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 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