Uncut Poetry
Sunil Bhandari is a poet by compulsion. He says he survives in this world because he can get to write poetry. This podcast is of his poetry.
Episodes
August 2, 2025 • 5 mins
A colleague committed suicide today. 7 am. He woke up early, took a bath, did his pujo, and then hung himself from a fan. His wife discovered him when she didn't see him in the pujo ghar.
I'd met him the day before getting into office, and asked him how he was doing. He was cheerful. I asked him to drop by for a cup of coffee. Another colleague did two meetings with him. Another one said good bye to him at 7 in the evening. Just ...
Mark as Played
July 26, 2025 • 5 mins
I was reading poet Joy Sullivan's book of burnished sepia-tinged poems "Instructions for travelling west", and followed the footsteps of her poems into my childhood. Trying to catch the magic without sinking into syrupy nostalgia. And was amazed at how much I remembered - the games, the bruises, the sweat, the moths, ice-cold drinks - and just that feeling of unencumbered joy.
But much more than that was the closeness of friends ...
Mark as Played
July 19, 2025 • 5 mins
I am at that age when I see more deaths than births.
And, for some esoteric reason, such news arrives either as an early morning call - these are shriller, as if recognizing the weight of the tragedy - or as a message deep in the night - when the night lights up with the neon glow of a phone which refuses to predict the darkness it predates.
And I skip a heartbeat. And the news seeps in. And then it takes a while to reconcile ...
Mark as Played
July 12, 2025 • 5 mins
So much arrogance!
I see people preen into their power, as if they owned every bit of what they are. Old wealth and position are often the worst. Privilege turns into a right; dissent sparks righteousness; power becomes a press drill; wealth is mistaken for intellect.
People forget they are humans - a bundle of gorgeous contradictions, always at the brink of errors, growing out of contradictions, alive inside abstractions, beyo...
Mark as Played
July 5, 2025 • 4 mins
So much of our lives, nay, our heart-space, our mind-space, is about flying or falling, of binaries like coming ahead, being there first, being smarter than the other.
We live and die in comparisons.
And as always, when we wallow in shallow waters, we never ever get drenched fully.
Without realising that this is the way of the world, that we can be the maximum of ourselves, but never more, and that comparisons are a zero sum ga...
Mark as Played
June 28, 2025 • 5 mins
Friends, lovers, relatives. People we know intimately. Who do we become when apart? Our bodies replace 330 billion cells every day. Every 15 years or so each one of the cells get fully replaced.
We do not remain the same person physically, then what about the metaphysicality, the psychology, the soul, the belief systems of us?
How much of us is built by the new people we meet? What is chipped away from the experiences we stumbl...
Mark as Played
June 21, 2025 • 4 mins
I was in Emirates business class,
on the way to Dubai, en route to a holiday.
I was happy with myself, my life.
A full meal, two rom-coms, one to go,
and the relief of my kids tethered,
as they slept after all kinds of indulgences.
There was a peaceful sea which awaited me,
massages, and sunset walks.
This is life, I deserve it.
I sighed into my smile.
Then there was static, peculiar to a plane,
the one which precedes an announce...
Mark as Played
June 14, 2025 • 5 mins
I have always wondered about people who go through tragedy, and then fall into profound grief. Such that their lives change, trajectories bend, and a state of being moribund sets in.
In much of our existences, we are all living half-lives in our own way, pur-blind, half-dissatisfied, fully-disgruntled. The world refuses to work according to our diktats or wishes. And we are being continually rebuffed or embarrassed. Till we take ...
Mark as Played
June 7, 2025 • 4 mins
There are so many microscopic things which happen which tend to change our lives - not in cataclysmic ways, but in infinitesimal ways making us the persons we become.
A word said in passing, a kindness shown when not expected, a smile out of the blue, a touch when unexpected.
And when a person opens up to you with all her vulnerabilities, bare to her soul, regardless of consequences, regardless of the delicate position which she ...
Mark as Played
May 31, 2025 • 5 mins
"My love, of a thousand reaffirmations,
we know we will never find ourselves in adequacies.
Beyond the blemishes you absorbed,
the ones I ignored,
it was enough for us to have found
the places where we fitted."
