"It was a wonderful experience interacting with you and appreciate the way you have planned and executed the whole publication process within the agreed timelines.”
Subrat SaurabhAuthor of Kuch Woh PalThis collection spreads its wings over diverse issues: Emotions, (joy or grief) old age problems (financial insecurities, loneliness and fear of death); relationships, nostalgia, changing society, obsession for electronic products and more. There is no single thread of unity running through these poems.
The opening poem “The Young and the Old” may make you think this slim volume deals only with geriatric issues. But then you read about a dog waiting to bite your slippers while you are praying. The poet also talks of a child eating chocolate, cake and a toddler happy to have learnt a new word. There is a tinge of spirituality too (The Sai in ‘OM’, Divine Grace). Loss is felt at the passing away a friend, anguish at a dying relationship and an unexpected turn of events.
Women empowerment at the micro level: there’s an illiterate widow who plaits jarimines for a living, and a seventy-five-year old who makes thattais to eke out a living.
Let’s learn to re-connect before it is late.
Uma Mani
The author graduated from the University of Bombay with honors in English Literature in 1968. Thereafter she joined a course in Creative Writing in English and a post-graduate diploma course in Journalism at the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). She is currently overseeing operations in a publishing company in Chennai.
She had been writing casually in college, and ventured into serious writing after marriage. This collection spans a period of thirty five years. Her main source of inspiration was her father, a reputed journalist in the pre- and post-Independence eras.
A believer in brevity, she sculpted her poems with few words. She looked around her home, the middle-class values and what happened in society. Her poems were never obscure, nor were they overtly direct.
At the age of thirty she joined her father’s business of publication. Then there was a lull in her writing, when she had to take care of her children. When they grew up and charted their own careers, she went back to writing in full gusto.
E-Mail id: mani_uma2002@yahoo.co.in
Website: umamani.com
