Jan 17 2025 to Jan 17 2025 6:30 p.m.

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

In March 2020, when the world went into lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, poets and friends Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Nair—living mere miles from each other, but separated by circumstance, and spurred by this strange time—began a correspondence in verse.

‘Renga’, an ancient Japanese form of collaborative poetry, is comprised of alternating ‘Tanka’, beginning with the themes of ‘Toki’ and ‘Toza’: this season, this session. Here, from the “plague spring”, through a year in which seasons are marked by the waxing and waning of the virus, Hacker and Nair’s Renga charts the “differents and sames” of a now-shared experience.

Their poems witness a time of suspension in which some things, somehow, press on relentlessly, in which solidarity persists—even thrives—in the face of a strange new kind of isolation. Between “ten thousand, yes, minutes of Bones”, there’s cancer and chemotherapy and the aches of an ageing body. There is grief for the loss of friends nearby and concern for loved ones in the United States, Lebanon, and India. And there is a deep sense of shared humanity, where we all are “mere atoms of water, each captained by protons of hydrogen, hurtling earthward.”

At turns poignant and playful, the seasons and sessions of A Different Distance display the compassionate, collective wisdom of two women witnessing a singular moment in history.

Karthika Nair will be in conversation with Prem Panicker. An audience Q&A session will follow.

Speakers
Karthika Nair
Poet, Playwright, Fabulist & Librettist

Karthika Naïr is a poet, playwright, fabulist and librettist. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reworking of the foundational South Asian epic in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tata Literature Live! award for Book of the Year. Les Oiseaux électriques de Pothakudi—illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet—won the 2023 Prix Felipé for ‘ecological children’s literature’.

Naïr is the co-founder of choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s dance  company, Eastman. In 2012, she blueprinted the biannual Prakriti Excellence in Contemporary Dance Awards (PECDA) from Prakriti Foundation, a unique initiative for dance in the Indian Subcontinent, and she remained its artistic director across four biannual editions.
Prem Panicker
Journalist & Editor

Prem Panicker is a journalist and editor with 33 years in the profession. He is currently Consulting Editor, IndiaSpend.