Mega Bytes
#LoveBytesLifeHacks by Veera Sanjana. Published in 2018 by The Write Place, a publishing initiative by Crossword Bookstores Limited, Umang Tower, 2nd Floor, Mindspace, off Link Road, Malad (W), Bombay 400064. Pp: 125. Price: Rs 249.
The book is divided into two parts: Love Bytes covers the range of passions aroused by love, longing and loss, and Life Hacks offers cadenced observations on the ups and downs of life and the inevitability of death. The first part of the book resonates more strongly as verse after verse touches on a topic that has been an obsession with writers and poets through the ages. The longest poem in the book is only 13 lines long, and most of Sanjana’s thoughts and feelings have been succinctly expressed in four or five lines, which is quite an achievement.
Veera Sanjana (center) with Cyrus Broacha and Parizad Kolah Marshall
Musing on the overworked themes of love and life, her poems do not offer any earth shattering revelations or new insights, but they do contain well-expressed sentiments and common-sense advice. For example, writing about love, she declares:
Who you love cannot be ascertained
When you love cannot be determined
Why you love is sans all reason
However, how you love determines
Whether it’s for a lifetime or a season.
And advises:
Open those windows, let love fly in
Love cannot seek entrance where the Ego has been.
On life, she observes:
Life is just an accumulated concentration
of the choices you’ve made,
There will always be options,
However where you choose to invest
your love, time and money
Is where you invest your life, so tread carefully
Choose wisely, in order to live happily.
And cautions:
Do not dismiss the fool for his foolishness
Nor the wisdom for the wise
Cause often wisdom can be foolish
And the fool surreptitiously wise.
An author, columnist and teacher who lives in Bombay, this is Sanjana’s second book. Her first book, titled Endured, published in 2016, was also a collection of poems. #LoveBytesLifeHacks is a slim and well-designed publication that makes for easy reading and re-reading. The only blemishes are a couple of typos which appear all the more egregious as there are often not more than a dozen lines of text per page.
In the preface to the book, Sanjana reveals that the first time she read Shakespeare’s sonnets, "they spoke to my soul.” She adds, "Poetry and its offshoots — be it quatrains or couplets, quotes or lines — have always danced around in my head seeking an outlet: they tango with my tongue and then waltz out on that paper… LoveBytesLifeHacks is but a manifestation of just that — flitting, contemplative thoughts in my head that sought an entrance to the outside world. Readers may find these quotes resonating with the exact sentiments they have felt on innumerable occasions.”
The blurb on the book’s back cover urges readers to use this compilation as a handbook that "will be invaluable in choosing the right words” to share with a friend or lover by email, text or WhatsApp. That is a great suggestion for spreading Sanjana’s good thoughts and words. D. K.