Arun Kolatkar is a contemporary Indian poet who straddled multiple worlds, writing in Marathi and in English - His poetry is marked by irreverence and a clear sense of badassery that is not afraid to question the status quo, and mix the profound with the profane. Kolatkar was a poet intimately familiar with the urban sprawl of Bombay, he worked in Advertising as a visualiser and also translated Bhakti Poetry into English, he used swear words in his Marathi Poetry and wrote in an unaffected, immediately recognizable style in English that marked him out as different from his predecessors and truly experimental in his approach.

In this episode I read a few short poems from Jejuri, a cluster of 31 short poems that chronicle Kolatkar's acidic observations aboard a ST bus to a piligrim town, Jejuri. I talk about the milieu in which voices like Kolatkar flourished, how his work was counter culture, egalitarian, marked by a bold new experimental form as exemplified by the Beat Poets from an American tradition, and analyse what spaces remain for us as modern Indians seeking to chronicle our times and lives.

Listen to this episode to learn from the life lessons of a multi-disciplinary artist, who made music, painted, and wrote poetry that was meant to shock and shake up its middle class readers out of complacency and poke at them, using humour and observational style that comes from belonging to here and there, as Kolatkar was, an intenerent flaneur poet, commenting on everything he encountered in the jumble that was India in the 60s and 70s.