Manama, Bahrain. 2004.
I was there to shoot the first F1 race in the Gulf, which was quite unbearable. I’d rather have spent more time sitting near the waterfront where they played dominoes, though. They called it domna. They slapped a scratched, wonky sheet of plywood over the café table, and I hung around long enough to be invited to a glass of mint tea.
A long while ago, a girl in Bombay passed on a couple of lines of People by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. I’ve just discovered the complete version:
No people are uninteresting. / Their fate is like the chronicle of planets. / Nothing in them is not particular, / and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a man lived in obscurity / making his friends in that obscurity / obscurity is not uninteresting.
To each his world is private / and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute / These are private.
In any man who dies there dies with him / his first snow and kiss and fight / it goes with him.
There are left books and bridges / and painted canvas and machinery / Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing: / by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them. / Whom we knew as faulty, the earth’s creatures / Of whom, essentially, what did we know?
Brother of a brother? Friend of friends? / Lover of lover?
We who knew our fathers / in everything, in nothing. / They perish. They cannot be brought back. / The secret worlds are not regenerated.
And everytime again and again / I make my lament against destruction.
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4 Comments
How unbearable,indeed, to watch a race of any sort! It takes a great brain and a poet to make a write-up about a race so beautiful. But this time I’m SURE someone IS listening! Thank you, Pinks…
Word. Excellent
He is losing! Now, if he had that 6/6, that would have been an eye catcher!
There seems to be a fault in this page. Ops, I only wrote a single line! Didnt mean to steal your singiture Pinaki, sorry!