The Hindu Business Line : Chug along with a train of poetic thoughts

"The bottom of the pan was a palette - paprika, cayenne, dhania, haldi, heaped like powder-paints. Melted ghee made lakes, golden rivers. The keema frying... "

This appetising snatch is from Indian Cooking, a poem by Moniza Alvi. "Born in Lahore, Pakistan, and came to England when she was a few months old," reads Alvi's bio on www.poemhunter.com. "I pictured my birthplace from 50s' photographs. When I was older there was conflict, a fractured land throbbing through newsprint," reads a poignant stanza from Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan, posted on the site.

Alvi finds a place in New Poems on the Underground 2006, edited by Judith Chernaik, from Cassell (www.orionbooks.co.uk) . `Poems on the Underground' is a project that originated in `London Underground, The Tube' about two decades ago, informs www.tfl.gov.uk/tube, the site of Transport for London (TFL). The programme was the brainchild of American writer Chernaik, "whose aim was to bring poetry to the wide ranging audience of passengers on the Underground."

Chernaik had proposed that empty advertising spaces in Tube carriages `be filled with poems'! And the idea caught on.

London Underground sponsors the programme. Not only does it donate the space, but also helps with `the cost of design and production.' A press release dated January 31 is about the display of `six Chinese poems spanning 2,000 years of Chinese civilisation' as part of `the China in London season.'

In return, Wordsworth is wandering on to the Shanghai metro, as Jonathan Watts wrote on March 17 in Guardian Unlimited. "Thirty years ago the posters on the Shanghai public transport system screamed Maoist slogans. For the past 10 years, they have been hard-sell advertisements for cosmetic surgery clinics and cars," wrote Watts. "But from next month, a more poetic tone will be struck by verses from Blake, Wordsworth, Michael Bullock and Kathleen Jamie."

Public poetry seems to be a healthy contagion. "Porto and Helsinki have displayed bilingual and even trilingual poems on their public transport systems," inform Chernaik and her co-editors Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert. They are happy to have inspired similar programmes in Dublin, Stuttgart, Paris, New York, Stockholm, Prague, Vienna, and Athens.

On TFL's site, `random poem for the day' is Piano by D. H. Lawrence: "Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; taking me back down the vista of years... " I click again, and it is Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock by Wallace Stevens: "The houses are haunted by white night-gowns... " In the `poetry archive', you can stumble upon A Dead Statesman by Rudyard Kipling: "I could not dig: I dared not to rob: Therefore I lied to please the mob."

There is by Dom Moraes' mournful poem titled Architecture in the collection on hand.To stir up nostalgia are: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sonnet 65 by William Shakespeare.

Returning to Alvi, catch up with special rice pudding and khir, even as the author tastes `the landscape, customs' of her father's country, and `its fever on biting a chilli.'

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in