Uncut Poetry

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

The Love of an Ordinary Life

June 27, 2026 • 5 mins
We are just ordinary people, living lives which often don't make sense, seeking our share of meaning, joy and fulfilment in our own ways. Embedded deep within - undefined, unspoken of, often unrecognised as such - are tiny and eternal stories of love. There are no bells and whistles attached to these stories, nothing to define them as special, but in their quiet ways, they light up lives, and make them worthy of it.   Rarely d...
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    When You Lose the Lover but Not the Love

    June 20, 2026 • 5 mins
    Love can be pretty unrelenting. It's turgidity and its persistence can be intimidating to people who see it collapsing under its own weight and can't understand how it is still standing strong. People in love can separate without disengagement but equally they can continue loving with separation.   Anything anchored in emotion has moorings which may seem fragile but are often unrelenting. Nobody knows inner stories, of holding...
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    Hale, Fall & Spring (of you & I)

    June 13, 2026 • 5 mins
    I love this poem because it condenses the thoughts which partners who separate from each other might have of the other.   It's subtle, often the first flush of love, often the first separation. When you know the highs of love, but have not known how the valleys are to be navigated: and you think the first bump, the first infraction, a fight, a being-away-from-one's-sight could actually be enough cause for anything-to-happen. &...
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    Walking into the Morning's Wisdom

    June 6, 2026 • 5 mins
    Summers in Kolkata slide rather than blister, which is what happens when I visit Jhunjhunu. Both are experiences. There's no hiding place here because the humidity is omnipresent - but a shaded tree is enough to save you from the dry heat in Rajasthan. And then I go to a Delhi - where nothing can save you except an airconditioned room, because what does not melt you burns you down.   There's very little that's romantic about a...
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    Replay - Let Me Sit Beside You Quietly

    May 30, 2026 • 5 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.   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...
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    A Home Which is You

    May 23, 2026 • 5 mins
    A home is a person.   I think I realized this a long time back. I loved all the homes I've stayed with my parents. Every time my dad changed jobs, and consequently cities and homes. And then in his final assignment in pristine Tribeni, on the outskirts of Calcutta, he kept getting promotions and we kept changing homes. The last one was a colonial bungalow with an acre worth of gardens, and a view from the terrace of the river....
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    Naked, My Love

    May 16, 2026 • 6 mins
    We complicate relationships because we deny simplicity or simple ways of loving or - maybe - the simple solutions to complex things.   Every relationship starts with a clean slate. Pure, unencumbered. Then it gets layered. One incident at a time, one feeling expressed at a time, and often (more vitally), one feeling unexpressed at a time.   And the grooves get cut and get deeper, sharper, as the unresolved creates acid an...
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    This light like love

    May 9, 2026 • 3 mins
    To awaken every morning is to reward oneself.   The day is desperate for us to discover it, to unravel its mysteries and find its surprises. We do not have to fly or be special. We merely need to be excited.   Then we can see birds with new eyes, and feel the air on our skin. We can sit quietly, sip a cup, gaze out of the window, and know this is what it is to be alive.   An ordinary life.   Many things could ha...
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    Before Beauty Takes Its Toll

    May 2, 2026 • 5 mins
    There's so much in this world to be unhappy about. The reasons are endless. And we can fallow in the silky self-indulgence of not being in control and letting circumstances take their toll on us.   It's an irony of humankind that in the positioning of action and result, we bring in destiny as a critical component, and instead of letting it be a possible catalyst, we seek to substitute action with it. By further combining it wi...
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    A Poem as a Gift for a Girl With No Confidence in Herself

    April 25, 2026 • 4 mins
    Don't we all know people who are gold - talented, beautiful, attractive - but who deep inside are uncertain about themselves. They doubt their abilities, and for ever (and ever) they look at every decision they take with trepidation, and consider themselves inadequate. And nothing one says to them, nothing, convinces them that they are talented and just fine the way they are.   Until something magical happens. Maybe a poem, ma...
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    Closer to Death. Nearer to God.

