Some advice to those who will serve time in prison

The following is probably one of the best poems ever composed by Nazim Hikmet. Read it out aloud to yourself and try to savour in each and every word


If instead of being hanged by the neck
you're thrown insidefor not giving up hope
in the world, your country, your people,
if you do ten or fifteen years
apart from the time you have left,you won't say,
"Better I had swung from the end of a ropelike a flag" --
You'll put your foot down and live.
It may not be a pleasure exactly,
but it's your solemn duty
to live one more dayto spite the enemy.
Part of you may live alone inside,
like a tone at the bottom of a well.
But the other part
must be so caught upin the flurry of the world
that you shiver there inside
when outside, at forty days' distance, a leaf moves.
To wait for letters inside,to sing sad songs,
or to lie awake all night staring at the ceilingis sweet but dangerous.
Look at your face from shave to shave,
forget your age,watch out for lice
and for spring nights,
and always rememberto eat every last piece of bread--
also, don't forget to laugh heartily.
And who knows,the woman you love may stop loving you.
Don't say it's no big thing:
it's like the snapping of a green branchto the man inside.
To think of roses and gardens inside is bad,
to think of seas and mountains is good.
Read and write without rest,
and I also advise weavingand making mirrors.
I mean, it's not that you can't pass
ten or fifteen years insideand more --
you can,as long as the jewel
on the left side of your chest doesn't lose it's luster!

May 1949 Nazim Hikmet

Nazim Hikmet

• The following poem is written by one of the best poets i have come across in the recent times. Nazim Hikmet. Hikmet was a Turkish poet A fervent nationalist patriot, a socialist whose humanistic views tran- scended barriers of race and country, Nazim Hikmet is considered one of Turkey's very foremost modern poets . . . and yet for many years his works were banned in his native country and he himself suffered long exile.
  Nazim Hikmet himself had the most impeccable bourgeois antecedents. His grandfather had been the governor of Salonica and his father consul at Hamburg. Hikmet was enrolled at the Naval Academy but after five years he suffered repeated bouts of pleurisy and was given a medical discharge. During the Nationalist struggle he went to Anatolia and taught school in Nationalist territory but swiftly became disillusioned and went on to Batum in 1921. The next year he was accepted into the Department of Economic and Social Studies at the University of Moscow where he remained until 1924, coming under the influence of the Futurist poet Mayakowski and into contact with Vera, Piraia and the other women who inspired some of his poetry and prose.
  Though he returned to Istanbul and began publishing his poetry in local journals, the Ankara Independence Tribunal sentenced him to 15 years of hard labor and exile ``in absentia'' in 1926 for one of his poems. Apprised of the sentence, Hikmet was able to flee to Russia, only to return in 1928, hoping to benefit from a general amnesty for political offenders. But immediately on his return he was emprisoned at Hopa and later sentenced to six years and six months of penal servitude. This sentence was shortened by a year and a half through another amnesty in 1933 on the tenth anniversary of the Republic. A period of freedom, publication and activity in local film studios was once more terminated by the decree of the Court of the Military Academy which sentenced Nazim Hikmet to 15 years for his supposed subversive activities among its student body while the Naval Academy Special Court added a sentence of 20 years for the same offense. Sentences delivered by the courts brought the total sentence to 61 years and 6 months. (Karaalioglu, Edebiyatimizda sair ve yazarlar, 1979, p.272)
  On the accession of the Democratic Party in 1950, numerous lawyers and intellectuals petitioned the new goverment to include Nazim Hikmet's name in the political amnesty list. He was released from prison in 1950, but alarmed by threats against his life he fled once more, this time aboard a freighter bound for Rumania. He spent his remaining days as a political refugee in Poland, Bulgaria and the Soviet Union, dying of a heart attack in Moscow where he is buried.
  The influence of Nazim Hikmet on the young Turkish poets of his day was considerable both from an ideological perspective and from his blank verse and expressionistic poetry after the style of Mayakowski. In spite of the fact that none of his works were published or publicly sold between 1938 and the reestablishment of multi-party goverment in 1965, his poems printed outside the country have been circulated and read by the intervening generation.
  Nazim Hikmet's plays, with the exception of ``Ferhad and Shirin'' which was revived in 1965, were rather less durable than his poetry and lacking in strong plot and characterizations.
  His use of Turkish lyric, almost musical compositions, rescues his verse, even at its most didactic, from the level of propaganda. The Japanese fisherman who was killed in the sea
  By a cloud, was a young man.
  From his friends, I heard this song
  It was a bright yellow evening on the Pacific.
  Forget me, my almond-eyed one.
  Putrid, from a putrid egg
  Would be the child you'd bear from me.
  This ship is a black coffin.
  This sea, a dead sea.
  Oh, mankind, where are you?
  Where are you?
  (Japon Balikcisi [The Japanese Fisherman]. Secme Siirler, 1968)
  Alongside of a universalism and compassion which finds its roots as much in Sufism as in ``socialist internationalism,'' Hikmet expressed a passionate love of his native country and ``sense of place,'' through a rare scheme of impressions evoking a land from which he was barred and in which he had been deprived of his liberty

