Title: Negligible Inertia
First published: 2002
Description: *Negligible Inertia* is a book of poems written in so-called '*blank verse*' or '*free verse*.' Each poem is the record of an involuntary encounter or collision. City meets semi-rural countryside. Artistic yearning meets the mother of all engineering and is almost throttled by her uncompromising steel embrace. First recorded in the foothills of the Shivaliks, which stretch out like rogue spines in the lower Himalayas. In Chandigarh, that strange, concrete maze originally designed by Le Corbusier. Further east, in the sprawling, magnificent, metropolitan ruin that was Calcutta in the early 1990s. And lastly, in the glittering oasis of tax-free excess known as Dubai.
Subjects: poems, surya, shaman, moon, winter, fire, stranger, Marxist, slave, morality
Places: Dunscinane, Calcutta
People: P.Lal, Kali, Chekov, Sonam Kachru
Time periods: 1989-1995