Shyamalee

A tribute...* by Amalendu Jyotishi

Between blistering terrain and my words
a life incarnates
some one at distance
whispers Bismillha

someone at distance….

A boy runs to play with the marbles
the wings spread across the cloud
this is the time for Mallhar

I wait
I wait for your return

Now when you are not there
I gather all these small little images
you left behind

That soothing sound of Shehnai
creates resonance in ear and thought…

Yaman takes uncounted steps in avaroha
And mingles in Ganga
like a poem…


From Taar to Mandra
From Sa to Nee
From life to cadaver
each stanza of your poem
waft with the ferryman who sings a Kajri

Coming Holi you will not be there with us
Ustad
Nor your Shehnai will be filling the heart
for that endless fasting of Ramzan

from Reshav to Pancham
the language of your invisible poetry
will cover that miniscule distance of death

I will wait
I will wait for your return
in the mournful afternoon’s veranda
to start the journey from Sabd to Naad

Just following my nose, and letting link lead to link, only guided by all of my life up until this moment, or nothing.
I have ended up reading through various Indian blogs, even what was sung at Connaught Place (Janis Joplin, which to my ears retuned by having children, seems almost as far in the past as Scott Joplin).

However from river's blue elephants blog I followed a fellow commentor who was Amalendu Jyotishi from Bangalore, India
His blog is called Shyamalee subtitled The Women in me....
Rashly, perhaps, I promised to try and solve a problem river had pointed out, but one that is much broader.

In this poem called A Tribute.., Amalendu had made many footnotes specifically concernerned with Indian culture and music.
river commented as had others before that the fluidity of the poem was broken by the footnote numbers.

Rashly , oh so rashly!! Had I forgotten the pain? Had I forgotten the gods of HTML and browsers that made irksome barriers at every attempt?
Sure had!!
I wanted a simple form where the presence of an explanatory note was made visible: change in text (bold , italic); in colour ; in underline ; or combination. A visual marker that informed of deeper knowledge available without distracting from the flow of the poem.
Several hours later.
Certain javascript functions operating on the function called mouseover would work across most platforms. However Blogger , even beta, does not like users doing activescripts from within their blogs and I don't really blame them.
However it is unclear how much HTML is actually considered acceptable within the bounds of Blogger Beta.

Beta, by the way, has become a word I often internally have dual pronunciations of the word which has come to mean under development.
This is from a nerd site
"beta" is pronounced "bay ta" not "bee ta" not trying to be a jerk, just letting you know!
on the same site more respondents chime in to tell Americans that it is
pronounced bee-ta in the UK
same place
"Beta" = bee-tah in Australia too. Bayta means you're obviously US, everyone else says bee-tah that I've come across.
Me, I say both.

However that is only half the problem as ever
Acronym, or its cousin Abbreviation, is one of the elements in HTML that was horrendously implemented in Internet Explorer.
I want two things to happen.
One,a visible show of the hidden element.
Two, the display of that element.
I use three browsers for test purposes. The aforesaid IExplorer, the up and coming Firefox, and yeterday's hero Opera.
In this case Opera, the Norwegian champion, leads with a distinct visual display and the pop up on mouseover of the footnote text
The only problem I have is the footnote text begins with Title:.
Firefox is acceptable on both categories, but has the problem of truncation of footnote text if overlong.
Internet Explorer will display the footnote in full on mouseover, but bizarrely not give visual notice that the footnote is there.
The simplest markup then, that hopefully covers at least these variations,is to mark up as acronym and double mark as italic to cover the IE option