Poetry bridging gap between idealism and realism

Is life really an inevitable responsibility or a rare gift to be celebrated in every moment, or only a chapter packed with transitions, or perhaps a journey to keep pace with time? A single definition of life can hardly satisfy a life-hunting soul. In real term, life is not an isolated sound on earth; rather boisterously it echoes the tales of respective soil, air and water when anyone tends to portray life. This very type of voice, most substantially, covers up the latest collection of poems titled 'Pap o Punorjonma' (Sin and Rebirth) by Chanakya Barai. The poems are distinctive in terms of vivid imagery, experimentation of several forms and fatless diction. During exploring the domain of Chanakya Barai, readers are to go through a number of poetic constructions; a few of which are on the basement of glory of life and nature, while some other of which uphold the deviation from that glory, at the same time a few are nothing but a sum of the momentary feelings of the poet and some other are purely nostalgic.

In the case of form, this single book wears different attires and the poet, subtly, tries to maintain a connection between the form and the subject-matter. Many of the poems are image-based and made up as prose, while several other are cast on the blank verse with or without rhythm considerably, and most noticeably a few poems incorporate lyrics in them which is certainly new in the tradition of poetry. Chankya Barai is worthy of appraisal in term of thematic distinctiveness, in particular. His poems seem to be a multihued rainbow showing out, at the same time, a darkling and pensive modern life, a burning love, nostalgic portrayal of own soil and infantile pleasure, a lyrical tradition of old days, a sketch-out of nature on his empirical view and so on. The poet, in fact in every framework of his poems, successfully voices the tune that his poetic soul intends to figure out. However, the poems are designed in a way that most harmoniously unveil painful scenery of life and earth at one time, therefore another time shows a ray of hope and potentiality of nature and human life. The inclusion of some translated lines from different poems of Chanakya Barai in this article may help readers have a little bit idea about his writings.

In the poem, 'the city of nocturnal light', readers are to find out a 'moonless' and 'mysterious' city life which is lightened by a 'lightlessness'. An image of a city, chained in only physicality, but devoid of soul, gets transparent.
Entire city is marched on by nocturnal light. Breaking

Down the wall, so, cannot reach the greetings of the Moon,
Nor can reach the faded light of the stars…orange-colored
Nocturnal light burns out like the eyes of the Tigress…                                                    

In another poem titled 'Bearer', the poet is possibly telling about a true view of his life-

         Time is walking ahead
         So am I-
         Along with the burden of life, got by birth,
         I am carrying out…

         I, a pledged bearer
         Carrying myself toward
         Death…

These two poems may persuade the reader to justify the poet as a builder of a castle of shadow and deathly life. But this will not be the true justification; Chanakya Barai also creates rooms for life, love, hope, pleasure and so on. Poems like 'Raga-Ratri'(Raga-Night) and 'Basiala' (Piper) are distinctive in the sense that the first one manifests a bold desire to fill up every nook and corner of the world by the power of music, while the latter retains an essence of pure love. In addition, the poem 'Tirthotrishna'(A Thirst for Sacred Land) touches me severely, because in this poem, the poet pays a tribute to knowledge. The houses of Rabindranath Tagore, Santiago seem to be the sacred places to the poet. This particular poem reminds me of Robert Browning who places knowledge in the highest peak in 'The Grammarian's Funeral'. However, another distinguishing poem, I think, is 'To untimely Rain'. A few lines of the poem, in fact, are to be gone through-

  You have come very untimely……..

 Still you can pour rain over anything whatever you wish…
         Now drench in everything.

This invitation of the poet to 'untimely' everything through the symbol of rain ultimately mirrors a soul in which everything has an access to be reflected. Such an ever responding soul to everything is, theologically, post-modern in nature.

Besides these concerns, the poet also celebrates his poetry from multifarious points of views that are certainly very ingenious in character. Through the poems, Chanakya Barai also searches for a realm of spirituality and also strongly feels remorseful for the exile of an idealization without which human life falls at stake. However, such melancholy of life halts him for a moment but cannot restrain him completely from believing that there still remains something indefinable for which riding on a wheeled chariot every human rounds off the journey of human life, and probably these two very contrastive realities of human life grab the soul of Chanakya Barai's 'Pap o Punorjonma'(Sin and Rebirth).  


The reviewer is an independent researcher