An Austenesque memory, summer & a poem
#Scurf221: Summer, Jane Austen 250th birth anniversary and then some
Hi to so many new followers and subscribers!!! I’ll introduce my newsletter here a bit, although it’s a bit tough for me to. I’m a critic and essayist and through these essays I write about the things that move me — movies, books, music! I also share my published essays and criticism. I walk a lot and write dispatches about writing through cities, urban infrastructure and how those find a place in popular culture. Along those lines, here’s my latest review out in the Art Review of Saou Ichikawa’s Hunchback, translated by Polly Barton. Read it here and tell me what you think of it? Hope you have as much fun reading these, as I have writing them! And yes, please spread the love and share my newsletter with more of your reader friends and folks…
2025 marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth and 10 years since I first visited Bath, UK. Austen lived in the ancient city between 1801-06, grew so fond of it that it found its way into two of her novels - Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. When I visited the city in 2015, it was my first step into the holy lands (for me) of England, marking a big personal day. Walking along the cobblestoned streets, with smatterings of Roman Baths’ related tourist hotspots, Austen hubs and the overwhelming Indian restaurants, I had felt a reckoning.
Its bookstores, art galleries, that one saxophone busker and the veritable corner with pigeons that attracted all the children had presented themselves before me as a kind of allure to a present while also simultaneously harking back to a past. Stepping out of the station that late July morning, the first sound that landed into my ears was of a stylish old man strumming his guitar and singing Chasing Cars with equal parts passion and panache. Till date the song is etched so poetically in my mind to Austen, to Bath, to that summer morning.
Back in 2015 I did not blog so much, as I wrote long emails to an artist friend in Bombay and a lawyer bestie in Delhi. Today, fishing through those I found this sentence: “You know what? I sampled my first ever Starbucks on a roadside cafe in Bath of all places!” While I was in the city I didn’t nose around too much into its Austen connect, which in retrospect seems rather Austenesque. Perhaps a way she would’ve preferred, compared to the exploitative, superficial and pretentious tendencies of the various Jane Austen celebrations perforating the entire city and country in 2025. I wish to see the city again, and again, and again, perhaps through the curtain of Austen’s writings and then some.
Austen’s writing is modern, and has stood the test of time over the centuries. A lot of literary and scholarly words have been spent eulogizing her in ways this and that. Similarly many a film reels have been exhausted in trying to capture what she put to adroitly into words those centuries ago. But what’s missing from these has been the simplicity and magic of those times and the clear-eyed vision with which Austen captured the social milieu around her. I won’t spend any further on how they get the plot wrong over and over again, but would direct you to read Brandon Taylor’s exquisite substack essay on how Netflix’s Persuasion (2022) got the plot so wrong, alienating all Austen fans (I LOVE ALL HIS ESSAYS!):
See my Insta post for pictures from Bath, UK (2015)!
Read this Financial Times essay on the Jane Austen Festival currently underway in Bath: https://www.ft.com/content/99d685c8-1dd5-4017-9568-9b9929a29688
And this Austen movie I’m so keen on catching as soon as it’s released!
As summer begins in my precincts of the world, here’s a poem from seven summers ago that I wrote on a sweat-soaked metro ride from home to my office in Central Delhi:
a summer wishlist
langour
dandelion on the roadside
shade from the sun
i wish i could eat water
water melons
musk melons
water melon juice
water melon popsicles
water melon cubes
cut fruits
salivate to fruition
chilled mangoes
raw mango juice
aam panna
water cooler
less ice more cool
a kerchief soaked in water, half-drained, half-wet
soothing fan air
still air
less chatter more sleep
more time to read
more time to eat, drink water
more time to watch mindless tv
less drama
more mirth
less miracles
more magic
walking everyday in the shade
more dawns, dusks and early mornings and late nights
less talk
less touch
more breath
more wishes
less going
more coming around
more lemon
no pillows
less sheets
tied hair
combed dogeared pages of childhood favourite short story books by Ruskin Bond
palms pressed against cold surfaces
a nose for the cold, solemn, quiet
more poems
less words
more words
more movies and life
and
langour
