Thursday 31 May 2018

Arrival

Arrival
--- - - - - - -

In the intervals of

bidding

a not so good adieu

and telling

 jokes in the morn

someone

 just knocked

 in the haze
as an after thought.

Came in, lit the lantern

as if to write

the incomplete poem,

in the air,

 filled the silence

with a rustle

that wouldn't wake one up.

A presence

against

the not  so unyielding

resistance,

some one stood,

Never to touch,

Not to vex
or to win,

just to show

that fences

are

the fantasies

of the awakened.

just that ,

nothing more.
Aswathi MP

Wednesday 25 April 2018

Long Live Laugh: Laughable Loves of Milan Kundera- Book review


Long Live Laugh: Laughable Loves of Milan Kundera- Book review


Seriously, sometimes the human universe will be filled with jokes, when people, especially lovers, who wouldn't make out what they really wanted to have, achieve in the games of eternal desire. What they thought as they needed is simply a plethora of unseen and hence unknown. After having rushed for gaining a vulnerable love, suddenly the lovers would reach a summit of desperation, when shyness was history,  the present is a plain of unfamiliarity where the man would lose the lover, for a woman, whom he craves to yield. Milan Kundera's Laughable Loves unleashed the real paradoxes of (manly) wishes.
    The women, absolutely real, escape the imagination on the one side and occupy the province of imagination on the other, playing hide and seek and finally, dwelled on the whimsical frames of the minds, leave the space, surmising the weary the lessons of incredible failure. Kundera showed young and old libertines, who, with or without satiety, end up in the most farcical aspect of opportunities.
            The book is a humorous take on human tragedies; the sublime is no sublime for a vision Kundera exposed enormously through quotable threads: "When a man is contented, he gladly turns down an opportunity that presents itself, so as to be reassured about his blissful satiety", "Her ugliness relieved him of the shyness to which feminine beauty always reduced him" and "in order to prove her religious faith, she had to devote her entire attention... God Antifornicator" are a few in the many.
            Out of the seven stories mixing desire and despair, in "The Hitchhiking Game" and "Edward and God'', the female characters  wretchedly live as the helpless spectators along with their erotic male counterparts without tasting the success  to illustrate and substantiate themselves for each others' needs. While "The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire" is a virtual tour de farce guided by a Martin ,"Symposium" is the conspicuous depiction of Elisabeth's eroticism, her imaginary striptease and Dr. Havel's reprimand and a platonic love at the backstage followed by the theories of individual characters on Elisabeth.”The old dead make the room for the young dead" bluntly articulates the layers of guilt and yearning and unfolds the strange intricacies of fulfilment and gratification beyond idealism as a character remarks," you have erected a monument to me within your memory. We cannot allow it to be destroyed." 
"Nobody will laugh" reveals how an excuse is taken as promise by telling the tale of an art history lecturer and Mr. Zaturecky who desperately runs after the lecturer who vaguely submitted to the commitment of reviewing the article of the former that he believed as nothing more than crap. The events turned to a surprising menace when the lecturer raised an allegation that the scholar is a womanizer, unnecessarily involving his lover and the wife of the scholar into his plot of procrastination. "Dr. Havel after Twenty years" presented a man who couldn't agree with the gradual invisibility and absence of attention, the contributions of the time's travel that he substituted with the popularity of his wife, a beautiful actress.
Kundera's subjects are indeed men of unrelenting lust, and women are the premises of the stories of men. Of course, his women too are far from the innocent fragile manifestation of cupid, sometimes fantastic monuments of human wishes and sometimes flirtatious, shameless, intolerable, fearsome, envious and impulsive.
Laughable loves is sharp-witted, if you don't read it like "optimism is the opium of the people, a healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity. Long live.....".
Aswathi.M.P.