Me, Myself and my poetry

It's about 2:30 AM into the night now, and still sleep doesn't come to me. I did lie down twice on my bed, waiting impatiently for sleep to grasp me in its arms, but alas, this blissful lady has deserted me again.

Most of my friends have given themselves up to sleep, and here I am, waiting for the sun to rise and release me from the nauseating grip of solitude. I know I will not stay awake long enough to see the sun rise, but yes, I will not go to sleep soon either. Listened to a flurry of songs all evening, and spoke to some of my friends before they too left as the night grew older. So I read an old diary of mine that was lying around somewhere in the sea of files and old books in one corner of my room. Read through the first few lines, and realised that it was a compilation of notes that I had made exactly a year before. I realised my blog would not be of much relevance if those special notes of mine couldn't be a part of it. So here are the first few pages of the old dirty diary that meant so much to me at one stage of my life.

On poetry being a passion: (July - 2005)

It has been quite a while after a series of events that formed a significant part of my life, a natural consequence that gave me many a new things to learn, to remember and to forget in the remaining elements of my existence. When I look back at the not quite recent past, what I see is just not a mere happening of events, that I consider disgraceful, but I see a vision of sordid experiences that ache my heart and lead me to the realization of many fresher aspects of life that may not be produced perfectly on paper.

Here I have come to terms with newer qualities that I believe I lacked in the past. Being alone, I have tried hard and finally achieved to an extent to develop the hidden sense of imagination, self learning and positive thinking. In the evenings when I shut myself in the inner confines of my room, I analyze myself and my activities and try to meditate in order to realize the purposes for which I exist in this world. Institutionalized education is but a primary aspect of life, in which one person teaches another what he had much earlier learnt from the books. Every person is a distinct unit in himself, and one being taught by another is a natural process of nature. In fact that is how one learns to live. But finally there comes a stage when the matured person realizes that he is fit enough to teach himself and to construct himself as a perfect being. At that stage he rejects the prospect of being taught by other men, who themselves have never been perfect in their lives. If the law of nature could ever be applied, you would have learnt not what others would have made you see, but what you had seen for yourself. The law that I now learn contradicts to a large extent to the law that I see. The course for a Law degree that has been made by the Bar Council of the land of the largest democracy in the world does nowhere set the course for defining parameters of good behaviour. Here we learn what wrongs are, what crimes are, and what the punishments are. But after two years of learning I realized that there have been neither codes nor laws developed for setting modes of good behaviour.

Life has, however, been pretty kind to me in the recent past. The new semester has been pretty enjoyable and to some extent, a break from the daily chores of university life. We students have now been together for five semesters and the bond between us has been created not just by attending the classes on a daily basis but also by working together for long hours, sometimes late into the night. But this in no sense relates to the notion that we are hard- workers, because the famous concept of “last- minute rush” applies to us as well, and we seem to enjoy challenges as they come. This gives us, at least as far as I am concerned, a lot of time to concentrate on other things in life that are more pleasurable, or in other words, more satisfying than other common chores. In my case, the most common time- passing activity has been writing poems, surprisingly, for until the recent past, I have never known seriousness or being devoted to something. Perhaps, life teaches one a lot of things which he never realizes that he has actually learnt. And I must take the liberty to state that I have been an outright success at it, the way people responded to my poems and the encouragement I received. Sometimes, I felt it was not a bad idea converting a passion into a career, but found it was a futile exercise considering the lack of time and poetic experience, and most importantly, contacts that I needed the most. Nevertheless, a passion was a passion was a passion, and I went at it, and in less than a month, was boasting of authoring twenty poems and a few short stories. Small successes are sweet, charming, and give a great boost to one’s confidence, and I felt I was improving at studies too. But that’s another story. I named my collection as “The Pleasant Emotions” which I gathered was pretty imposing.

Pleasant Emotions is like a well decorated bouquet, with a collection of poetry that was a result of periodic whims and mood swings that occurred to me at intervals. Poetry seems to come out of my pen at selected intervals that were heavily dependent on my moods and fantasies. The much needed sense of imagination is however lacking in most of the independent works as they were serial common life incidents. Though being a bit humorous and fun loving person, I find my poems do not have a shred of humour in them. The uncharacteristic and sometimes grim reality arises out of occasional dreams and romantic disposition that I face in my daily living. I wish to address emotional and ruthless events in life that are mostly seen through by most people.

Being alone and away from my family gives me the liberty to develop my own imaginations and feelings that otherwise could not have been possible. The immense joy that I sometimes find in pleasant solitude, I must admit, adds to my poetic sense. In the evenings, when under the golden sunshine I walk atop the tiny hills, I realize and relish the beauty of nature and that of the strange human personality. I find it enjoyable to dig deep into the multifaceted features of life that lie buried under the exhaustive daily schedules and personal bonds. I write about the beautiful irony that God created in men, of laughing faces and crying minds going together, of dancing bodies and broken souls tied together, and of me and my friends sharing everything together where the emotional and mental thought processes between us is so varied, so different.

I, in the process of writing my poems, sometimes place myself in the same category of all men, that is, to judge the world placing myself as the judge as if I am the only person in this world who is right. Such deviance towards self- appraisal is a disadvantage as far as a poet is concerned. I therefore try to write my poems like being a third person and judge my own deeds. I try to figure out the reasons of breakdown of friendly relationships with previous best- friends. I try to find reasons for the most unpardonable sins that I ever committed. I try to write my poems placing myself in the same mindset as my neighbour and try to write the same way he could have written the same subject.

Poetry is not a compulsion to relieve oneself from the clutches of the daily schedules that threaten to carry man away from the basic purpose for which he came to this world. It is a habit, a born desire to express, and to explain the inevitable darkness that exists in human life. This is how I visualize myself as a poet; this is how I believe I will fulfill the purpose for which God sent me here. Institutionalized education alone does not bring me satisfaction. It is only the theoretical aspects of life that one man teaches another. It is a continuously developing area where new principles learnt by one generation of mankind are passed on to another and so on. Poetry is the visualizations of nature and mankind that one sees for himself. It cannot be taught by anybody, but acts as an unending valley of fruits which can be explored upon by one and all. It is the harmonious construction of the vast nature into words, a nature that never erred in its set course, a nature that has something new for us to see and relish each day we begin our new step towards its holistic realization. It does not bind us to follow it, nor does it force its presence upon us. It acts as a giant cradle where people like us live our own materialistic lives. Poetry, in my opinion, is a mode of owing our allegiance to mother nature, of the respect that we owe to her, and of praising her beauties that survived under the cruel hands of the materialistic and power- grasping human society.