Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

About 50 years ago, folks in the family got the first inkling about my poetic tendencies.

Any event in the family was good enough for me to get going with a paper and pencil, snuggled up in some corner with some raw mango and tamarind pieces, along with some salt and cayenne pepper , just stuff to nibble on, as I came up with all kinds of poetry, that celebrated things as diverse, as my best friend's father getting a national honor, someone having surgery (complete with anatomy details), Nikita Krushchev's visit to Pune (my hometown), the terrible dam-burst-floods (July 12, 1961) in Pune, and visits to various relgious pilgrimage places we went to, as a family.

Most of this poetry was in Marathi, my mother tongue, and some of it was published in magazines, and was once even recited by me at 9 years of age, on the All India Radio children's program, Balodyaan , where the compere kept signalling to me to pipe down my volume :-)......The intervening years saw me making poems for folks retiring at work, for a well-liked yoga instructor (with details of exercises), and countless poems to celebrate the engagements of daughters of various friends.

The prominent feature of all this great poetry then, was the rhyming.

A few years ago, my late father, in one of his demento-geriatric anti-paper, anti clutter phases, suddenly dispatched a file to me in Mumbai, through his visiting grandson. In a divine intervention, in what was a "get rid of this paper" campaign in his house, he recognised the file in which he and my mother had painstakingly kept some of the cuttings of newspapers and magazines where my poems appeared, and had it sent to me before it got unknowingly unmindfully trashed . (Read this).

Today, many many blogs (in prose) later , at a different stage of my life, the poetry is coming back. It no longer needs to rhyme, and is often triggered by events, inside and outside the family, anger, confusion, frustration and appreciation .

I've been commenting lately on some blogs in verse form. As well as writing verse on my own blog .

And so I now introduce "Strewn Ashes", my poetry blog. Despite what may appear to be a morbid name, the blog has a fair amount of cheery stuff.

Isnt technology amazing ? Years ago, my father was the archive. Today, he is no more, but technology has changed , the poems are paperless, and I dont need to do anything to archive....

Have a look. There is Indian music on the site if you get the urge to shake your head or tap your feet, and it disappears if you hit the back button :-)

Click "Strewn Ashes " ............