Life is a poem

      Of late, I’m obsessed with poems. Well, why of late – oh, I’m obsessed with them ever since I opened my eyes. Language is no barrier – I can cherish poetry as much in English and Hindi as in Punjabi. One might ask why I write usually in Punjabi, then. There might be a reason unclear to me, but I like sticking to one clear explanation: something as pure as poetry comes more naturally and at its best when the medium is a mother tongue. That’s it and that’s all: no other explanation.

      Poems, like paintings, are beautiful. I like to think that a painting has an internal beauty, such that when you see it in color or when you see it in black and white, or even when you see it in some other tint, it’ll look just the same piece of beauty. Similar are poems: Language is just like the paper that carries the painting. The poem is independent, and in that independence lies an intrinsic magnificence.

       I remember that fine day when in a workshop, I heard an elder girl expressed her wonder about poets and poems. She said it was wonderful that one could express some beautiful idea in a fashion that it has some rhyme, some rhythm, which multiplies the beauty factor.

      The idea was new to me then, and now, years later, I still find it wonderful.

      But now I know that poems, like paintings, are but gifts of nature: it is like that apple which falls on your head of its own when you sit under an apple tree: and mind you, it does not always take a Newton to figure out what effect it is. Newton’s explanation was a poem of sorts: isn’t this beautiful that every big thing in the world pulls every small thing towards it? Except that Newton’s poem was in free verse, and it was loved best by scientists.

      I have some poets as my all-time favorites (like Bhai Veer Singh and Satinder Sartaaj) though I’ve discovered a newfound admiration in Robert Frost, John Keats and William Blake.

      I think I’m a “poemaholic”. To me, poems come almost daily, and sometimes I cannot stop them: sometimes I have to write when the idea – that world should not miss this poem – summons heavily. The journey of a poet, I think, is only to make himself more welcoming to beautiful poems.

      And finally, you realize life is a poem too. You try to make some sense of it, weave into it a good, delightful story, fit some rhyme here and there so that one can sing and dance, inscribe somewhere a lesson and before you put a full stop, you take a reread to see if things are good to go.

      Except, in case of life’s poem, you cannot change what is written.

PS: My Punjabi poems can be read here.