Madness in November.....

The last time I was published, was 50 years ago.

By the Children's Section of a newspaper from Kolhapur, in the plains of Maharashtra. It was a poem, where the rhyming was perfect.

By and by, poetry changed, and publishing changed. You didnt need to always rhyme. And the advent of the 21st centrury saw the entry of electrons into publishing.

Sometime in August 2010, a few hours before their deadline, I came across this item about a group that called themselves Madness Mandali (mandali = group), and they were planning to come out with a Visual Poetry book.

You could send in your entr(y/ies), and they would select a total of 33 poets and 33 artists. Artists would be allocated/allowed to choose a poem, and would submit their interpretations, and voila ! a book would happen !

500 confident types sent in stuff. The Mandalis entrusted the poetry selection to English faculty in one of Mumbai's oldest colleges.

September brought some good news, a poem of mine got selected. A wonderful lady called Sonal , who I have yet to meet (face to face), illustrated it.

And then the Mandalis started sending FB messages. "Think of a title for the book !" "Do a blog post to promote the book !" "We got ourselves a domain ! Link! " "Design posters about the book !" ; and then in fine print they said the link would go to their blog page till someone designed a webpage for them, free, of course.



Well, the impossible has often happened. ( I am not mentioning the CommonWealth Games) .

I am thinking of a title, but at 60 its difficult to come up with "rocking" stuff, unless it's your chair.

I just did this post.

I am sure some cool artistic folks are doing a Madness Mandali webpage out of the goodness of their hearts.

In the meanwhile, if you leave aside the late editor from Kolhapur, my late parents, and some of my friends who are bombarded with personalized poems when something good happens to them, or they post great pictures on their blogs, I can see, that there may exist folks, who raise a quizzical eyebrow, go into a crooked smile, snort, and give me a look that says , "Poet, eh ?"....

All I can say, is that old structures often get a new life after 50 years. They call these Golden.

And all you cynical types can have a look here .....