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My Encounters with a Peacock
Half a kilo of pure happiness
Can you home deliver that to me?
After all, I am the national bird of this unhappy country,
Since 1963.
You don't want me flying
Across the border,
To Burma or Ceylon
As a mark of protest.
Can you home deliver that to me?
After all, I am the national bird of this unhappy country,
Since 1963.
You don't want me flying
Across the border,
To Burma or Ceylon
As a mark of protest.
123 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 25, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 2, 2025
My Encounters With A Peacock by Ramu Ramanathan is a collection of poems where the poet shows the readers the conversations he had with the peacock when he was staying in Dharampur, a small town in the South Gujarat.
With this interesting premise, Ramanathan with his poems and perspective captivates the attention from the beginning itself, and intrigue readers with the brewing of an unconventional duo and their world and how both the peacock and human can interact and understand each other's world and how it grows on them with time.
In these 65 interactions with the peacock extending over months, Ramanthan elevates the mundanity of life into compelling conversations, and how with each successive interaction, their connection and understanding deepens and yet surprises them out of nowhere. He managed to inculcate a lot of themes and issues subtly, and yet makes a point to make the readers delve deeper - marriage and relationships, financing and poverty, literature and stereotypes of life among various others.
It was delightful to see how both of them go through a lot of learning and un-learning and push the conventional line of thinking. And the most fascinating parts of the poems come when the peacock interacts with the wife of the narrator!
The poems are arranged with the occurrence of interactions and shown in the monthly sequence. Though I was a little confused with the timeline and events occurring.
A conversation between a bird/animal with a human is something that I have seen a lot in our folktales and bed time stories from elders, and it never fails to fascinate me. If you are looking to read poems that break the narrative of meaning beyond the textual understanding in poems and conventional relationships, this collection will definitely entertain you.
With this interesting premise, Ramanathan with his poems and perspective captivates the attention from the beginning itself, and intrigue readers with the brewing of an unconventional duo and their world and how both the peacock and human can interact and understand each other's world and how it grows on them with time.
In these 65 interactions with the peacock extending over months, Ramanthan elevates the mundanity of life into compelling conversations, and how with each successive interaction, their connection and understanding deepens and yet surprises them out of nowhere. He managed to inculcate a lot of themes and issues subtly, and yet makes a point to make the readers delve deeper - marriage and relationships, financing and poverty, literature and stereotypes of life among various others.
It was delightful to see how both of them go through a lot of learning and un-learning and push the conventional line of thinking. And the most fascinating parts of the poems come when the peacock interacts with the wife of the narrator!
The poems are arranged with the occurrence of interactions and shown in the monthly sequence. Though I was a little confused with the timeline and events occurring.
A conversation between a bird/animal with a human is something that I have seen a lot in our folktales and bed time stories from elders, and it never fails to fascinate me. If you are looking to read poems that break the narrative of meaning beyond the textual understanding in poems and conventional relationships, this collection will definitely entertain you.
March 25, 2021
Love the whimsical theme used to make the reader ponder over the real.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews