Chandrabimbam Nenjilettum Pullimane

Title: Chandrabimbam Nenjilettum Pullimane

Singer: K J Yesudas

Music Director: M S Baburaj

Lyrics: Sreekumaran Thampi

Movie: Pulliman (1972)

Chandrabimbam nenjilettum pullimane…
Chandrabimbam nenjilettum pullimane nee
Ente nenjil tullivannathenthinaanu?
Kaalidasan kandedutha kannimaane nin
Kannilente kombukondathenginaanu?

aa haa haa ha ha
aa aa aa
aa aa aa
aa aa
Mayakkunna mayilppeeli mizhiyinakal
Manmadhante malarambin aavanaazhikal
Mandahasa mazhayil njan nananjuvallo
Ninte manassenna puzhayil njan kulichuvallo

Chandrabimbam nenjilettum pullimane nee
ente nenjil tullivannathenthinaanu?

Kudakile vasanthamayi vidarnnaval nee
En karalinte puthariyayi niranjaval nee
Ente lokam vaanam pole valarnnuvallo
En hrudayam thinkaleppol thelinjuvallo

Chandrabimbam nenjilettum pullimane nee
ente nenjil tullivannathenthinaanu?

Onakkodi Uduthu Maanam

Title: Onakkodi Uduthu Manam
Artist: K. J Yesudas
Album: Madhurasangeethangal (1970)
Lyrics: Sreekumaran Thampi
Music: V Dakshinamoorthy

Onakkodi uduthu maanam
Megha kasavaale
Venmegha kasavaale )- (2)
Mazhavillin malar mudiyil choodi
Madhuhaasam thooki
Aval madhuhaasam thooki
(Onakkodi…)

Karkkidakathin karutha chelakal valicherinjallo
Maanam valicherinjallo )- (2)
Kadalin moham tanutha karimukil vilarthu manjallo
Kaattil vilarthu manjallo
(Onakkodi….)

Kannikkoythinu kaathirikkum paadamunarnnallo
Nellin Paadamunarnnallo
Mannin manassil vidarnna kathirukal
Chirichu ninnallo
Kanakam koruthu thannallo
(Onakkodi…madhuhaasam thooki)

Credit me if you take these lyric romanization out.

Chaitanya

Here is a poem by Arun Kolatkar, the Indian poet. Written in English, it is titled “Chaitanya”:

‘Sweet as grapes

are the stones of Jejuri’,

said Chaitanya.

 

 

He propped a stone

in his mouth

and spat out gods.

Words

A Poem by Kamala Das

All round me are words, and words and words,

They grow on me like leaves, they never

Seem to stop their slow growing

From within….But I tell myself, words

Are a nuisance, beware of them, they

Can be so many things, a

Chasm where running feet must pause, to

Look, a sea with paralysing waves,

A blast of burning air or,

A knife most willing to cut your best

Friend’s throat…Words are a nuisance, but

They grow on me like leaves on a tree,

They never seem to stop their coming

From a silence, somewhere deep within….

P.S. Kamala Das/ Kamala Suraiyya/ Madhavikutty is one of India’s most celebrated writers and  a writer par excellence even in the international scenario. Her poetry is often termed as “confessional” as she employs the  “personal” mode in most of her writings. A must-read writer for literature enthusiasts and students 🙂

Someone Else’s Song

A Poem by Kamala Das

I am a million, million people

Talking all at once, with voices

Raised in clamour, like maids

At village-wells.

 

I am a million, million deaths

ox-clustered, each a drying seed

Someday to be shed, to grow for

Someone else, a memory.

 

I am a million, million births

Flushed with triumphant blood, each a growing

Thing that thrusts its long-nailed hands

To scar the hollow air.

 

I am a million, million silences

Strung like crystal beads

Onto someone else’s

Song.

P.S: I have posted this poem here for those students studying Das and have difficulty in finding her poetry. 🙂

Enterprise

A Poem by Nissim Ezekiel

It started as a pilgrimage,
Exalting minds and making all
The burdens light. The second stage
Explored but did not test the call.
The sun beat down to match our rage.

