Kala Ghoda Poems

This is Kolatkar who wrote in two languages and dreamt in a third that nobody really got. This is the artist who spun through time and space, with his pen twirling metaphor like the revolving Sudarshan chakra that could make and unmake entire universes. His impertinence married the city’s coy unfolding with a groundswill of mismatched characters finding union in verse. I am fascinated by his fondness for triplets, his satirical disdain for the rich and the indifferent, his comradeship with the real ragtag bands, the little explosions of sentiment and noir, that he captured with the imaginative voyeurism of a self aware ethnographer, the fantastical excess of a god whose magic was too much for this city, too tender, too magnanimous. He unravelled time itself in the collective sigh of Bombay’s dishevelled offspring, and let out a big, long guffaw, as he sat there. The difference is that he laughed with them, in awe, not at them.