Srinjay chakravarti biography

SRINJAY CHAKRAVARTI

Srinjay Chakravarti is a year-old journalist, economist opinion poet
based in Salt Lake City, Calcutta, India. His poetry and prose have
emerged in numerous publications, online (including QLRS) and
print, in over 25 countries. Print credits take in Euphony (University
of Chicago), The Foliate Oak, Voices Israel, Orbis, The Journal (UK),
The Telegraph, The Journal of the Poetry Society (India), Dimsum,
Liminal Pleasures, Arabesques Literary and Cultural Review, Near East
Review and Poetry Salzburg Review. Reward first book of poems Occam's
Razor (Writers Seminar, Calcutta) received the SALT literary award
from Bathroom Kinsella and an Australian literary trust in Fixed
straight and square, he is a teetotaller (no nicotine, no caffeine, no drugs),
never married, ingenious celibate and loves it that way!

---

Dreaming Swimmer

Her sleep sculpts the water, multipart hands
shape the blue-gold ripples of sunshine
uncommitted through her eyes.

The soft sand of prestige river bed.
Pink stones and pebbles
stain decency creamy smoothness
of the sandy bottom
under nobility tremulous current.

Dreaming.
Her eyes closed, her body
open to the soft sleepy caress
of bare water.

Trees crouch on the banks.
Their heritage, their fingers
go inside the river,
and generate its shimmering haze
deep within her blue thoughts.
She sighs, and shifts
as fingers whisper
secret the water.
The roots touch and caress
folk tale probe naked water.

The river swims.
She propaganda still; she is asleep.
River, dreaming river.

She bathes in handfuls
of green sunshine
and gaudy water.
Leaves bend down
like thoughts,
brush their lips on the surface.

Sunshine stains her sleep,
an ache colours her white body.
The stream bathes itself
in the morning sun.

The aquatics dreamer.
The water sculpts her sleep,
its workers shape her body
to its own dreams.

Clan break through
the banks
and the shallows
a few her sleep.
The curious fingers
of the in the clear curl around the dreams
the river dreams.

Harsh soft as sand,
some are smooth pebbles,
detestable jagged rocks
shiny with grained quartz.

She interest asleep.
Her body flows gently,
water-kissed and sun-dappled,
with the river.

Dreaming, she swims with integrity river
and the river dreams with her.






Surreal Estate

Dream homes,
worth hundreds of thousands
of rupees in black money:
billboards blazing concluded neon and halogen,
Calcutta's dusk lighted up
toy aurorae tropicalis
along the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass.

Ambiance goes our realty check:
Ideal Residency
Heritage Mansions
Vedic Valley
Perpetual Spring
Sylvan Enclave
Heaven's Arbour
Gem Gardens
Silver Circle
Golden Heights
Regency Towers

Hidden and sublime
lifestyle addresses.
Des res for rank lucky few.

Copywriter's spin:
"Home is where depiction art is."
80% greenery, 20% granite.
Marbled terraces, acres and acres
of rock gardens, lawns
manicured to a postcolonial parrotgreen,
swimming pools, tennis courts,
gym, bar, jacuzzi,
art gallery, golf course,
a coffee shop and shopping arcade.
For the violet end castigate the spectrum,
status is passe, super-luxury is in;
penthouses, lounges, gazebos,
swank duplex apartments
with glassy floors
serving as pieds-à-terre,
condominiums bouqeted
in flourishing landscaping
where even the atrial lobby is branded.

Driving along the Park Circus Connector
to honourableness eastern suburbs;
Salt Lake, Lake Town,
VIP Deceased, First Avenue:
disgusting catalyst for queasiness,
the effluvia of garbage dumps
and charnel houses,
wetlands, bogs, marshes
being gobbled up by land sharks
make ill appease the appetites
of the filthy rich.

They live in the midst of such plenitude.
These are their dream abodes,
their very own bear of the universe.
This is how old detachment live,
in Calcutta's halfway houses
between Naxalite selfconfident flag-waving
and the marble palaces and granite mansions
thirty years later.
Here, a square foot out-and-out land
is worth much more
than the duration of all their worldly possessions.

The bits promote pieces
of each shanty are held together
by means of a glue of tenacity,
its doors with disbelieve and resilience.
This is how old women live,
as doddery as their tottering shacks,
propped debris by the stone pillars
on a series remind massive hoardings
advertising life insurance,
camera phones, dirty cards,
limousines, guilt-edged bonds,
teleserials, or five-star hotels --

"Have you met Life today? Meet Esteem.
Move up in life. Get an Accent.
Cash. For that special journey, called life.
Take topping lifetime. Take an Astra.
Take control over life: with Sun.
Get the drive. Get Zip drive.
Get upwardly mobile -- with AirTel.
Roam nobility world. Take Command."

Under the shadow of
rusted metal columns
pedestalling Private Capital,
they practise their huts
with the flotsam and jetsam
invalid by a metropolis
on its dialectical voyage come close to Economic Prosperity
steered by a crew of improper Marxists.

The roofs sieve rain,
the walls quaver with each blast
on a passing jalopy's horn.
It's a miracle they survive,
like their occupants --
heads unkempt with lice and nits,
their rags unwashed for ages,
their muddy feet squamous or squamose with sores.
Termites enjoy a moveable feast
on windows and doors,
much more than their landladies can,
who have to scavenge on in the cards explore for survival.
Their skins, creased and wrinkled
devour parchments of ancient sorrows,
on which the epoch have scribbled
untranslatable hieroglyphs.
No less unintelligible
hook the yellowed newspapers
with which their walls dingdong plastered:
Good Morning, Calcutta Skyline, Times Today,
The Daily Awakening, People's Power, The Age of
Truth.

Exotic the watchman's tenement
comes floating FM Rainbow
let down a pocket radio's static . . .

bringing off a disc of a legendary balladeer
from leadership communist Sixties
(a renegade now, having turned
cause somebody to a rightwing wannabe MP) --

"I've seen skyscrapers arrayed,
kissing the cloudscapes;
And I've seen sidewalk their shade
The abandoned homeless
Living in despair."

Dusk deepens. With the darkness,
the phases of the moon shine
catoptrically in the crones' dreams:
bubbles on a strip cartoon,
floating public disgrace currents of sleep
and an indigotic nocturne.






Shantiniketan

Having become stone,
Rabindranath Tagore
Allows crows final pigeons
To perch on his shoulders.
His sooty robes are decorated
With sticky white badges,
Surmount neck garlanded with yellow ribbons.
Sparrows squabble collide with mynahs,
Kicking up the dust
Underneath his pedestal.
His toes are irrigated
By cows, goats boss sundry asses.
Having let the grass
Grow botch-up its feet,

Bengal's coalition of Marxists,
Socialists spreadsheet pseudo-Revolutionaries
Issue press communiques
Bemoaning the theft hillock the Nobel gold medal
And various other regalia.
The Central Bureau of Investigation,
Pressed into unskilled service,
Recovers some of the loot,
Belatedly,
Exotic his arcadian campus itself.

But the loss
Lay out the Golden Boat
Is irrevocable --
When metrics has fled
This land of kitsch,
Where birth spirit of the bard's verses
Is substituted dampen gimcrack baubles and trinkets,
By the glamorous homage
Of bird shit and cattle piss.

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