A decade of poetry - I

This has been an unfathomable journey and it has taken a decade to realize how far I have come in this chosen path. A journey that has taken me to places never imagined before and meeting people I had never met before and getting to know people better than I knew them before. This path has put me on situations and has tested my wit, wisdom and my will and has put me from an unidentifiable soul to at least the one whose word is at least read and heard.

For the last ten years, there has been a life that I have never dreamt of. I began with a self motivated push and it came in the form of an exercise post a lesson in my English Class way back in the year 1998. I still remember it was Ogden Nash's poem on a patients ordeal with his bad tooth at the Dentist's place. It was titled "This Is Going To Hurt Just A Little Bit". There was something about the dark humour in the poem that tempted me to give it a try and it was then that I gave it my first shot at my first poem. In all the cliché to it...there was no more looking back.

It was the likes of Robert Frost, Rudyard Kipling, Samuel Taylor Coleridge that further motivated me to take this direction and pursue the craft of poetry which is seemingly becoming a dead art like the language of Sanskrit. I am not telling that it is dead...just that it has taken a lot of derivative forms that the purity has been almost wiped out. Of all the people I have met, I havent yet met the right publisher. Even if i met one, all they said was - "Sorry, Poetry doesnt sell, so we cant take your material" . And this was what prompted me to write for the art and for my writing pleasure.

Writing was one of the biggest revelations in my life. It helped me cross the trivial pressures and the confused state of mind of a teenager. The art was my saviour and put me on a course that was charted to some destined destination. When I was in Delhi for my schooling, I surely was the most recognizable, but for all the wrong reasons. I was called Madrasi and was treated like a guy from Africa because of my complexion. Well, this did build a lot of internal pressure and stress and by discovering the art of poetry, I saved myself from the violent arms of the disturbed mind. The writing did the trick and I soon found my way out. In the last 4 years of my schooling, the first 2 years were hell...after that it was a comeback of sorts - my knowledge of weilding the power of the pen than that of the sword, paved my way to some recognition and saw the same guys who took me down, see me in the eye and just wishing me well. That was my first ever victory...I knew it was just the beginning...

Writing was a very enjoyable experience at this stage because it was all about the discovery the art and it was a very innocent stage where even the silliest rhyme would sound like the chime of the bells. Without a proper guide or a person to keep pushing me to be good at it, I took it as a mission to do what was necessary. I would take up words as titles...just plain words...and write about them - for e.g. Books, Winter, Time, Music, Love etc. and endlessly tear down the drafts till they sounded right to enter my first ever collection of my poems. This wasn’t however very easy to do, as it involved a lot of patience, persistence and a lot of practice. But it finally paid off as it took at least the first 3 years to bring about 75 of my first poems into one solid collection.

This would go on to become the first of many ventures and thematic expeditions I had set upon. I had finally found my muse. The identity I had taken was what I called the DarkKnight which defined my struggle and the battle I waged to overcome my barriers and defy what was impossible with my only weapon of choice – and hence the reference of the Warrior Poet as a model of my existence and purpose and hence the deep and dark sides of the Knight in me who rose in the darkest of moments.

Please Note – the pseudonym might be a direct parallel to The Batman's tale of emergence but is not derivative of the name. It was just mere coincidence, like it was all meant to be, like it all fell in the right place.

More to come on Part II