Uncut Poetry
Sunil Bhandari is a poet by compulsion. He says he survives in this world because he can get to write poetry. This podcast is of his poetry.
Episodes
November 8, 2025 • 4 mins
It is sobering to realize how insignificant we are in this universe, how much of a speck. And how much the grandeur of nature - a spectacular lunar eclipse, the sun shining on a quiet sea, a moonlit desert - shows us both the incredible world we live in - as also bring us back to the joy of minutiae, if only we have the eyes and time for it.
And it brings us back to the gorgeous littleness of our lives. How the highest joys are o...
Mark as Played
November 6, 2025 • 3 mins
I am so often in awe.
Of another being’s endurance or grace — perhaps a lover, a river, the sea, or even time itself.
I want to learn how they do it -from borrowing calm, to letting life flow through, to finally resting in stillness and reverence.
To see life as a moving tapestry of happenstances, tragedies or ecstasy; living through them, but not allowing any of these to change the essential core of what they are, why they a...
Mark as Played
October 25, 2025 • 5 mins
We give up on those we profess to love too soon.
There is something primordial, something gossamer, to do with the body, to do with first inchoate impressions, which attracts us to one another in the first place. Because relationships often begin in shallow waters.
As things start to become serious, the couple traverses depths. It's not easy. And unexpected. Murky, weed-laden, algae-full. The clear eyes and the pellucid surface...
Mark as Played
October 18, 2025 • 6 mins
This is a repeat of one of my more popular poems, replayed here with a hope of getting a new audience, who might have missed it,
Childhood is a town we have to leave. Home is a destination we have to leave and recreate again and again. Memories are the wealth we carry as reflux. And we create ourselves as our own saviours as we search strange lands.
Even as we flee our abandoned bicycles in empty playgrounds, even as we carry hurt ...
Mark as Played
October 11, 2025 • 7 mins
Revisiting a place where one has one's roots is tricky business.
On the one hand, there is enough familiarity - relatives, school chums as unrecognisable adults, hazy lines of playgrounds, peacocks, changing views from rooftops, familiar cracks now deeper - and on the other, one enters the familiar as a complete stranger. The air is lighter, the light is sharper, the language is alien in spite of familiar intonations, and one sit...
Mark as Played
October 4, 2025 • 5 mins
Love is fragile but can withstand blows; it is easily dismantled but can be unrelenting in its persistence. It can disintegrate in a word, but can stand unbreakable after the worst of happenstances.
Love is both ordinary and a maverick. It can breathe as if it is taking its last inhalation or linger as if infinity is a friend. There is lassitude, there is energy, there is determination, there is presumption. Of course we know whe...
Mark as Played
September 27, 2025 • 5 mins
Pondering as I do on relationships, the beauty and brokenness of them, I continuously marvel, nay wonder, at both their tenacity and tenuousness. And how, at the bottom of them all, they all exist on the basis of a single decision: to be together.
However old, however strong, whatever the optics, the couple is together only because they want to be. Years might slip by, a thousand experiences might be shared treasure, but a single...
Mark as Played
September 20, 2025 • 5 mins
We don't always realize, how much of our lives belongs to others, is determined by others. Their concerns, their insistences, their jealousies, their phobias, their happinesses, their frustrations. Their blank stares, their under-the-breath comments, their lack-of-joy. Their obsessions, their obsessive need to control. Their potential reactions, their prejudices, their silences.
In time, what we do, indeed, what we become, is a f...
Mark as Played
September 13, 2025 • 5 mins
People drift.
Love leaves home. Life becomes a refugee. We become migrants in our own cities.
What brought two people together often becomes the reason which tears them apart.
Poetry is often a glue, often it it only a record-keeper. Often it is a bystander, checking out its own pulse.
And the two who loved how poetry defined them, find the suburbs of love - where they finally have to settle - to be boring brick-laden homestays...
Mark as Played
September 6, 2025 • 4 mins
Relationships often run their course. But we don't. And I'm both heartbroken and frustrated at the phenomenon. As I try to decipher the possibility of a rich life, now existing as an afterlife.
It's not a question of toxicity setting in, but of a river in full spate disappearing into an arid empty bed.
And I ask - why do we hold onto relationships which subtract us as human beings?
