Bio
Nandini Sen nowadays lives in Edinburgh, Scotland though she is originally from Calcutta, India. Nandini Sen is an anthropologist by profession who runs the virtual book club ReadinGLa(d)sses where readers and authors share their creativity, artistic and literary journeys. She was one of the storytellers for UNESCO, Edinburgh City of Literature's Story Shop 2016 at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and had an article 'Women and Gender in Short Stories by Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthropological Introspection on Kinship and Family published in the ''Anthropological Journal of European Cultures' in November 2016. Her poem 'With a different stroke' was published in an Edinburgh based journal ' The Ogilvie, Edinburgh Creative Review' in 2016. Her anthropological experience/book on the waste pickers ' Urban Marginalisation in South Asia: Waste Pickers in Calcutta' was published by Routledge in 2018.
Nandini Sen
Virtual Celebration
I have forgotten to lean from my chosen balcony.
Don't know any more how to hold my teacup.
Tried to create violets, swallows and a long train of impressions,
instead created meteors from the darkness of a burnt-out day.
All night I never put out my lamp
Observing ghosts standing there
With their chubby faces, eyes wide open
with stunning sadness and mockery.
Tales tell they are tired of random photographs,
Feeling melancholic seeing their own sketches.
Their lonely, virtual celebrations make me
Throw glasses at their surreal tiles;
the broken shards will suck the blood
And I will paint the moon red.
While the dead television set, the dysfunctional tumbler
and the rusted refrigerator have already gone to heaven.