Robert Frost and Dushyant Kumar : Part 1

Though I’m fond of reading, poetry never appealed me. There are a number of reasons behind it. When I was a school student, stories were a big source of entertainment (no PC’s and few homes with cable TV that time) for me as well as many of other children of my age. Our course books featured some of the very fine English as well as Hindi stories. Though, what I observed later, the quality of poems and kavita too was superb. But at that tender age, the poetry served only one purpose: in earning some easy marks in recitation.

As I moved into secondary and senior secondary classes, English poems almost disappeared from the books, while Hindi poetry became almost unbearable. The Hindi ‘Padhya Sangrah ‘consisted of some of the fabulous ‘dohas’, and 'kavita' of poets ranging from pre mughal era to that of post independence era. But again, instead of enjoying them, we got engaged in only doing ‘sarlarth’ and ‘bhavarth’ of the poems without delving into their souls, thanks to our present educational system. ( Sarlarth is somewhat analogous to the decoding process that I encountered in my engineering. The difference lies in the fact that when you decode something, you get the correct information or the wrong one. In case of sarlarth, you are always partially correct and the degree of correctness depends upon how much is your answer in tuning with the person correcting your copies. I guess I was unlucky both times.)

I was in class 12th when 2 different poems, one that from the English text book and the other that from Hindi drew my attention. What was appealing about them was their simple language and the message delivered. It was something that I hadn’t seen before. The Hindi kavita was more special because it consisted of Hindi-Urdu words in a manner we actually speak and can relate to and understand easily. I got interested in that poet and looked for his most acclaimed work. That poem doesn’t carry any specific message and you can make a lot of inferences from it. What struck me though was again the use of simple words by the poet to express himself. His poems aren’t hard core Hindi or Urdu, but a healthy combination of both that a person with a little bit of knowledge about these languages can easily understand. It was his ‘ghazals’ which inspired me to write poetry.