was writing continuously in her spare time.

Though she was repeatedly rejected by the earliest

publishers she approached, Enid was never

disheartened. Her first book, Child Whispers, a 24-page

collection of poems, was published in 1922.

 The Enchanted Wood, the first book in the Faraway

Tree series, published in 1939, is about a magic tree

inspired by the Norse mythology that had fascinated

Blyton as a child. According to Blyton's daughter

Gillian, the inspiration for the magic tree came from

"thinking up a story one day and suddenly she was

walking in the enchanted wood and found the tree. In

her imagination she climbed up through the branches

and met Moon-Face, Silky, the Saucepan Man and the

rest of the characters. She had all she needed."

In the year 1942, Blyton published the first novel in

the Famous Five series, Five on a Treasure Island. Its

popularity resulted in twenty-one books between then

and 1963, and the characters of Julian, Dick, Anne,

George (Georgina) and Timmy the dog became

household names in Britain.

In a letter to the psychologist Peter McKellar, Blyton

describes her writing technique:

I shut my eyes for a few minutes, with my portable

typewriter on my knee – I make my mind a blank and

wait – and then, as clearly as I would see real children,

my characters stand before me in my mind's eye ... The

first sentence comes straight into my mind, I don't

have to think of it – I don't have to think of anything.

Gillian has recalled that her mother "never knew where

her stories came from", but that she used to talk about

them "coming from her 'mind's eye‍ '​", as did William

Wordsworth and Charles Dickens. Blyton had "thought

it was made up of every experience she'd ever had,

everything she's seen or heard or read, much of which

had long disappeared from her conscious memory" but

never knew the direction her stories would take. Blyton

further explained in her biography that "If I tried to

think out or invent the whole book, I could not do it.

For one thing, it would bore me and for another, it

would lack the 'verve' and the extraordinary touches

and surprising ideas that flood out from my imagination."

Blyton herself wrote that "my love of children is the whole foundation of all my work".

Blyton's health began to deteriorate in 1957. Her agent George Greenfield recalled that it was "unthinkable" for the "most famous and successful of children's authors with her enormous energy and computer-like memory" to be losing her mind and suffering from what is now known as Alzheimer's disease in her mid-sixties.

During the months following her husband's death, Blyton became increasingly ill, and moved into a nursing home three months before her death. She died at the Greenways Nursing Home, London, on 28 November 1968, aged 71. She was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, where her ashes remain.

The story of Blyton's life was dramatized in a BBC film

entitled Enid, which aired in the United Kingdom

on BBC Four on 16 November 2009. Helena Bonham

Carter, who played the title role, described Blyton as "a

complete workaholic, an achievement junkie and an

extremely canny businesswoman" who "knew how to

brand herself, right down to the famous signature".

It is reported that Enid Blyton wrote around 800 books

during her 40-year career. Her books and the worlds

she created ignited the flame of imagination in the

minds of millions of children all over the world. Despite

a lot of criticism about her work, she remains widely

read even today.

People who knew Enid, often described her as emotionally immature, unstable and even malicious, to some extent. However, it is for her stories and her incredible talent of drawing in the minds of young people into reading that Enid Blyton is remembered for. Blyton's daughter Imogen has stated that she "loved a relationship with children through her books", but real children were an intrusion, and there was no room for intruders in the world that Blyton occupied through her writing. These statements do not exactly show Blyton in the greatest light. She appears to have been very self-absorbed and cut off from the world

around her. Her literary genius, however,

cannot be doubted. She was, and still remains one of

the world’s most beloved writers.

Source of Image/Text: Wikipedia

Published Article

Vanisha Srinidhi.K

Published in The Hindu, Metro Plus 2^nd September 2013

With coarse dialogue filmmakers are spoiling the teacher-

student relationship in real life. The portrayal of the teachers

shown in films, such as flirting scenes between student and

teacher, using the double meaning dialogues and sexual

innuendos are so sleazy. It is not necessary to project such

things onscreen which ultimately leads to cynicism. Because

of this, students are behaving worse while responding to

teachers and their respect for teacher in society will dip. Not

only the present generation but the impact also falls on the

coming generation.