Synopsis
Giving words to the mundane, this collection in the post-modern world lends a sense of beauty to the day-to-day contradictions. The grand gestures and the value-laden principles of yester years have given way to the subtle joys of peeping into the gaps. Rakesh Chandra, over the years as a bureaucrat, a husband, a father, a citizen, and a cricket lover has expressed his enchantment with his miss-en-scene in thirty nine poems, bringing out the mockeries of being in today's world. His poems are replete with his natural affinity towards an enquiry of our needs and gestures. Be it the willed ridicule in 'On my laugh', revisiting the classical case of the hare and the tortoise with immortal lines like, 'I raised my head and found his face turned comic in self-conceit. The spring of laughter, then, erupted into me, destroying the crust of shame and agony. Again I was laughing as ever!'. Or, his plea to the elusive sleep to consume his daily strains in 'To Sleep', Rakesh Chandra weaves poetry into his prayer with mesmerizing rhymes like, 'My limbs are eager to come in your lap. With your magical stick plus your grace, please bestow me a single nap.' In 'My office days' he lays asunder the struggling sigh of a bureaucrat surveying the demands posed on him, and his consequent need for strength to shoulder the responsibilities. 'There are problems too, lurking into atmosphere, and problems are infinite, ' the bureaucrat notes. A lover cannot resist his contradictory instincts in 'While you are angry'. He loves the anger in her eyes, but also finds perfection in her smile. Rakesh Chandra, beautifully evokes the duality - 'You were so beautiful in the violet of your rage, that was writ large where I tried in vain, to search for the lost vestiges of the gleaming calm'. Full of such beautiful idiosyncrasies, longing sighs, satirical rhymes, joyous expositions, earthy pangs, this collection is a worthy addition to the contemporary poetry coming out of the sub-continent.
About the Author
Love for art and literature is a rare phenomenon among bureaucrats Rakesh Chandra is an Administrator by profession, but he possesses a poetic heart. He had developed keep interest in English poetry when he was in graduation. Although he was a science student, he read a large number of fictions, courage stories, biographies and autobiographies of some famous littérateurs and books written by many Nobel Laureates. This extensive reading developed his keen interest in English Literature and gave him confidence to express his feelings in the form of poetry. After completing education he entered into a profession which provided him ample opportunity to interact with people of different walk of life. Observing life in different hues and colours is passion for him. That is why one explores the kaleidoscopic view of life in his poems. On the one hand, there are giggling girls, whispering ladies, childhood fantasies about a beautiful face, cries of patients in agony, stress and strain of a working day in the life of an officer and a woeful tale of cultivator in the time of drought etc. and the portrayal of Nature's abounding beauty on the other hand. Most of his poems are based on day to day activities of routine life. The author is endowed with rare sensitivity of human heart. His poetry, largely emanates from seemingly insignificant events or happenings which hardly draw attention of people at large. He loves life and he loves Nature. Initially he started writing poetry in traditional Quartet form in which the last words of second and fourth lines sound similar. But soon he realised that this format in poetry had become out of fashion. so he started writing poems without any such bondage of meter or format, but still maintained the rhythm to make his poetry different from prose. These poems bring to our notice the rise of a promising poet on the horizon of the Indian English poetry.
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