What is Spiritualism? What is Divinity?
Is it the Obvious or is it the Symbolic?
This anthology of 12 poems takes us on a spiritualistic transportation from the obvious to the symbolic. As we delve into some well-known facets of Krishna's life we begin to see reflections of modern day emotions and situations, the outpouring of pain and suffering, and the spiritual aspect of Love.
This book is also an ensemble of photographs of the deities of the Parthasarathy temple in Chennai. The pictures provide the perfect accompaniment to the poetry in terms of passion, variety, symbolism, poetic artistry and beauty.
So, come readers, come fall in Love with Krishna.
Sunshine to Sunshine, each syllable, each burst of light, a note of the heart
Orchestrated by the Flautist, the years of our life His sheet music.
The tryst with divinity, what began as a futile, endless search,
But eventually reaching a crescendo, converging with the intrinsic being,
With the images speaking and the words flowing into optical manifestations,
A conscious awareness illumining the truth that the divinity so sought after
Lay in that quintessential word — Me.
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Vidya Shankar & Shankar Ramakrishnan
Vidya Shankar
An Academic for more than two decades, Vidya loves teaching children of all ages and takes pride in stemming the creativity of her students. Her passion towards literature, particularly poetry, has been her innate skill, and the fact that her students fondly call her lady Shakespeare is a testament of her literary prowess.
She takes her love for literature a step further by contributing to the voluminous ocean with her own writing. Though she has been composing poetry from a very young age just for the sheer joy of creativity, and had always dreamed of being widely acclaimed as an author, she had not allowed herself to go public, and instead, satisfied her imaginative strain for several years by writing scripts for school programmes.
An impulsive step that she took in December 2013, when she started her own blog called 'So I am a Blogger', (now renamed 'The Quintessential Word') pushed her into a limelight she had never imagined would happen, and that too in a short span of time. By March 2014, she was contributing to 'Short Take', a column that appeared every Saturday in The Gulf Today, a Sharjah based newspaper. Three years down the line, she is still a regular contributor, the articles of which she reproduces in her blog.
It was around this time that her poetry writing blossomed; from the buds of nonsensical verses it got Divine essence when poignant modern day truths reflected events from the mythological tales of Krishna. A book such as this naturally had to find the light of day.
Vidya Shankar can be contacted on her Facebook Page / Blogger 'The Quintessential Word'.
Shankar Ramakrishnan
(M.R. Shankar)
Shankar has had a versatile career ranging from the stock markets to multimedia but his inherent occupation was vested in photography. One could blame his DNA for that; his father was not only a freedom fighter but a photographer too in his own right. Nothing but an intense passion for photography could have induced Shankar to leave a well-settled job of over ten years, and that too in his mid-thirties, to pursue multimedia as a career, an arena that hardly was popular then.
This move also helped him recognise his other great passion, teaching. It took him places for work, to Colombo and to Dubai, gave him an International Best Faculty Award, and escalated his career to great levels with Asia's leader in Multimedia Education. But at the end of it all, his heart lay in Triplicane, with the Lord of the Parthasarathy temple.
Shankar took his baby steps in photography with a small, second-hand, aim-and-shoot camera that his wife had gifted him. His eye for perfect clicks was evident even with that humble device, the 36 exposures of a film roll getting maximum output. There was a phase when he was camera-less, because his dear red instrument had to be shelved and he could not afford to replace it. But that didn't deter him from taking photographs. He would borrow cameras from friends to pacify his yearning heart.
His photographic calling found a foothold in 2010 when he got his first mobile phone with a camera. Starting with a 2 mega-pixel, through a 12 mega-pixel and finally a 41 mega-pixel mobile phone camera (again, a gift from his wife), Shankar exhibited to the world an onslaught of amazing pictures, the quality, clarity and colours on par with those from DSLRs.
Shankar can be spotted in the streets around the temple of Triplicane, towering, as the Lord is, at six feet, clad in pristine white nativity, armed with his recently acquired DSLR, following the path of the Lord through his lens.
He can be contacted on his Facebook Page 'Vishnumayam' that he had started in 2015 with the sole purpose of showcasing the thousands of clicks he has taken and continues to take of the Lord of the Parthasarathy temple. The Page, which has nearly 3000 likes and still counting, gets a post reach of more than a lakh across the globe.
Shankar is also occasionally into candid photography which he shares with his audience on his Facebook Page 'Out of (My) Focus'.
