August 18, 2026 In an audio recording - recorded on a cassette no less on a walkman with a record button [remember those], my mother asks my grandmother. "What were your favorite subjects in school? " "Poetry and singing," my grandmother replied. They spoke in English but I heard the Gujurati roots in the voice of my grandmother, or Kutchi more like it, for that is where was from originally, the Rann of Kutch a vast expanse I have never seen. Today is her birthday and on occasion of her...
23 days ago • 2 min read
August 16, 2026 There is tissue in sinew connecting a body in pain with a body coming out of it. There is an animal, the desert and an invitation to enter the wild lands within - yours, mine, ours. There are odes to moments without shame or blame. Also, dance, song, shayari-poetry and me! Sinew, a 30 minute online performance is on Tuesday, August 18 at 11:11 am US mountain time (check your time here). Dear friends, you are invited! Here’s the YouTube live stream link. All you gotta do is...
25 days ago • 2 min read
August 8, 2026 Dear friends: Ooh something new. It was taking time to show its shape but now, here it is. enter the wild lands There's a place in the body where no one is welcome except your own voice. A sovereign space. A rogue state that has ceded from the union - so long, uncle sam! A space where no one is welcome, not even angels bearing chocolate or spirit animals. "Please leave your spirit animals at the door." The walls of this place are made of 118 elements from the periodic table...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
July 29, 1:30 pm Dear friends longing has a funny way of suddenly becoming form. for some time now, I have been dreaming of a new performance and today, this took shape. the origin story video below - in which there is a special cameo by a goat. I kid you not. aww come on what’s an indian without a proper pun? From the Wild Lands presents sinew a performance by Shebana Coelho playing in shayari, song-poems, & movement. August 18 • 11:11 a.m. US mountain time. Live online RSVP to join the...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
July 10, 1:11pm The rain in pain falls mostly on the strains which I am only saying because I can. oh elocution. 'Pain in the body becomes poetic only after it has waned enough that you have breath to say: Pain is poetic… The giddiness of having less pain may drive you to drink or worse, to rhyme. Pain unveils hidden cities that occupy desert bodies - and then, I asked myself, where are you going to live? what street, what sinew?' [from Sinew] This is what comes from making faces at tyrants...
2 months ago • 1 min read
july 4 state of the union, take one tyranny is a tinny sound that the orange fellow makes in front of reflecting pools wah wah wah which is wail in English but in Urdu, it's what you say two times when the poet just kills it. tyranny is talking ourselves out of remembering we are also the wild dark ones made of mystery following our gut and smells of other animals in caves highways byways bus stops We have lost our animal selves, ceded the cave for the picket fence, lost the howl, the sharp...
2 months ago • 2 min read
June 29, 2026 these are not the droids you've been looking forbut they arrived anyway as branch as tree as darkAsk a river and it will tell you that the eyes lost it at twelve the first sight of star wars in a boarding school auditorium on VHS no less the only thing I saw clearly were the shining eyes of the sand people glinting red and those two suns he longed for at sunset longing longing yearning yearning elsewhere came ~ prelude to starry starry future river episode one:what is your given...
2 months ago • 1 min read
June 22, 2026 There are stones, branches and futures you see in rivers that you cannot see in other bodies of water. A river is on its way somewhere else and in that way, it is like time. It has its eye on some future spot, where it meets another body of water and changes. Ergo, therefore: when in doubt about the future, ask a river! …is my Solstice insight from yesterday. I walked along the Animas river in Aztec, New Mexico and put my hands in the water. And I saw the future and it was...
3 months ago • 4 min read
June 12, 2026 You know that quiet before the storm rises in you and shows you what you are going to make a noise about? There you are on deck, facing the sea, sensing the winds are about to change, but with no idea from which direction they are going to come. Or how strong they will be. Or how big. Whether the boat will stand the impact. Whether you will. You don’t know. All you sense is that what is coming means a change of direction. cha cha change. And unlike Robert Redford in that movie...
3 months ago • 3 min read
