LUCID INTIMATIONS OF FAIR AND FLAWED: REVIEWING LALIT MOHAN SHARMA'S 'PARABLES'

The greatest issue before a work of art is ‘for whom’ and ‘how long’. All art, I believe, is autobiographical, and political as well. Those who believe they are apolitical, i.e. they do not comment on the system which sustains them, or if they think they can write something which has no relevance to their situation in a society, I believe they are being highly political. Neutrality is perverse politics. The fact is that no one can remain immune from either suffering a system’s blues, or being the author of that suffering. There is no class in between. A work which lives beyond its times, is truly a work which is rooted in its times. Immortality and eternity are factors of time. We who are now in 21^st century, if start talking and writing about the Renaissance, and or Romantic Age, and if our writing has nothing to say about how those times are related to our present, how they affect us, if our work does not take into account the changed and changing circumstances, not only that, if we cannot look forward to coming times, the work definitely lacks the elements which make it immortal and eternal.

Dr. Lalit Mohan Sharma is among those electrified minds who refuse to compromise with ‘what has been’ and ‘as it has been’. Milton, in ‘Paradise Lost’ tries to justify the ways of God to man. A poet too justifies himself when he writes, of course his own feelings, but does not forget to make them all inclusive. He does not try to justify what cannot be justified. In a way, the poet in Dr. Sharma stands his ground, in the flood of politics that has inundated the social scenario around him. His work of poetry ‘Parables Fair and Flawed’ is an enlightening journey into the heart of contemporary reality, and like an echo recorder, he records the pulse as well as the impulse of society, and like a doctor, goes on to prescribe what is best for the patient.

It is a journey into the heart of dark reality which has come to characterize our present system which he very skilfully calls into question:

The link between surveillance

And governance has often handcuffed

My mind

[Baritone in the Corridor]

The image ‘handcuffed’ cannot denote an easy situation in which governance means surveillance, and both together immobilize men and their minds. It is bitter criticism of the social conditions obtaining in society. Later, in the same poem, he laments:

“A belief does sustain a system to survive

Delusions to keep deluding a people.”

The poet turns sardonic when, while describing the mass in Malls, he turns to the ballot power of these people, who still remain unempowered:

Ask and it shall be given, and the weak

Shall inherit a kingdom of the republic,

Rule of Law ensures/

No innocents will

ever be fleeced by the cunning of crooks.

[Them/the People]

Have the innocent and the weak inherited anything except poverty, not only material, but spiritual as well. They have been deprived of their rights, justice, fair-play, voting power, their own power to rule themselves, and everything has been made a travesty of the original.

Apart from the contemporary reality, Dr. Sharma meditates on the nature of art and its function in a society beset with problems of identity:

Art blurs….

The line between the seen and the perceived reality

Prophetic eye holds mind as captive

The forgotten and the forgettable

merge/enable the mind of an artist’

to resist the pressures of that which

insists to be heard in his imagination.

‘The Kiss’ presents the macabre setting of covid-stricken multitudes migrating to their remote villages from where they had assembled in cities for livelihood. Not only this, the nightmare was heightened in density by the death-toll, which was unprecedented, and the poet’s passionate outburst raises questions how this whole issue was treated.

The undercurrent of hatred that has replaced communal well-being and empathy shakes the poet’s consciousness and when he writes about his country, [My Country, 2020] no doubt he loves it no less than any patriot, yet, one has to decide where patriotism ends and parochialism begins. Does it rest in not questioning things, or, like the poet, in raising the alarm?

The content of daily conversations,

And the tone and manner of each one

Among friends in family/or workplace

All do betray an undercurrent of hate

And blame the policy of appeasing

A few favoured at the cost of harming

The larger populace/fie the tricks

To manoeuvre the outcome of suffrage.

The poet alerts us in the beginning in his poem ‘Ripeness’ that hasty judgements are not passe. “An act unleashes meanings” says the poet, but

My friend must watch to the full

To the last syllable, and still not make a

Judgement, but just watch the whole.

An act can be deeply contemplated, planted by design, and it often tries to mislead common minds, so, as a caution, he wants to look at the whole, because one act cannot justify the whole. It can make suggestions, but the real meaning of that act is latent in the whole itself.

Perhaps, I too should not make any fast judgement. And, yet it is difficult to read what you have written, and what remains unsaid in each poem.

I am bewitched by his simply complex writing, where mostly the last lines contain the punch. The poem on Guru Purnima moves innocently along until the last lines strike you in the head:

Men all over the world raise themselves

To the challenge of the mind and the body

In the Olympics of the mind and the physic,

Those gather laurels who tally talents

To the ever-evolving abilities of mankind.

The poet sums up the paradox of modern times in the following three lines from his poem ‘Pandemic at Bay’ in which the pandemic symbolises the evil that permeates in the streets of the country, eulogized and upheld by the ruling classes, to the detriment of common masses and all the principles that underlie the monolith called India:

One book we swear by and read another

To uphold the Sovereign secure and then

Offering the carrot and the cane as a choice.

For whom poetry is written? Is an intriguing question, because, the first reader of a poem is the poet himself, and he writes it for himself. Then comes in the reader to whom how it affects is not poet’s concern. It may or may not impact him. Yet, poetry has a responsibility to meet the readers in a comprehensible form. It is like a thoroughfare, a point at which the poet and his readers meet, and then, they depart in different, individual directions.

A poet can never leave behind his youth entirely. ‘Airborne Allusions’ supplies the freshness of youth to the dry discussions on politics, covid, and crime that has rotten the body politik:

My bedroom window can spy on

Far away and so very near

Like clouds far up and off

Drop drizzling sensations

Of love’s lucid intimations.

I would like to conclude my discussion once again on the idea of patriotism with which the poet closes his oration, ‘Indian’. I cannot call it a political verse. It is a poem of a man who loves his motherland, and does not like people who try to tamper with the spirit of republicanism and the democratic ideal embedded in it:

To be India, one has to love each Indian

Love every grain of sand and the soil

Woo and revere each leaf and sapling

I am an Indian and the virtual India too.

I congratulate Dr. Lalit Mohan Sharma for offering us a vision of a man, who is a citizen of a free country, and also the vision of a nation which transcends physical boundaries. Through these lines, the poet converses with the reader intimately, and in his persuasive style, reaches his heart almost effortlessly. That is the real achievement of this work.

Reviewed By:

Dr. Jernail S. Anand
Prof. Emeritus in Indian Literature,
The European Institute of the Roma Studies and Research,
Belgrade, Serbia.
anandjs55@yahoo.com/919876652401