Because what doesn't lift us, diminishes us; w...
Mark as Played
August 30, 2025 • 2 mins
What did my palms come to know
what did my skin feel
what did my eyes own
as I transversed universes
as I clasped light conscious
we are captive of time and age
held together in ways undefinable
on the wings of unsaid hope, possibilities
held as a moment's gift
who are we if not fools holding
love as a talisman
a bushel of kisses as proof
that when all fails
there's a touch which knew
as we other our other worlds
as w...
Mark as Played
August 23, 2025 • 4 mins
Someone said something very telling the other day. In a court of law, the criminal knows he's the one, the accuser knows the criminal is the one. So in the scheme of things, it's actually only the judge who is being judged.
I was reminded of this when I realized that our relationships are intrinsically not of the other, but about us - the person in front of us is a mirror in which we can see ourselves.
A friend, spouse, lover,...
Mark as Played
August 16, 2025 • 5 mins
So much of our time is spent in yearning.
A slow despair of knowing life is slipping by, and of somehow not being able to wrap our arms around its fullness. Of, time and again, sinking our fingers into something we see as compressible but finding mere nothingness.
Of having touched love, but having lost it before experiencing its infinite lushness or its prickly pleasures. Because through love, we know how we are given this lim...
Mark as Played
August 9, 2025 • 4 mins
We are what we make of the minutiae of our daily lives. Because love resides in them.
We have a simple choice - we can curse at the commonplace or be masters of the mundane.
The ability to observe and feel and let go, all at the same time, is what determines both the trajectory of our days as also the journeys of our heart.
Because the other choice is of getting overwhelmed with the negativity each relationship perforce brings....
Mark as Played
August 2, 2025 • 5 mins
A colleague committed suicide today. 7 am. He woke up early, took a bath, did his pujo, and then hung himself from a fan. His wife discovered him when she didn't see him in the pujo ghar.
I'd met him the day before getting into office, and asked him how he was doing. He was cheerful. I asked him to drop by for a cup of coffee. Another colleague did two meetings with him. Another one said good bye to him at 7 in the evening. Just ...
Mark as Played
July 26, 2025 • 5 mins
I was reading poet Joy Sullivan's book of burnished sepia-tinged poems "Instructions for travelling west", and followed the footsteps of her poems into my childhood. Trying to catch the magic without sinking into syrupy nostalgia. And was amazed at how much I remembered - the games, the bruises, the sweat, the moths, ice-cold drinks - and just that feeling of unencumbered joy.
But much more than that was the closeness of friends ...
Mark as Played
July 19, 2025 • 5 mins
I am at that age when I see more deaths than births.
And, for some esoteric reason, such news arrives either as an early morning call - these are shriller, as if recognizing the weight of the tragedy - or as a message deep in the night - when the night lights up with the neon glow of a phone which refuses to predict the darkness it predates.
And I skip a heartbeat. And the news seeps in. And then it takes a while to reconcile ...
Mark as Played
July 12, 2025 • 5 mins
So much arrogance!
I see people preen into their power, as if they owned every bit of what they are. Old wealth and position are often the worst. Privilege turns into a right; dissent sparks righteousness; power becomes a press drill; wealth is mistaken for intellect.
People forget they are humans - a bundle of gorgeous contradictions, always at the brink of errors, growing out of contradictions, alive inside abstractions, beyo...
Mark as Played
July 5, 2025 • 4 mins
So much of our lives, nay, our heart-space, our mind-space, is about flying or falling, of binaries like coming ahead, being there first, being smarter than the other.
We live and die in comparisons.
And as always, when we wallow in shallow waters, we never ever get drenched fully.
Without realising that this is the way of the world, that we can be the maximum of ourselves, but never more, and that comparisons are a zero sum ga...
Mark as Played
June 28, 2025 • 5 mins
Friends, lovers, relatives. People we know intimately. Who do we become when apart? Our bodies replace 330 billion cells every day. Every 15 years or so each one of the cells get fully replaced.
We do not remain the same person physically, then what about the metaphysicality, the psychology, the soul, the belief systems of us?
How much of us is built by the new people we meet? What is chipped away from the experiences we stumbl...
Mark as Played
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