Sunday, December 23, 2007

Of a mother and her daughter

Everybody knows what a sunset is. The ball of fire rises every morning in the East and disappears over the Western horizon in the evening. The Navajo Nation calls the sun Morning Boy. They even have a song about it. If I recall rightly, it narrates the Morning Boy waking up bright and shining at dawn and, tired after working hard through the day providing energy to the world, going to sleep at dusk.

Most people take sunset for granted. But there are a few who sit down and watch the evening sky with fascination. Some of them are poets no matter whether they write in the poetic form or in prose. They see the beauty around them, their minds wander to obscure corners of imagination which only they are aware of. They feel things about sunset that the others don’t. And out of their inner vision, sometimes, emerge pieces like Reflections of an Evening in Gowri Mohanakrishnan’s blog Seventh Chords.

Here are two examples from the post: "The light would fade slowly and grandly out of the sky, lingering until the clouds and trees were dark silhouettes….I sit alone now and the children who played in this garden when they were little have left home." Actually a fellow blogger, RAJI MUTHUKRISHNAN, has highlighted these in her comments on the post. Wish I could write with such ease and flow and meaning.

Now, who is Gowri Mohanakrishnan? All I know is that she is the daughter of Maiji, the 80-year-old blogger and a great-grandmother from Chennai, India. I mentioned her in my post Believe it or not - blogging at 107. Do visit her site Memories and Musings too. It is one of the very few blogs that I have bookmarked.

Thank you, mother and daughter, for providing us good reading material.

Ends.

Also see: No Red Sails in the Sunset


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"Most people take sunset for granted. But there are a few who sit down and watch the evening sky with fascination. Some of them are poets no matter whether they write in the poetic form or in prose. They see the beauty around them, their minds wander to obscure corners of imagination which only they are aware of. They feel things about sunset that the others don’t.."

Well said Abraham. When I was young I had superb opportunity to study Sanskrit and works of Sanskrit poets, particularly those of Kalidasa under a great (traditional) Sanskrit scholar. Later, when I visited Kanyakumari with my mates from the engineering college on a South India tour, we had an opportunity to witness the sunset there and what a sight it was! Only then I was able to appreciate what Kalidasa said about sunset in his works like Meghasandesha.