Who are we if not a pack of confusions and misdirections? Because we are so inadequate in our understanding of what we are, and what is truly important in our lives, we ever so often miss the v...
Mark as Played
May 24, 2025 • 5 mins
Sometimes you just know.
As someone once said "I knew you were the one, as soon you walked into the room. There was light coming out of your ass!" Frankly, more often then not, love has less drama associated to its arrival, because it is really a feeling which grows and found incrementally, one conversation at a time, one walk at a time, one infraction at a time.
You know there's something happening inside you when there's an une...
Mark as Played
May 17, 2025 • 5 mins
Someone once said "The path of peace goes through power." It's not only the truth, but a reality. Sadly.
In a world largely ruled by men, rules are set as statements of power and domination. Even if someone seeks a hassle-free existence, unencumbered by positions, they are forced to seek bullies as allies, and are blackmailed in the name of security guarantee.
In the sick paradigm of domination, innocents are both targets and c...
Mark as Played
May 10, 2025 • 5 mins
Vincent Van Gogh, possibly the loneliest man in history, once said - “A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.”
We are so much, and so little at the same time. As we transverse our fulfilments and relationships, seeing one flourish, and the other flounder. And we struggle to understand why. We find that we are that person who is loved outside as also the per...
Mark as Played
May 3, 2025 • 5 mins
Too often, only too often, couples live lives of quiet despair.
Without knowing that's not ordinary, that's not what coupledon is all about, that we can't have lifetimes compromised to the extent that an entirety passes by and there's nothing to show for it.
Life is valuable and nobody, no relationship, has a right to take away from the preciousness of each moment. Because we have too few in the entirety of a lifetime to be in ...
Mark as Played
April 26, 2025 • 7 mins
Summer is late in the city I stay in. There are discussions about it but no conclusions. Some say - enjoy the extended spring. Nobody minds, as there are high winds coming in from the south-west, and windows rattle. There is more time to get the air conditioners serviced.
But the intimations of summer have not ceased.
Much before the papers announced the hot days ahead, the mornings had started to get more humid. Joggers knew. ...
Mark as Played
April 19, 2025 • 5 mins
The riches of our lives, even when we are not searching for it, is like the journey of Santiago, the young Andalusian shepherd boy in Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. The treasure is always nearby, always close. We just don't have the eyes for it.
The treasure is often our search for meaning, sometimes it is the clarity we seek of what the fulcrum of our life is, so often it is our despair to put together the disparate parts of our ...
Mark as Played
April 12, 2025 • 5 mins
Aloneness is forced, solitude is a choice. Loneliness forces me unwillingly to be with myself. But solitude, as the great Montaigne said, gives me a chance to know how to belong to myself. A mental stand - and an entire outlook changes.
But, of course, it is not so simple!
Ironically in our worlds, we have to forcefully claim our aloneness, often to fight for it. It is antithetical, nay, antisocial, to voluntarily eschew compan...
Mark as Played
April 5, 2025 • 5 mins
Coming back, when you've slammed the door behind you, is not easy. Literally or metaphorically. There is too much history to deal with, to have it hit us again like hale. Fresh starts are rarely as heroic as in fiction, and there is too much pus oozing out of the pores of common history for it to be a conjoinment without terror or distress.
We do not always desire recall, because rewinds bring with them memories of unbearable pain...
Mark as Played
March 29, 2025 • 5 mins
You have to say it first. You have to do it first. You have to use the words. You have to acknowledge what is burning inside you. You don't have to find a reason. You don't have to wait for an apposite season.
Lack of Reciprocation, fear of rejection, the vulnerability of putting one's heart (one's ego?) on line. Life is a hurdle race and love is strewn with obstacles. In the magnificent tapestry we create of our own scars and wo...
Mark as Played
March 22, 2025 • 5 mins
I read about the famous economist Daniel Kahneman, author of 'Thinking fast and slow', opting to end ha life through assisted suicide, euthanasia. He went to Switzerland, and died.
A friend and I were talking about it. And I remembered what Tanu and I have often discussed -
Not to live if we become a permanent burden on someone.
I told my friend, I was quite clear - I get to decide when I will end my life. But he asked a simple...
Mark as Played
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