Does the much-admired creativity explore inherent potentiality of untidiness, not visible to ordinary human eye? Does it also invite us to go beyond the abiding passion for putting things in order? The answer “Yes” has been poignantly told in an elegant Dogri poem “Making of Scrapheap” (Khalar). The poem, composed by a celebrated Dogri poet Lalit Magotra, is published in a reputed Hindi quarterly, “Hindi Jagat”. The journal edited by an eminent Hindi poet Suresh Rituparna carried three poems of Lalit in its latest issue. The poem “Khalar” presents an alternative perspective in contrast with an intense disdain for things lying in bits and pieces:
“My wife/gets angry/As I toss my books and paper everywhere/ My house is filled with the litter/ She does not know/ These unread books, incomplete notes/ These rubbed and curved lines/ Early signs of poems/ All parts of my life’s dustbin/ It is my life/ I also know/ When times change/ A rag and bone man will wrap up it all/ The way the rag picker of time carrying dirty bag on his back/ Collects the past life and goes away/The house maker does not know/ Life produces junk all around/Death bundles up the litter.”
Lalit, casting a satirical eye on a subject that does not get talked about, explores an array of non-visible feelings and the poem produces a subtle intrigue that pulls one into the poem, makes us more alive to the vanished truth.
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Lalit Magotra, who got Sahitya Akademi Award for his collection of essays, “Chetan Diyan Galiyan” in 2011, writes in a language Dogri, spoken about five million people in India and Pakistan. In the second poem, “Many a times poetry”, the poet seeks to demystify the process of writing poetry and creatively asserts that poem is essentially an idea of text that the poet himself cannot readily pin down, the more he tries to find appropriate words, the more apt words escape him. The poem produces an air of amused astonishment and it also makes it clear that most ordinary things create a more lasting impression than serious.
Creative dexterity
Not much is known about the rich legacy of Dogri language and literature with the exception of Padma Sachdeva whose creative dexterity got wide acclaim in literary circles and she bagged Sahitya Akademi Award and Saraswati Samman for her collection of poems “Meri Kavita aur Mere Geet”, (1971) and autobiography “Chitt Chete” (2015). She was also instrumental in persuading Lata Mangeshkar to sing some Dogri songs and it went a long way in popularising Dogri language.
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The term Dogri was first used by famous Persian poet and sufi saint Amir Khusro in his long epic poem “Nu Sephar”. Dogri is spoken in Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh. It has become one of the popular languages of Northern India. Many literary genres are making their presence felt in Dogri and recently Lalit Magotra published translation of his Dogri poems in Hindi. The book, carrying 80 poems titled as “Shabda Se Maun Tak”, seeks to explore inner potentiality of the silence as majority of poems do not necessarily provide the reader with full explanation and they unfailingly create a sense of creeping unease. The themes of incompleteness, fragility and pause are revisited with a marked sense of introspection.
Besides novel, short story, drama and poetry, a new genre personal and light essay has become very popular in the contemporary Dogri literature and recently a prominent Dogri poet Darshan Darshi, whose collection of poems “Kore Kaal Korian Talian” won the Sahitya Akademi award in 2006, published a selection of his essays “Musings from My Attic”, which carries twenty-nine short essays on various traits, values and human follies.
Authors across the globe are worried about the future of book in a completely digitalized world. Darshi too talks about the survival of book and he suggests a new means to take on the likes of Facebook and digital publication. One such method is Book Crossing where a physical book travels across and also takes assistance from the same monitor which is feared to be killing the future of books.
Book crossing has a simple idea. Share books with strangers if you can, leave a book at a café, on the top of an ATM, the train station, anywhere that someone might find it. That person reads the book and releases it into the ‘wild’ again after letting you know where he found it and what he thought of it.
If Darshi’s advice is adhered to, it will certainly produce more argumentative Indian, not intolerant Indians as many writers fear.