Dual Personality of the Poet

When I was in Phaltan, a small ex-princely state near Pune in Maharashtra, one of my poet-friends Santosh Pawar, kindly decided to stay overnight with me and give me company. He lives in a small nearby town called Dahiwadi and has written a very good long poem ` Bhramistacha Jahirnama' which won him Abhidhanantar prize for Rs. 10,000/- some years back. Commenting my works, he said that there was strange duality about me. As a person I am loving, warm and affectionate but my poems are more arid and devoid of feelings. He pointed out that you love kids, family and friends but your poems are so dry and unfeeling. Well, well I was too tired to respond to it and said that I really don't know the reason for this. A similar view was expressed by some other friends in Valsad. They remarked that the person in my poetry is not the person they know. Not that this duality is something very profound or something. A famous and classic statement about this problem would obviously be TS Eliot's and his so called `theory of impersonality'. He makes the distinction between `the man who suffers' and `the man who writes'. The man who suffers has to take a backseat if he wants to transfer and communicate his feelings effectively. The feelings have to be `depersonalized' so that the reader can make them his own. So much so about the classical Eliotian/symbolist theory of communication of feelings in art. Then you have all those French neo-Symbolists ( so called structuralists and poststructuralists) with their notion of writing as `ecriture', as a practice of exploring symbols for their own sake rather than for the sake of communication. In ecriture the duality between the `man who suffers' and the `man who writes' vanishes because `man' vanishes. Man becomes yet one more symbol in the game of symbolic exploration. But obviously Santosh was not referring to the problem of artistic communication but to the duality within me as a human being. I asked myself: does the poet Sachin Ketkar want to avoid Sachin Ketkar the person? Is my writing, a yet another way of escaping the fact that I was constantly being threatened by my emotional self which seeks to submerge me? Poetry as a means to evade my self? The poet says you cannot allow yourself to be submerged and yet be a poet. There is a deeper split in my poetic self , probably, because the poetry becomes at once two contradictory things: means of articulating feelings and at the same time means of avoiding them. One forays into dangerous zones when one faces oneself. Yes I am in some way a sentimentalist : ` a man of feelings', but at the same time my poetry becomes my survival strategy, a coping device. My poems are unfeeling because I have too much of it in my life! I try to transmute my pain, emptiness and suffering into images, metaphors and symbols. This alchemical faculty is a gift. Probably like Derridian take on Plato's `pharmakon', a toxin that cures, a cure that kills. Interestingly, I find myself reading Eliot often and wonder at his relevance today for me. His meditations on art, craft and passion of poetry are probably the most profound ones I have ever read.

The Ghati in his Ghats

The ghati is in his ghats. In Panchgani after a long time. I am here for a national seminar on Postmodernism in Indian Fiction in Phaltan and I grabbed up this opportunity to catch up with Shirish and Nanda at Panchgani.

Panchgani is the land of five plateaus a ravishing tourist spot in Maharashtra and my association with this place is well over fifteen years since Nanda and Shirish joined Sanjeevan Vidyalaya as art teachers. There were times when I almost come here every year in my vacations. Now after my marriage this is the second time that I am here. I love this place for its silver oaks, schools, dense rain forests, its plateaus, valleys and mists. If you are a student here it is an entirely different world here and I would have loved to study here.

Arrived at Pune in the morning at around eight. I had boarded Indore Pune express after completing Amogh’s birthday bash yesterday. In a nostalgic mode, I asked myself how emotionally close I am to Maharashtra though I have not actually stayed here for a stretch of time. The earthiness and ordinariness of common people in Maharashtra is different from the counterpart world in Gujarat. Though I have always considered myself a ` Gujarati’ person speaking Marathi, I felt that it is Maharashtra which gives me that at home feeling. It is strange not to belong to either world.

Will leave for Phaltan, the land of Nimbalkars tomorrow morning for the conference and I am going to talk about `postmodernism’ in Indian fiction in English. My argument would be the postcolonial novel of Rushdies and Diasporas is not the true postmodern novel, because the postmodern spirit, as discussed by Lyotard is the true non-conformist avant-garde art which does not play it to the gallery. The Post colonial novel is novel which is to use Vilas Sarang’s phrase, ` prisoner of market place’ and prey to international fads. The themes of migrant experiences, diasporas, national allegories, colonial experience etc are done to death by the post colonial novel. I will talk about Suniti Namjoshi and Vilas Sarang as people who truly embody the postmodern spirit.

The previous blog entry was about reduction in medication and increase in physical exercise. But a week ago I went to consult pulmonologist regarding why I feel out of breath after climbing stairs. He did lung test and diagnosed `moderate to severe’ asthma and put me on a heavy dose of steroids and strict diet regime. The medication has unsettled me completely. My sleep hours have diminished but I feel more energetic and productive. But breathlessness shows no sign of improvement even today.

During the first week of medication, the doctor said that I would feel extra hungry and I would have cut down on sweets, fried, salty and spicy stuff. Ashwini put me on salad diet and after a week I shed almost seven to eight kilos of water! Now I am worried if I wont undo the loadshedding and become unmanageable....

I don’t know what lies in store for me in the future. Asthma has definitely returned to haunt my life in more serious ways after I moved to Baroda. And I am groping in the dark to latch on to something…… anything…