Shuruaat / शुरुआत (१) / कैसे चुनूँ ?

शुरुआत (१)

               कैसे चुनूँ ?

अपनी आवाज़ को पहचानना
तो जान गयी हूँ
लेकिन
कैसे चुनूँ
अपने लफ्ज़ ?
अपनी लिपि ?
इन अनगिनत दायरों
        दीवारों
    उम्मीदों
           और आहटों
          के बीचोंबीच
इन सुलगती, सुगबुगाती खामोशियों  के आर-पार
                          क़ायदे क़ानून और सरहदों के खेल में
                          उलझी चुप्पियों
       को तोड़ने की कश्मकश
शुरू करूँ तो
कहाँ से
       चुनूँ
अपने लफ्ज़ ?
     अपनी लिपि ?
       अपनी जुबां?
         हर बार.

२७ मई २०१६, सेंट पॉल (शरद-पूर्णिमा)

Aisi hi ek nayi-purani shuruat (13 farwari 2015, Saint Paul)

Beginnings new and old... shuruaten nayi purani

No longer a footnote: Writing and shuttling between worlds, struggles, commitments, and dreams requires me to choose words and scripts that imprison even as they allow me to imagine some kind of liberation from the tyranny of academic languages...or, languages that often foreclose the possibility of touching, troubling, permeating, and piercing the borders that matter to me and to those with whom I want to speak.

No sooner than I give a subtitle to these 'beginnings' in English, the words start seeming alien with respect to the intimate, intricate churnings (mine and others') that I want to share here. Then I try Hindustani, deliberately choosing "simple" words that cannot be claimed as

pure Hindi, or Urdu, or Awadhi; words that can allow me to ignore the labels that categorize my zubaan and make our bolis disappear from our mouths and pages and minds... Yet, just as these words appear on my screen in Devanagri--a script I have worked hard to learn to type in without getting stuck in the clutches of unicode--I feel trapped by that very scripting. 

So I transliterate the Devanagri back into the Roman script.

Exhausting details? Maybe so. But that is beacuse the labor of translation is often intense and exhausting...possibly violent even...Yet, it may carry a hope of sparking a new beginning...

तो पेशे ख़िदमत है, इक और शुरुआत

Here is another beginning