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Reflecting on an obsession with nostalgia

Chandini Santhosh is now coming out with her second collection of poems in English. Like the first collection titled `Time Series and Other Poems,' her latest collection, scheduled to be published soon, - `Voyage Series and Other Poems' — also has poems that reflect an

obsession with nostalgia.

A post-graduate in English literature, Ms. Chandini Santhosh is now running a pharmaceutical firm in her home town Thalassery after her brief stint as a journalist. Her first collection has been appreciated for visions of time expressed using fresh images and idioms.

Writing poetry and running a business certainly are poles apart. But she seeks to ensure that the two do not collide. Her second collection is a continuation of the themes that one finds in the first. If `Time,' in its various dimensions, is the leitmotif in most of the poems in her first collection, the poems in her latest collection draw on the diction of voyage.

It is both a trip down the memory lane and a journey to explore the unknown and unfamiliar. "I stand at the tip/Of this bulbous journey/Unmarked/And ticketless as usual/In a quaint ship/Timed from the beginning" (Setting Sail). But it is also a journey that is `ruptured.' "Somewhere/In the half lit world of dreams/Where my journey began/And ended" (Shipwrecked).

— Mohamed Nazeer

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