What inspires a poet ?

Golden Daffodils would be my first guess; dead albatross would be my next.

Of course, it is a personal question and thus needs to be answered in first person. So my attempt to answer it is an honest introspection of those moments of solitude when my imagination metamorphosed into poems.

“Emotions recollected in tranquility”, William Wordsworth had famously and verily traced the origins of a poem.

For tranquility, I have almost always relied on winter nights.  There is a certain stillness and assurance that comes along a winter night. It says to me, “Delve deep into yourself, and take your time to distill your thoughts. I will engulf the surroundings long enough for your thoughts to condense into words.”

But for emotions, it is more complex. Emotions, for all practical reasons, have to be sacrificed or at the least deeply concealed for a successful modern life.  A successful modern life, in that case, becomes impossibility for a poet.  For a semi-poet like me, I have created a parking lot for my emotions. I carefully park them from where they can be easily towed, whenever a long winter night might arrive. Needless to say, I live a semi-successful modern life.

So when the night does arrive, I handpick a parked emotion and try to live it again. I try to remember the settings and the incidents that evoked it.  What memory was stirred in that moment, why it surfaced to reality? I try to follow that memory strand to the depths of my being and I usually land up in my childhood.

 Childhood, when my imagination was my lone companion. Childhood, when I truly enjoyed solitude. Childhood, when I was observant and innocent.  Can there be a treasure more valuable than the memories of your childhood.

And sometimes, I land up in my youth when love was in fashion.  I could have written odes to the moons on your nails. Also when love is in fashion, can misery be any farther? On many nights I could have written the saddest lines.

And sometimes, I land up nowhere. In this emptiness, I expand my existence. Only my ideas can float in this nothingness, only my words can dangle in this space.  A piece of my existence falls on the paper to become a poem. 

आख़िर यह जीवन क्या है ?

बचपन से ले केर अब तक
जो भी हुआ ,
या जो मैंने चुना ।
और चाह कर भी जो मैं कर न सका
वो कहाँ गया ?

वह एक राह
जिस पर चल कर मैं
यहाँ तक पंहुचा ।
और वो  रास्ते जिन पर मैं चल न सका ,
वो कहाँ गये ?

वह विकल्प
जो मैंने चुनें
जिन पर मैं स्थिर रहा ।
और समय की धारा जो बह गयी
वह कहाँ गयी ?

या' यह पल, हाँ यही पल
जो गुज़र रहा है अभी ।
और इसे समेटने की क़ोशिश मे ,
जो शब्द नहीं मिल रहे
वो कहाँ गये ?

ज़िन्दगी जीने का आसान तरीका

जीवन की असीम संभावनाओं को
एक मनगढंत परिधि में  कैद कर जीना ,
भला यह भी कोई जीना है ।

क्या है जो मुझे रोकता है
इन सीमाओं को मिटाने से ?
इन सीमाओं में इतना सुकून क्यूँ है ?

वो कौन से विचार है
जो मेरी जीजिविषा को बांधे हैं ।
मेरी इन विचारो से क्या दोस्ती है ?

इन सवालों का ज़वाब ढूंढ़ना
क्या सचमुच ज़रूरी है ?
या इन व्यर्थ सवालों में ,
मैंने ढूंढ लिया है
ज़िन्दगी जीने का आसान तरीका ।

Wanderlust

Can you feel a chilly mountain breeeze
with your eyes closed
on a summer afternoon?
I can

Can you visualize the mountain peaks
with the magic of sun and snow
to the last shade of yellow.
Can you stay there forever
or atleast think about doing so
I can

Can you recreate the desert
vivid to the last grain of sand
and then remember the last thought
you had at that place
Can you go back there just to feel
the same again
I can

Can you see that distant wave
coming to tickle your feet
and then laugh young and free
Can you wait for yet another
till the last shimmer of the sea
I can

I have more such plans
But promise me
you will always find time
to come with me
smitten by wanderlust

Existential Confusion

There is a state of mind- some angst, some irritation some despondency. A grand confusion, a feeling of being directionless and not knowing why...I call it the existential confusion.

