“Ruchi & Mitesh swung by with a screwdriver and energy to put together the third bookshelf. Yogesh Ji was just looking like a wow!”
Pocket Diary Book Club
Minutes of the meeting
Edition 24
08.10.2023
Hosts & Moderators: Shaurya and Sandeep
Doodles by: Shaurya
A day before this day, Ruchi & Mitesh swung by with a screw driver and energy to put
together the third bookshelf at the studio Akshat Drama Group.
Yogesh Ji was just looking like a wow
– in a striped peach button down tshirt, hanging piece of black frames from his collar
and cream loose style pants. I aspire to dress like him someday, in character, the skit
maker.
– If vibe had words, his is the background song in Mohit Chauhan’s voice: “man ke
mere ye bharam, kachhe mere ye karam, leke chale hai jaha, mai to …”
Ruchi has been to The Country Without a Post Office to collect a few pieces of fallen leaves
and poems, this book was originally published as “Kashmir without a Post Office”
Found a beautiful oration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s58Ij0oP6FM
“I must force silence to be a mirror to see his voice again for directions”
While listening to this poem and randomly stopping the video just to read a line again… I
fully stopped functioning and went back into the past, reading and through so many stories
and films and books and poems, we feel that we’ve been to this place, or it is the sense of
loss we can hug and make it one with one’s own self
“… The title of the poem is derived from an incident that occurred in 1990, when Kashmir
rebelled against Indian rule, which resulted into hundreds of dreadful and brutal deaths,
fires, mass rapes of innocent Kashmiri Pandit women, and there was no mail delivered in
Kashmir for seven months. A friend of the Ali’s father used to watch the post office from his
house the mountains of letters piling up high and high with no one picking them up. The
‘Post Office’ in the title symbolizes a specific identity of a countryman and on the other hand
absence of ‘Post Office’ from a country symbolizes the concealing of person’s existence from
the world. This fact disturbed Ali and he lamented his anguish throughout the narratives of
the poem …”1
This edition had books, readers, tea and Agha Shahid Ali.
1 http://www.ijelr.in/2.2.15/216-220%20UJHALA%20SHARMA.pdf