April 22, 2021

Sundar Mundriye Ho

 I am back to blogging after a long hiatus. This time too, the trigger has come from Yakhmi Bha. As mentioned by me umpteen times before, he bestows on me a privilege in that he calls me to give me an auricular preview of his latest poem. Keeping up the tradition, he called me a few days ago and recited his new poem. This time his interaction resulted in me getting reminded of an unfinished poem of which I had had the 'aamad' quite a while ago. The effect did not stop there because I got inspired not only to revise the two lines that had originally germinated in my mind but also to augment those lines with some more. Subsequently, I made a return call to seek his critical appreciation  of my effort. During the course of our chat, he was prompted by Mrs. Yakhmi to ask me to send them a copy of an article that I had written about  30 years ago. This article pertains to  'Sundar Mundriye' a folk song which is sung during Lohri, a unique festival of Punjab. I had written it for the 'News Letter' of Punjabi Biradari, an organization of Punjabis of Anushakti Nagar.  Fortunately, I was able to dig up a scanned copy of the article. I am reproducing that copy of the article here below. It will take a bit of doing to read this copy.







1 comment:

Yakhmi JV said...

Dear Chhokra,

Great that you could fish out the article written by you nearly thirty years ago. As usual, the quality of the text and its contents are superb.

I and my wife read this article together to get back to the nuances of this folklore and the poem.

Thanks, and stay safe
Yakhmi