    April 18, 2026 • 6 mins
    Haruki Murakami said "Death is not the opposite of life but a part of it."    Loss is an inevitable part of life. It could be the loss of a pet, the end of a relationship or loss of a loved one, the loss of a friend, the loss of a child, the loss of a parent or even our health.   No matter the kind of loss, it is never easy. It leaves a yawning crevasse inside our soul. Even if we recover, it's an unfilled pause to o...
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    Marriage Made Me a Philosopher

    April 11, 2026 • 6 mins
    Marriage: it was the end of all illusions and the beginning of philosophy:   marriage was a lesson in impermanence - not an idea, a daily unfolding.   To remain calm in storms not of my making. Dinner is late.       Plans change.           Cushions are moved. I nod, smile, adapt. an ardent disciple of Aurelius.   Closet space shrinks mysteriously. my belongings become philosoph...
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    The Long Now of Us

    April 4, 2026 • 3 mins
    I sometimes feel we would be better people if we were slaves to love. Not to work for it, not to fantasize about it, not try to record of its wonder - but just to ease into its trust and surrender.   Because the secret of love's power is not its ability to sway but its strength to render vulnerability as an essential ingredient.   It's contrarian in concept - showing your weakness to strengthen your relationship - but tha...
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    A Child Mulling on Life Beside the Sea

    March 28, 2026 • 3 mins
    The whole process of growing up has an inevitability- and a tragedy - attached to it. A child grows up believing - trusting everything and everyone. An innocence which is endearing - and often encouraged, possibly because of it's anachronism and the fact that an atavistic urge inside us reaches out to something which makes us remember days when we were less cynical, less pessimistic, less prone to mistrust.   But how fast real...
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    The Art of Living

    March 21, 2026 • 9 mins

    I spent three days in Kochi, immersed in the art biennale. And wandering through the lanes, warehouses, waterways, and cafes of the city. The city was alive with art - representations of life, adn its anguish and joy. And hundreds of people from all over immersed in art, as something they now saw as they went to school or office. 

    I recorded small pieces as I viewed the art, and have put them up here, unedited. 

    They ha...

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    Memories of Peppermint Mocha

    March 14, 2026 • 4 mins
    It's a startling thought, that someday sometime, there's that final time - and never again - when you will meet someone, hold someone, say that word, share that laughter.   Then how do we know that it is not also the final time when we leave with a sharp word, a fight ending in tears, a time which leaves someone in despair, that final moment when the last memory is of pain given and anguish taken.   Life's profundities ar...
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    Lunatics in Search of Peace

    March 7, 2026 • 5 mins
    Animals hunt to fill their stomachs. Humans do so for power and greed. And when they possess weapons of destruction, they think themselves to be invincible.   It's easy to say it's primordial, part of the ancient blood running in our veins, but it's also civilizational. Of having - or not having - a spiritual foundation, a religion which teaches inclusion and diversity, and not harp on a supreme monotheism.   The urge to ...
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    The Ironies of Love

    February 28, 2026 • 4 mins
    Words are all what we have, to conjoin or to distance each other, what can make the difference between making a bridge to cross differences, or to find dissonance to deepen chasms. Who are we if not the stray remark which hurt or the heartfelt apology which redeemed. Love finds its bedrock in the glad word: beyond the body pheromones is the reality of the feeling, the thought enunciated in ways which lays bare the truths of a perso...
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    It Takes Time for Love to Find Comfort

    February 21, 2026 • 5 mins
    Relationships take time. Even 'love at first sight' is a construct only, finding immediate challenge in the crucible of real life. I know couples who have gone around for years, but find they scarcely know each other within the first week of married life.   The interesting dynamic is the setup provided by love. It could work in two dynamically different directions. It could make you accept what really comes your way with gener...
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    Where We Start & Where We End

    February 14, 2026 • 4 mins
    The charm and beguile of life is that it throws the unexpected with such unerring regularity.   We start something with an intent. But the universe has other ideas. We strive for bliss in flight and fall in love with the grizzly earth.  So much of what enriches our lives is the unexpected turn we took, the yes we said reluctantly, the adventure which emerges when we step out in the middle of a dull day.   We merely w...
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