A Review by Rod Hemsell, poet, philosopher, artist, educationist and friend.
Publis-hed in Auroville Media on release of APPROACHING AUROVILLE.

A-pproaching Auroville by Ajit Sripad Rao Nalkur

Ajit Rao, a former greenbelter, short of stature, heavy of beard,
a world traveler and outsider, once a student in the Ashram and at the same time a member of the Pondy bohemians, poets, artists, seekers in the sixties, gathered around the campfire before dawn to dream of things to come – that same friend of the golden dawn has published a little book of poems titled Approaching Auroville (aurovillearts 2008).

If you care to take a dip into the pool of devotion and bathe in its golden waves of simplicity and delight, then open these pages and float lightly into a space created for you by the poetic word of grace. Schooled at the feet of Amal Kiran, and members of the Aurobindonian school of poetry in general, these are poems of the golden dawn by one of its divinely obsessed poets. The obsession is particularly evident in the introductory nature of this volume, to be followed by a corpus of hundreds of subsequent poems – many of which I have been privileged to read in draft form. They are all strikingly similar, and yet each is a unique incantation of the psychic being never mentioned, because it is always tangibly in front.

I have written such poems myself and have sat around the same campfire, and so I am familiar with their structure – the simple rhythms and images and rhymes that flow on endlessly like the youthful melodies of Krishna, from line to line and poem to poem, and carry the hearer mantrically heavenward. I think that personally I have moved on to more sober and sophisticated pursuits, but at the same time consider myself fortunate, and again privileged – as one of those specially mentioned in the book’s dedication – to be able to retrieve here an ounce of this lost innocence and delight. It can pour effortlessly, limitlessly, and luminously through this well-tooled vessel into the listening hearts of any who, like myself, may have become more hardened by the harsher realities that these poems eschew but who are still sensitive to another reality and aspiration. I can therefore recommend it heartily and humbly as a testament to that deeper truth to which we know we have been called.

It is a beautifully hardbound, chocolate covered volume with many subtle linoleum cut illustrations throughout, available at VAK and La Boutique D’Auroville in Pondy and at various Auroville locations.

R-od Hemsell
July 2008