Sachin Ketkar

Sachin Ketkar Poems

Sachin Ketkar Biography

Sachin Ketkar is a Maharashtrian bilingual writer, translator and critic, based in Baroda, Gujarat. Sachin Ketkar was selected by Marathi poet Hemant Divate for the November 2008 edition of PIW India, ‘Poets on Poets’. He has authored two collections of poems – one in Marathi and one in English – and has translated and edited an anthology of contemporary Marathi poetry, entitled Live Update. He has worked on translating fiction and poetry from Gujarati and Marathi into English. His translation projects have focused on the work of Gujarati short fiction writers, Nazir Mansuri and Mona Patrawala, as well as 15th-century Gujarati poet, Narsinh Mehta. He holds a doctorate in translation studies and works as a Reader in the Department of English at the MS University, Baroda. He is also a contributing editor for New Quest, a journal for participatory cultural enquiry in Mumbai. He mostly translates fiction and poetry from Gujarati and Marathi into English. He has translated contemporary Gujarati short story writers like Nazir Mansuri and Mona Patrawala along with the Gujarati poets like Narsinh Mehta (15th century AD) into English. He also works as contributing editor for New Quest, a journal for participatory cultural inquiry, Mumbai. He holds a doctorate in translation studies and works as Reader in Dept. of English, The MS University of Baroda, Baroda. Writes Hemant Divate on the poet of his choice: “Sachin is one of the most unusual talents in contemporary Marathi poetry today . . . He can be very detached about himself, and at the same time, he reflects upon the world in an exceedingly personal way. This makes his poems paradoxically self-centred and other-centred. He usually writes about mundane and ‘un-poetic’ objects in an exceptionally imaginative way." “He translates the everyday world into an outlandish and bizarre work of art. . . . He grapples with contemporary social and personal problems in a poetic way by using and abusing images from the technological sphere and the present-day metropolitan milieu: the world of internet and mobiles, multiplex theatres, shopping malls and photocopying shops.” Divate’s observations are clearly substantiated in the three Ketkar poems selected for this edition. While images of a fast-moving globalised world flow thick and fast, the poems seem essentially fuelled by a spirit of intellectual enquiry. A world of blogs and limited-over cricket matches rubs shoulders with a medieval world of myth and epic. Thus, in the poem about Jarasandha – the king of Magadha in the Mahabharata, who was memorably vanquished in combat by being torn apart lengthwise and thrown in opposite directions – the images seem primarily to be a means to probe cultural ironies and historical dislocations: “I order desi liquor / In the English wine shop. / In the desi shop/ It's the English liquor that I order.” Torn between his native soil and the cyber café, between T.S. Eliot and medieval Marathi saint poet, Dnyaneshwar, the poet parodies the postcolonial predicament in an extended literary conceit. Divate concludes: “All this makes Sachin Ketkar’s vision and style particularly idiosyncratic and original. He is also one of the best young translators and critics in Marathi today.”)

The Best Poem Of Sachin Ketkar

All This Fuss About Skin

1)

To tell you the truth
I am infuriated
By all this fuss
About this wench, this skin

To begin with
How she beckons us
With her half-open
Moist mirage lips

Only to meddle
Between you and me

2)

Not for nothing
Do they call her
The biggest organ
Of our body

The bitch keeps
The maximum supply of the blood
For herself

As if that's not enough
She maintains the exact record
Of every passing year

3)

The thing that we call Man
After all is nothing but the skin
Because what we see
With the skin called our eye
Is nothing but skin
What they call clothes
Is nothing but artificial skin
That we use
When we come short of the natural one

4)

One always suspects
The thing that we call the World or whatever
Is anything but the loose wrinkled hide
Of the old man called God

After He gives up his ghost
We will graze his hide
Make pretty purses
And handbags
For our women

5)

Skin me
Make chappals
From my leather
Trample me
Underfoot

Because from now onwards
I am going to wear my body
Inside out like a shirt

So that now you can observe
The skeleton turned out
The dangling intestines
The spleen, the kidneys
The stomach, the liver
And most importantly
Concealed just behind my lungs
The boring exhausted
Booster pump.

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