We stood it very well, I thought,
Observed and put down copious notes
On things the peasants sold and bought,
The way of serpents and of goats,
Three cities where a sage had taught.

But when the differences arose
On how to cross a desert patch,
We lost a friend whose stylish prose
Was quite the best of all our batch.
A shadow falls on us – and grows.

Another phase was reached when we
were twice attacked, and lost our way.
A section claimed its liberty
To leave the group. I tried to pray.
Our leader said he smelt the sea.

We noticed nothing as we went,
A straggling crowd of little hope,
Ignoring what the thunder meant,
Deprived of common needs like soap.
Some were broken, some merely bent.

When, finally, we reached the place,
We hardly knew why we were there.
The trip had darkened every face,
Our deeds were neither great nor rare.
Home is where we have to gather grace.

Obituary

A Poem by A.K. Ramanujan

Father, when he passed on,
left dust
on a table of papers,
left debts and daughters,
a bedwetting grandson
named by the toss
of a coin after him,

a house that leaned
slowly through our growing
years on a bent coconut
tree in the yard.
Being the burning type,
he burned properly
at the cremation

as before, easily
and at both ends,
left his eye coins
in the ashes that didn’t
look one bit different,
several spinal discs, rough,
some burned to coal, for sons

to pick gingerly
and throw as the priest
said, facing east
where three rivers met
near the railway station;
no longstanding headstone
with his full name and two dates

to hold in their parentheses
everything he didn’t quite
manage to do himself,
like his caesarian birth
in a brahmin ghetto
and his death by heart-
failure in the fruit market.

But someone told me
he got two lines
in an inside column
of a Madras newspaper
sold by the kilo
exactly four weeks later
to streethawkers

who sell it in turn
to the small groceries
where I buy salt,
coriander,
and jaggery
in newspaper cones
that I usually read

for fun, and lately
in the hope of finding
these obituary lines.
And he left us

a changed mother
and more than
one annual ritual.

Love Poem for A Wife

A poem by A.K. Ramanujan

Really what keeps us apart
at the end of years is unshared
childhood. You cannot, for instance,

meet my father. He is some years
dead. Neither can I meet yours:
he has lately lost his temper
and mellowed.

In the transverse midnight gossip
of cousins’ reunions among
brandy fumes, cashews and the Absences
of grandparents, you suddenly grow
nostalgic for my past and I
envy you your village dog-ride
and the mythology

of the sever crazy aunts.
You begin to recognize me
as I pass from ghost to real
and back again in the albums
of family rumours, in brothers’
anecdotes of how noisily
father bathed,

slapping soap on his back;
find sources for a familiar
sheep-mouth look in a sepia wedding
picture of father in a turban,
mother standing on her bare
splayed feet, silver rings
on her second toes;

and reduce the entire career
of my recent unique self
to the compulsion of some high
sentence in His Smilesian diary.
And your father, gone irrevocably
in age, after changing every day
your youth’s evenings,

he will acknowledge the wickedness
of no reminiscence: no, not
the burning end of the cigarette
in the balcony, pacing
to and fro as you came to the gate
late, after what you thought
was an innocent

date with a nice Muslim friend
who only hinted at touches.
Only two weeks ago, in Chicago,
you and your brother James started
one of you old drag-out fights
about where the bathroom was
in the backyard,

north or south of the well
next to the jackfruit tree
in your father’s father’s house
in Alleppey. Sister-in-law
and I were blank cut-outs
fitted to our respective
slots in a room

really nowhere as the two of you
got down to the floor t draw
blueprints of a house from memory
of everything, from newspapers
to the backs of envelopes
and road-maps of the United States
that happened

to flap in the other room
in a midnight wind: you wagered heirlooms
and husband’s earnings on what the Uncle in Kuwait
would say about the Bathroom
and the Well, and the dying,
by now dead,

tree next to it. Probably
only the Egyptians had it right:
their kings had sisters for queens
to continue the incests
of childhood into marriage.
or we should do as well-meaning
Hindus did.

betroth us before birth
forestalling separate horoscopes
and mother’s first periods,
and wed us in the oral cradle
and carry marriage back into
the namelessness of childhoods.