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Prayers in solidarity with nurses, doctors, other essential workers and families coping with the ghastly turn the pandemic has taken in India. To citizens supporting workers and communities - thank you 🙏🏼 The crisis will blow over and we will all prevail; together and soon.

Fitzgerald to Salami - the happy joy when arcs bend to connect in a circle. Ali Salami, a professor of Shakespeare at the Uni of Tehran, has translated most of the Shakespearean corpus into Farsi. The wonderful @FolgerLibrary has a copy and an interview shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu/2021/03/05/tra…

"At-one-ment" - Shakespeare's luminous appeal that transcends all difference. SGreenblatt: '#Shakespeare in #Tehran' nybooks.com/articles/archi…

Herbert Zbigniew. Untitled from, ‘Inscription: In memory of my father’. (1969). TS Eliot on this same struggle with words: “a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general imprecision of feeling” #poetry

A poet who fiercely guarded the independence of his mind, never allowed it to be used by another, never sought the easy roads; here is that poet reacting to the abomination of the wall: "It will be demolished by our astonishment at its existence" twitter.com/emswam/status/…

Mourid Barghouti. Palestinian poet. 1944-2021. His feet found their belonging in every human heart that was fortunate to read him. twitter.com/emswam/status/…

I could think Mourid Barghouti now flies with stars. But in that too is the anachronism of displacement. Those whose feet still trod the earth say the departed enjoin the stars. Feet should know the belonging, the fit, with a land, before life climbs to the unbelonging of stars

So this needs no spotlight but I'm giving it one anyway a year since @rrobinson72 won the T.S Eliot prize. Roger's real genius is that he makes it look effortless when really that ease & apparent simplicity is hard won. I tried to chose a different poem but had to go with Grace..

@gopalears Not sure she was a courtesan; in the sense that her tradition was in music alone. I wish too that the video had more detail of her own life and history. What a beautiful and attractive grace she wears - like a cloak really, despite the downturn in fortune. Thank you for sharing

Zareena Begum lived at Hatha Khuda Baksh area in Old Fatehganj in Lucknow. An old harmonium, a tabla and some old pages and diaries with lyrics in Urdu were her companions in her final days. She passed away in 2018, she was a disciple of Begum Akthar. youtube.com/watch?v=HK4xQk…

Delhi: A sanitation worker becomes the first person to receive COVID-19 vaccine jab at AIIMS. Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan is also present. (ANI) Track #Covid19 latest updates here bit.ly/3qCHv5F

@AEkadanta Thank you 🙏🏼 It is a blessed day that begins with such a grand auspiciousness. 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼 I intend retrieving the text and reading alongside.

And a roll-out of a million vaccines in six days. In the new world we call it diplomacy. There was an older world with gentler giants whose roots stretched far. This is more than diplomacy,. It is a mater familias remembrance; rekindling memories in old roots #mybelovedland

@AEkadanta As I am by yours 🙏🏼 If after centuries, we are still stirred by the words and live by the philosophy; what a great uprooting it must have been that our ancestors went through at a time when this was the *only known way of being and the mind was unprepared for violence.

India is giving away millions of free vaccine doses to Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, Myanmar and Seychelles. The result is a form of vaccine diplomacy that appears to be unlike any other in the world. washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pac…

My profound gratitude to PM @narendramodi and people of India for gifting COVID-19 vaccines despite their own pressing needs. This comes at a critical time in our fight against the COVID pandemic, and bears testimony to the strong friendship between our two countries and peoples.

It took a poet after all. A new voice - a new and authentic voice - lifts a new rising: "Victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made. That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare." Bravo @TheAmandaGorman, Bravo!

Poets once knew the songs to sing to nations. The great American poet, Robert Frost was one such. “In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on”. On living with difference, with discipline, regard and in the presence of possibility: ‘Mending Wall’.

A phenomenal physician who epitomized the core values of medicine. Lived her principles, loved the science and taught both. One whose very memory was enough to stoke guilt and make everyone work a little harder for that day. A grand and blessed life. Thank you for much, Ma’am 🙏🏼

Undertaker bees sniff out comrades that have passed on; not by what they emit, but by what they do not. They then act as pallbearers and gently cart them away. Extraordinary. sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/h…

Van Gogh's Starry Night, painted in an insane asylum, accurately models a mystery of physics pst.cr/j6Dr3