What if Albert Einstein could play the piano like Beethoven? And paint like Picasso and write like Shakespeare? Improbable? Wait. Listen to the story of Deepa Chandran Ram, born in Thiruvananthapuram and settled in Melbourne. A lecturer with the Deakin College, she is involved in Deakin University’s highly prospective carbon nano fibre research. For the uninitiated, it is all about making carbon nano fibre composites on weaved polymers for industrial uses like aerospace and automotives. In the near future, these are expected to replace steel and other alloys. Nothing short of a carbon revolution, if experts are to be believed. However, Deepa was in the news recently for her achievement in an entirely different field, the world of poetry.
Three of her poems found their place in the World Poetry Year Book 2015, representing Australia. The poems were invited in 2015 but the book was released last month. The recognition didn’t come out of the blue. Last year, Deepa was picked as one of the best five international poets of 2016 by the World Union of Poets. “My poems have appeared in many online poetry lines and are being narrated in Scribble online radio show (UK based) by an internationally acclaimed writer, Ryan Woods,” she informs. Before we go into her other talents, let us see how she evolved as a poet. “I started writing poetry from my tender age, and as and when I converse to myself, it outpoured as a poem,” she says, in an online interview.
Deepa’s art work
“But it consumed many years of mine to take it up seriously to send off for publications.” Here’s a sample from her poem, O! River: O! River, wade in your fortuity of birth and death, cry your duress saline floods into the saltless ocean of prophecy unfolding its untrammeled tales as you survive the ravages of space and time never to be born again.. Deepa went to a convent school which stressed on English education and she naturally grew up on English books. “Though I write more in English, I have never disregarded my mother tongue,” she clarifies. “I have written a couple of poems in Malayalam too and have done many translations of Malayalam poems. My next project is to expose the English version of popular Malayalam poems to the western world.” While her father would buy any book that she wanted, her mother, being a musician herself, taught her Carnatic vocals and also got her to learn Veena.
She is learning even now under the eminent vocalist and guru, Shobha Sekhar, a direct disciple of D.K. Pattammal, D.K. Jayaraman, and K.S. Narayana Swamy and also takes Veena classes. In 2012, she started a music group, Symphony Melbourne Incorporated, which conducts music shows. Painting is yet another passion, and, as she puts it, every stroke is an emotion. A self-taught artist, she got attracted to aboriginal paintings after her migration to Australia. “I could deeply connect with their spiritual evoking, and my painting fantasies flared up to its highest intensity. Now my attention is dot painting where I merge a lot of aboriginal dot art with the tribal dot arts and mandala art of India. I am all excited as I am preparing to do a solo exhibition by mid 2017.” She has a beautiful explanation about how she is able to channel her mind to these diverse interests. “The arts spring from my feminine energy that helps me flow with the universe and realise who I am as an existence, and when I shut it down, my masculine energy is active, playing my mind with science.”
She adds: “I learned the skill to switch off one while I was in the other, and on some occasions to blend the two. Science uses our mind, the logical, reasoning, mathematical and analytical powers, and art is a spontaneous overflow of our emotions, but both could be investigative and innovative. I believe that human existence is a blend of mind, body and soul, and therefore science and art overlap, making them trans disciplinary. I always use my investigative approach in my pointillism painting, how the dots in different discrete areas blend to make a whole picture.” Does it all sound, this attempt at narrowing the space between science and arts, like rocket science? Well, not exactly surprising since her doctorate was on rocket fuels.