SEMESTER FLASHBACK

Phew! Semester is finally over…I am still in a daze…so swiftly and so suddenly the past few months whisked past….i could catch my breadth….till May I was a school student.But all of a sudden here I was studying in one of the best institutions in the whole country-Jadavpur University…In these past few months I have evolved so much that now that I look back I am amazed….a very simple girl freshly out of an all girls convent school…I had so many apprehensions and so many rigid do’s and don’ts…but now I have grown up and become much more accepting towards people…misconceptions has given way to true understanding ….Life in JU has been a really a rocking time… I have never felt so enthusiastic about studies that I would stay up all night just to surf the internet to find background material for the next class…. had the opportunity to be taught by one of the coolest professor on campus-Suchorita Chattopadhay and Sayantan Dasgupta…. my conception of what teachers are, have undergone a sea change, ‘SC’ mam is like a mother figure…she ‘ll take no nonsense from you but she will listen patiently to you….‘SDG’ as we call sir fondly or ‘Sayantan Da’ is just like one of us…. ever helpful and generous…. had a blast with him when we [me, Rohit and Tania] went out to lunch with him in Tangra or went out for coffee at CCD…..yeah you read right…we do hang out with our prof’s…what more our profs are very tech savvy indeed…yup! There are regular on orkut as well like any of us…that’s why there are simply the BEST…I had been very apprehensive about making new friends on campus but I had no reason to think that way…. because every body is everybody’s friend at ju…I have friends in almost all departments and they are truly wonderful people…yeah I do have my set of friends…. I have Rohit, this guy who is a Greek encyclopedia and one my close friends…Nimisha…sweet cute and extremely adorable girl who is the Egyptian goddess of our class…Shubhankar, class topper and my best buddy…Shiladitya the class joker…sitting in the jheel par or at the ledge chatting, tea sessions and talks with seniors. Oh! Its been just wonderful…On a personal front…I have started writing again…thought I had lost my touch of writing poetry…not that I write well…i just dabble with words…. I have witnessed new things and adjusted to them…took plunges and realized for myself what is good for me what is not… took a fag…didn’t quite like it. and that marked the end to my curiosity about smoking … started giving tuitions…earned my 1st salary…opened my 1st bank account and bought my own cell with my savings…oh! So beautiful…now that the semester has come to an end…I am feeling nostalgic…we wont have the same profs anymore in the next semester…may be it wont be as much fun….I have left a few new friends behind… and a wonderful relationship has gone haywire with a person I admire a lot…..all in all its been a good six months despite the few downs that I had to go through….found friends like shubho who didn’t hesitate to hang out with me just before the exams and made it a point to help me out…Rohit, who always was there whenever I reached out….after a great 6 months…I really do have to admit that truly ju simply rocks!

burning the midnight oil

semester is here..and frankly i am petrified...somehow i think that in my 1st sem at ju i am gonna get a suppli atleast in CL/UG1/1.1....one may wonder y??well let me tell you then...its way past midnight..1.15am to be precise and instead of studying i am blogging....call me callous or lazy...somehow i havent been able to make a headway with indian literature and probably thats y i am nt too keen on pursuing it further....somehow SRIMAD BHAGAVATAM and GITA seems to be translated into greek and latin....i cant make the head of tail of it....not that im trying too hard...others seems to be studying a hell lot burning the midnight oil...i dont know how i ll manage to get to my target of 60%...trinnnnnn!!trinnnnnnn!!there goes my alarm...break is over!back to studies...no more blogging or fooling around...maybe its not too late to salvage the situation afterall...as people say-"better late than never"
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