• Rama Rao Vadapalli V.B.

  Author

While avidly reading Indira’s poetry, in an intermission, looking into my favourite TRIVENI, I
came across this page-filler, a quotation from Gordon Atkinson: “It is not a foresight or hind
sight we need. We need sight plain and simple. We need to see what is right in front of us.”
Reading habits like eating or drinking vary from person to person and I felt that the work here is
replete with observations, repetitions, statements and expression of feelings which are limitless
as the ebbs and tides of the ocean.
Indira Babbellapati is an academic with a deeply sensitive thinking and powerful expression. Her
first book Echo was published in 2003, second one affair de Coeur in 2009, the third Vignettes of
Sea in 2010 and then came out From the Biography of an Unknown Woman in 2015.
Writing a critique of Indira’s latest book is not a run of the mill affair. The work is about the
many facets of woman’s life, trials, and tribulations, feelings of pain and very rare sweet
pleasures and infinite hues in deep feeling. Though the title says unknown woman, as the poet
tells us in the beginning these are vignettes culled from the lives of many women she came
across into very close mental proximity. There are a number of poems but none has been given a
title. This is particularly significant since each poem is a wailing, a different breath, a different
spasm and very little smiles of joyousness. Among these there are a few, just few, about faith
devotion and happily forward-looking.

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