The Nissim Ezekiel Poetry Crawl is a two-hour long walk, which involves passing through iconic city & poetic landmarks, stopping to read Ezekiel’s poetry, and experiencing Bombay through the poet’s lens. This is the poet’s city: a messy, heterogenous, ugly, hilarious, and viscerally alive place that runs on its own rhythm. As we time travel back a hundred years, we live through the city in all of its shapes and forms - pre-independence, post-partition, post-liberalisation, and during communal conflicts.
Since Nissim Ezekiel’s poetry begs for a conversation on immigrant lives in Bombay, multiculturalism, religious tolerance, stigmatism, and what it means to be “Indian”, this poetry crawl is centred in old Bombay: Colaba. Starting from the iconic Times of India building opposite CST station, we will walk through the busy lanes of fort, and pass through Kala Ghoda, Tamarind Lane, Bombay Stock Exchange, Mumbai University, the Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue, Sassoon Library, and end at Chabad House, Colaba. Nissim Ezekiel has left a mark on all of these locations; his stint as editor at TOI has impacted the way we access literary news today. His writings on the city’s social and economic state are reflected in important buildings like the university and stock exchange. His interrogations of faith make the synagogue an important landmark, and visiting the Chabad House is our way of honouring Mumbai’s last remaining living space for the Jewish community.