Existential confusion persists beyond the traditional methods of unburdening one like socializing; movies, indulgence etc. It is a state where your identity just manages to hinge on your name and designation.

It is a tiredness spreading through you when you are losing the will to prove or disprove peoples’ thoughts about yourself. Introspection makes it even worse. What do you think about yourself? Who are you in reality? Tiring questions.Are you not just a residual image of accepted perceptions?

Perceptions- collective thought of the surroundings about you and your own thought about yourself. This sum total of perceptions defines your reality. What else would reality be?

Have you ever been on this perception trip? Have you ever felt this existential confusion?

Tall Man Small Shadow

Many times I thought about writing a review for the book- “Tall Man small shadow”.  I have never written a book review before and to make the matter more complicated the book is written by my father.  Can any son write about his father objectively?  Will a son’s praise not be viewed as a natural way to express gratitude to his creator? Will a son’s criticism not be rated too harsh and an act to separate his identity from that of his father?

I had written a few lines about his book on some websites based on my preliminary reading of his manuscripts. I had read a few chapters of the edited version but had never read the final book until a few days back. Only now I feel I can write about the book. Here is what I felt:-

1.       The story is arranged in short chapters, with each chapter written from a different point of view. A single scene when viewed from different angles gives the reader a holistic view about the lives of book’s characters. However there are times when the reader is left slightly confused because of the multiple angles.

2.       The characters are intertwined by a series of coincidences in a very real-life setting. Whether these coincidences are fabricated or not, the reader is free to have his own interpretations.

3.       A few lines where I could not help but marvel at the simplicity of thoughts are-

a.      Perfection if pursued could dispense the need of God.

b.      If it is death, I am dying every moment. If it is life, I am living every moment.

c.       Mere talent may lead to frustration and pessimism.

d.      When he fails to understand, he philosophizes.

4.       The experience of reading this book is like reading many books in one. Many questions, many philosophies, many thoughts left just short of their conclusion. Sometimes entertaining, sometimes deliberating.

Reading his first book, I could feel that he has many more books in him and perhaps many more philosophies.

 I believe in the saying-“An author should be judged by his best lines.”

 And I know, his best is yet to come.

Love, Poetry and Prose

Some people love only when they are sure that they would be loved back. Is this love selfish? Is it impure? Can love be impure in any case? No one knows about it; everyone talks about it. Especially all these clichés- sonnets. Are there even enough words to contain the enormity of love?

Was Pablo Neruda as fierce a lover as a poet?  Did his woman feel the same pain, ecstasy, fear and longing as we do when we read one of his poems? Who is to say that he was not an erotic lover, not even a romantic but a simpleton and his poems were only a catharsis of his lonely heart?

Can a heart that has never loved, feel the longing for a comforting caress of the lover?  Yes, through poems, I suppose.

But what is the real feeling that is felt when two people are actually in love? Do they feel any different from- Tonight I can write the saddest lines-? What do they feel? How do they feel? If it is any different from poetry can it be penned down?

‘Avoid writing love poems’- A poet has himself advised. Are poets even the right species to seek advice on a phenomenon like love? Half of them are divorcees and other half bachelors. This decision of love cannot be influenced by such unsettled men.

Some might say poetry although marginalizes yet glorifies love. Poetry seduces words together to simplify love. It makes more people fall in love by its rhyme and helps them to forget their everyday prose. Poem is an expression of love to help the common man understand how he feels. I find this argument baseless.

Can poetry describe that penultimate moment; the one just before- two lovers depart. The moment that you desperately want to prolong even if amounts to selling a part of your soul to buy another second. Can poetry justify the act of sacrificing your best for the whim of your lover?

Poetry cannot even tell for sure whether the tension that two lovers feel in their first embrace is like ebbs and flows or more like waxing and wane. Only prose can dare where poetry ends. Prose is what poetry claims to be.

Think, whether the first word that every writer wrote to express something that could no longer be contained inside him- was it intended for a poem or a prose? And what if the first words of all poems put together form a prose and not poetry. If ‘l love you’ is a poem; I, You and Love in between, is a prose.

Love- it has to felt up your spine and out of your brain. Love should better be left alone, to be expressed through prose.