Started relatively recently. An early love for poetry possibly through the funny children's(?) poems of G P Rajaratnam (==tangent to Rama Bhima Soma== & influence of T P Kailasm?) through an audio casette of which all I remember is that the first song on Side A was about Kasturi's adventure with a ತುತ್ತೂರಿ (was it called ರತ್ನನ್ ಪದಗಳು?). This was possibly in the so-called *middle* school (no relationship with Middle Earth, a mid-medicine pre-occupation [[Middle earth, Tolkien and their ilk|on which elsewhere]]) > ಬಣ್ಣದ ತಗಡಿನ ತುತ್ತೂರಿ > ಕಾಶಿಗೆ ಕೊಂಡನು ಕಸ್ತೂರಿ A possiblly later favorite was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's *The Psalm of life* which I could (till recently?) recite while half-asleep, possibly imbibed through early renditions of its rhyme and rhythm by my grandfather, once an English teacher at - among other schools, many of them nameless government ones in small towns in central & the (then) Hyderabad Karnataka - Maharaja's High School in Mysore. With due respects to the rambles herein on [[Decolonisation]], these early poems many of them from textbooks have left a mark. Ozymandias from 1st PU (11th standard at Josephs) or the one I still fondly recall, *An Ode to a Cuckoo* which gave an amazing English teacher that some of us eventually held with much admiration, Arul Mani the nickname, *Cuckoo Mani* or the poem-ish lyric of *The Temple of the King* by Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow which I got introduced to much later while studying medicine through a dear friend (on whom elsewhere - ==Saketh Marla==)...poems have been with me for quite sometime, but it took post-MBBS life with bunch of good friends (*Boo*) with whom I shared a home in north Bangalore to really bring my flavour of cheeky humour, rhyme and later exploration of more solemn themes in my own poetry. ## 📜 List of Poems - [[Unwilled journeys]] - [[The inconspicuous intangibles]] - [[The Hand and the Mind]] - [[A toast to your birthday]] - [[Ode to ABD Selvam]] Last updated: 2026-02-08 21:34