As someone who grew up in the decades following the country’s independence and studied in Tamil medium and had problems of communicating with people who could not understand why I pronounced Leopold and Leopard similarly and why champagne remained cham-pag-ne to me for a long time, I could fully relate to Gautam Nadkarni’s haibun world where children and some adults constantly have to deal with gaudy green blazers, cats named Nebuchadnezzar, bananas with such a terrible identity crisis that they split and getting drunk on Coca-Cola on the rocks. And there is nothing really wrong if you think Istanbul is a male cow, for does it really matter, in the long run, as they say? The haibun and senryu with haiga drawings that come as bonus certainly pep up the otherwise dull lives that we live, listening to stories of falling bridges and falling planes, not to talk of fallen and falling leaders. Like the kid with the mouth full said, “More thugar in my oatth,” I would like to say with my mouth full of sambar-soaked idlis, “I want more of these ‘thories’ to keep everyone ‘thortling.’”
– C S Lakshmi ‘Ambai,’ Writer
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Gautam Nadkarni
Born in 1955, Gautam Nadkarni has lived all his life in the city of Mumbai. Educated in a Jesuit school, St Xavier's Boys' Academy, at the age of fifteen, he won the first prize in a short story competition, and one of his essays was read out on All India Radio. He dabbled with free verse in his teens and eventually made his mark in haiku poetry, having more than three hundred poems published in international poetry journals. He also had more than fifty haiga published in haiga journals and was interviewed for his distinctive style.
The present book contains a selection of sixty haibun out of more than a hundred published pieces, along with another twenty haiga drawings out of fifty plus appearing in international journals.
