Friday, September 25, 2015

Ici, on Parle Française - 36


This comic strip is specially created for Alliance Française de Bangalore, for use in their classrooms and website. Reproduced here by special arrangement. 

Monday, September 21, 2015

Ici, on Parle Française - 35


This comic strip is specially created for Alliance Française de Bangalore, for use in their classrooms and website. Reproduced here by special arrangement. 

Thursday, September 10, 2015

I’m a Poet… in Seychelles!

Most people know me as the common-or-garden soulless, insensitive clod. They couldn’t be more wrong. I’m a poet. Yes siree, a bona-fide, card-carrying, licensed poet. Ask those chaps in Seychelles.

Check out the latest edition of SIPAY, one of the leading (or possibly the only) literary review journals in Seychelles. Your corner newsagent doesn’t have copies? No sweat: I’ve scanned and uploaded the relevant pages:

 (click to enlarge)
There you go. Pashupati Chatterji (that’s me) featured as the “Invited Poet”. Yusss, it doesn’t get more poetic than that. And just in case you think Seychelles is just that little island out there in the middle of a big blue ocean, let me tell you that there are more poets per square yard on Seychelles than any other place on the planet. What the Seychellois don’t know about poetry can be written on the back of a picture postcard. If they say I am a poet, I jolly well am.

Highly impressed by my winning Chansons Sans Frontiere 2014, their French-speaking editor Maggie invited me to submit as ‘featured poet’ a couple of poems for their quarterly/bi-annual literary journal. (From what I understand, it’s supposed to be quarterly, but they don’t usually get around to pushing out more than a couple per year). This journal, by the way, is in French, one of the three official languages of Seychelles, the others being English and Creole. All the brightest literary minds in Seychelles consider their day made if they get their stuff on it.

Maggie asked me to submit at least one poem on the theme of ‘I have a dream’ (j’ai un rêve). I submitted a little piece entitled ‘I have a dream… of rabbits’. OK, I never denied I was a soulless clod. Give me a soaring, inspirational theme and I will write a comic verse on it. You can see the French version in the last of the snapshots above.

Here is the English version (an adaptation, not an exact translation):-

Friday, September 04, 2015

Ici, on Parle Française - 34


This comic strip is specially created for Alliance Française de Bangalore, for use in their classrooms and website. Reproduced here by special arrangement.