I have asked myself this question
everytime I felt dejected… why do I write?
This question comes in many guises.
When I feel the immense strain and stress of writing, when I find that writing
has given me a lot of pain, made me stay away from the simple and easy
pleasures of life like watching TV for hours or going on a shopping spree …
whenever I feel that for a piece of writing I have been harassed or
criticized…I ask myself this question. The answer, my friend is blown in the
wind. I got everything from my writing. I got myself.
But to get yourself back in writing,
you must first loose yourself first in the world.
And that is why the connection is
important between my world and my writing.
What is my world? How is my world?
In one way my world is what takes me
away from writing. What snatches me out of my reveries, pulls me down from my
ivory tower. Whenever I am embroiled in the day to day activities, in my quest
for earning the daily bread, and do not come back to the act of writing for
days on end.
But then I feel a gnawing pain
growing inside me. A sense of unrest,
unease, starts building up, and it gathers momentum. Gathers pressure. Then
like a pressur cooker whistle, my self tries to erupt into a scream.
That becomes my poetry.
Everytime I forget my writing , I
have to come back to it in tears, in utter depression. Whenever I stay away
from it, I feel so claustrophobic , so wound up, dejected, that I have to come
back to it.
My world has always given me a lot .
but it has also given me a lot of gaps to fill, lot of absenses which became a
boon actually. An acute loneliness in childhood, losing my father at a tender
age, all this accumulated to my sense of void. Which I had to fill up with my
writing.
I grew up in a typical Calcutta
urban middle class household, with
nothing much to do apart from my studies… a Bangla medium middle class school,
which taught a good dose of literature, specially writings of Rabindranath
Tagore et al. I had not many friends, did not have games to play , wasn’t the
sporty type. A lonesome , shy young girl who could only pour her heart out in
her diary pages. I was unable to communicate myself through any other means.
My poetry started there, on those
hidden pages, not meant to be shared with anyone. The journey which started from those diaries,
and ended in the magazines read by millions, was long. But it seems everything
happens by some providence.
I could never feel at home without
penning down my thoughts then. As I already told you, and even now, some days
pass by when I do not write a thing, after a few such barren days, I feel suffocated,
restless , and full of unease.
In the meanwhile so many things
happened to me…from a lonely childhood I have gained a society full of friends,
relatives, work colleagues. And in a crowded situation I still feel alone.
In our lifetime, on the other hand,
we have seen a lot of transformations. In a way my generation stood on a
threshold. I have seen feminism pass us by, I have seen the objectification of women like
never before growing with the sense and desire
liberation of women like never before. as a woman I had to address these
issues.
In the meanwhile, in the beginning
of my writing career, Indian society
underwent transformation with the times… 90s was the era of deregulation,
globalization and free market. The
public life changed and so did the personal.. each one of us was affected even
if in a small way. Human relationships changed because of the economic and political compulsions. This
phenomenon fascinates me. Such happenings always cast their shadow on me… and
make me scribble a few lines here and there.
On a second thought,writing poetry
was a subversion for me. I have never written anything without being perturbed
by something. I am not a typical anti establishment poet, but somehow through
recounting my life and times I have registered a version, an interpretation
wholly mine.. a protest..
So , in a way, my world has always been my
source of inspiration, even in the guise of an enemy.
I have been embroiled in my world,
sometimes lonesomely, sometimes in a crowd, and always tried to derive my own
absolute freedom from its various shackles. That , i think consists of most of
this world’s writing acts. Trying to unshackle oneself from the immediate
situation. A flight of fancy.
I personally feel constructing a
poem is like waging a war, throw back something on life itself. It is also
pacifying, therapeutic. Sudden urges or contemplated emotions… all get covered
by poetry… and calms me down, prepares me for more contemplation, more living…
