If travel is not tourism or trouble-free holidaying, Purapettu Pokunna Vakku , (Words Gone Astray), a book by poet and novelist T. P Rajeevan, is admirable as a travelogue depicting the unknown cultural and political voyages.
A well known columnist, Rajeevan tries to converge insightfully the ocular mixture of space and time. In the 210- page travelogue, he mimics the ever growing miscellany of human animation. Jnanpith laureate M.T. Vasudevan Nair will release the book at a function to be held at the K.P. Kesava Menon Hall of Mathrubhumi Book Stall, here on Wednesday.
“The book is dedicated to the late inimitable Dom Moraes, usually mistaken for the routes he had taken,” Rajeevan says. The book is purely political; Rajeevan goes to the U.S., Poland or the forsaken roots of the Reds, including Eastern European nations.
He meets Tomas Transtromer, the Swedish poet, a later Nobel winner, in the city of Struga, a lakeside city in Macedonia and Wislawa Szymborska, the Nobel winning Polish poet, at her residence at Krakow.
The manner in which the travail of travel is narrated justifies the advice Dom Moraes gave the author before he set out on the journey:
“Don’t stand baffled like a blockhead in front of the skyscrapers, get wavered seeing beautiful sceneries like weakling poets, don’t waste time taking notes about historical monuments like tasteless historians…When you come back there must be in your memory, the face of the most beautiful woman, the taste of the most delicious food, and in your nerve, the most hot intoxication, ” Moraes told Rajeevan in 2004. Purapettu Pokunna Vakku bears testimony to the unexplored experiences of travel writing.
