Latest news with #WasteLand
Hindustan Times
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Delhiwale: His heap of broken images
While the sun beats, the dead tree gives no shelter, and the cricket no relief. The world is a heap of broken images. This evocation from poet TS Eliot's Waste Land can get uncomfortably personal. After all, a substantial chunk of our lives consists of a heap of unfinished fragments. We rarely reach the end of things. Our incomplete endeavours are of many types—a broken New Year resolution, an aborted love affair, or even a thing as banal as the Uber driver cancelling the ride. Here are three of citizen Arjit Roy's many untitled verses that failed to find their end. This evening, the Rohini-based poet scrolls through his mobile phone, showing the poems he couldn't complete due to various reasons, despite his best attempts. (Judgmental readers must be gently told that Arijit has already published a book of completed poems! Brave of him to share his incomplete works, instead of the other way round.) 1. The moon is cut in two equal halves tonight It is cut with such exactness Such quality Such precision That I look at the moon and wonder If a scale was used perhaps So perfect it indeed seems That the mind is forced to ask Was it possible without human touch Or is it so perfect Because of its very absence 2. Why is April The National Poetry Writing Month Is it because No other month had a say Or Nothing is more lovely Than a summer's day But not in India though Then why so Is April given this status? I think it's for the April's fool And just to look a bit more cool For only fools write poetry, that too in English in India And that too for 30 days Surely, these chaps didn't know of life's other ways MBA, Civils, NET, SSC, IIT & GATE Those who aren't really poets, can leave You aren't late 3. O Amaltas tree If I touch your lowest flower Will you also grow into me?
Spectator
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Wake up, babe, new Dot Wordsworth just dropped
On X, that old-fashioned site still used by people like me, someone called Henri tweeted: 'babe wake up Waste Land new hard as hell cover just dropped'. Appended was a Penguin Classics cover illustrated with an apocalyptic picture which I think was a work from 2010 called The Harrowing of Hell, by David Adams. It turned out to have been put together with the help of an online device called Penguin Classics Cover Generator, which allows you to use your chosen picture to design a paperback. The site has no connection with Penguin. But 'Wake up, babe, new [something] just dropped' is a catchphrase or meme that has been around since 2020. Drop, a verb favoured by the trendy to mean 'arrive' or 'be published or released' has been used since the 1980s for records, but is still thought to be hip. Drop is having a creative time at the moment. People who use X are worried about drop shipping. Handy gadgets are advertised for sale, but the advertiser doesn't stock the dog-toy, or whatever the thing is. He merely gets a supplier (perhaps in China) to deliver it to the buyer and makes money from his mark-up as middle-man. Another thing that drops is the other shoe, for which we wait. 'Waiting for the other shoe to drop' must date from the advent of flat-living, and expresses the suspense with which downstairs neighbours await the next percussion after the warning shot, as the man upstairs prepares for bed. There is no recognised begetter of the phrase. It became popular between the wars, when Pont's cartoon 'Life in the flat above' showed the family upstairs jumping and thumping, with the daughter pulling a little wagon unstably piled with pots and pans and even the dog wearing boots. The indefatigably reliable Michael Quinion in his World Wide Words blog traced an American quotation from 1921: 'If nine out of ten of us hadn't heard that 'drop that other shoe' chestnut and molded our lives accordingly for the sake of the neighbor below us, what would be the end of us?' Today, I think we've seen what.
