 |
| Sri N Srivatsa |
Bio: Chennai-born Sri N Srivatsa is a retired banker living in Noida. Over the years, his poetry and translations mostly from Tamil to English and vice versa plus a handful to and from Hindi, have been featured on several journals and platforms. Ten volumes of Tamil poems by ten different poets and one volume of English poems translated by him into Tamil of yet another poet have been published so far. A collection of his English translations titled "Modern Tamil Poetry: A Miniature Canvas - Volume I with a poem each of 153 poets has just been released.
My city was alive with horse drawn tongas
that lent a rustic look to the metropolis,
Phat-phatis once fitted with Harley - Davidson engines
modified since to run on diesel engines
and double decker buses
which crawled on the roads and
which a brisk walker could overtake.
It had only one flyover, actually a bridge over the not-so-popular circular railway
but called a flyover anyway.
It also had giant trees a century old
whose trunks could not be
hugged by even two people
with their hands stretched wide.
It had ponds, vast open tracts of verdant green, streets lined with trees
mostly for their shade
and quite some for the jamuns they bore.
It encompassed so many villages
that remained uncorrupted.
It had green fields which
turned into a sea of yellow
when the mustard bloomed.
Parrots and peacocks were everywhere.
And then came development,
a budget motorcar, fast bikes,
wider roads and flyovers
which required trees to be felled,
arenas and multistoried buildings
multiple metro rail lines and more.
The ponds have dried up and fields have become malls.
But for the omnipresent pigeon the birds too have disappeared.
Tongas, Phat-phatis and double deckers are history now.
A concrete jungle stands now stands in place of my city of yore.
