At the Hamara Haiku Festival, Pune

Vidur Jyoti captures another moment at Bhamburda Forest, on the second day of the festival

This is to say that the Hamara Haiku Festival held at Kala Chhaya, Pune on November 27th and 28th, 2010 was a continuous monsoon drizzle in learning the various alternate ways of writing poetry. It was the first stage, like learning the alphabets, of the conciseness of haiku writing, the similarity of the former to senryu, the five-line lyrical tanka, and the prose-cum-haiku flexibility of the haibun, and finally the creatively boggling renku session, where each poet contributes the new delicate leaves to the bare branches of the poem.

As so much was to be imbibed, rebellion, and queries as to why poems had to be written in that particular way were kept aside. Meanwhile, let me thank all who made up for the extreme, deep, experience that the festival was, in no particular order, from the experienced, to the young, co-participants, organisers...

Kala Ramesh – Pune, Johannes Manjrekar - Baroda, Rohini Gupta - Mumbai, Dilip Daswani - Pune, Vidur Jyoti - Delhi, Rajendra Samal - Delhi, K. Ramesh – Chennai, Shernaz Wadia - Pune, Raamesh Gowri Raghavan - Mumbai, Sarat Rao - Mumbai, Mahrukh Bulsara - Mumbai, Gautam Nadkarni - Mumbai, Zalina Gamat – Pune and Nirali Shah – Pune