It was as if I was blind in my earlier days. I say that with a lot of conviction because I couldn’t relish the beautiful and natural melange of nature around me that mother earth had created for me. It was a time when I was soaked in the affairs of the corporate world, but that didn’t mean I was not a nature lover. I did go regularly for my morning walks but with the matrix of my office profit and loss in mind. Many years later I realised that the touch of nature is always so refreshing and lasting than any human grip. Life has its ways of teaching us humbling lessons and I realised this when my younger son, two and a half years old was diagnosed with brain cancer. This changed my life’s perspective completely. I began by blaming God and nature initially. I was swept away by theodicy—why do bad things happen to good people? This battle with brain cancer lasted for fourteen years and we finally lost him when he turned sixteen. The family was heartbroken. All my savings had evaporated in his treatment and with that, the lubricants of life had run dry and many doors had closed on me. However, in those unfortunate moments, I could hear the faint creak of an unseen door opening on me. There was a sudden gush of emotions that touched me and said write the story of your son. It was as if the command of God through the feathery touch of nature. It whispered, you need to share your excruciating experience with mankind and that’s when my dormant thoughts started unfolding and I began writing my first book ‘Gloom Behind the Smile’ now archived in several American libraries including Harvard and the Library of Congress helping cancer patients and their relatives.
This indelible tragedy left a deep scar in me … ‘But the poetry of the earth is never dead’ I was reminded of the famous quote by John Keats. Soon, in all my daily rigmaroles, I started visualising divine semaphores, and in every happening a story. In every flower, I saw a poem, in every leaf a rhythm. In every bird chatter, I found music and every rustle gave me the throb of pleasant emotions. I had unexpressed spring and fall in my heartbeat. I felt the prod of nature just as some great authors were graced by the touch of Holinshed’s Chronicle but yes it was of a different variety. By now, I was a man of verses and stories. My morning walks had a speck of enlightenment. My eyes had emotions, my ears had become more alert and my voice had softened and I had morphed into a true personification of a writer and poet.
Nature is the best friend of poetry. Silence is the best creator of poetry and colour is the best jewel of poetry. Thinking is the best tool for writing. Reading is the best source for writing as knowledge rebounds. There is a definite correlation that I found between reading and writing. Reading gave that intellectual nourishment that the more you read the closer you come to scripting. Writing requires wide spans of concentration. In present times the span of concentration has really shortened. People have moved away from reading to watching short clips on social media, yet what comes to your mind first is what you’ve read rather than what you’ve seen on social media. Over the years, in the United States, it is found that less than 20 percent of teens read books, magazines or newspapers on a daily basis, while the rest say they use social media every day (American Psychological Association). In India too, it’s not very different. According to a recent report, published by India Times, an Indian user spends about 200 minutes a day on mobile apps and 70 percent of the time on social media applications like Facebook and WhatsApp or any other music and entertainment applications and that infringes on his reading time.
Writing requires long and tedious hours of isolation. It requires one to jot down their thoughts that come in the dual spectrum of creativity and reality. It requires taking a call on the language and flow you use and its verbosity which depends on your target readers, and the ultimate is up to the storyteller to tell it aloud, which has not been told before and if one does not tell that story to the world no one else is going to tell it for them. ‘Great stories happen to those who can tell them’—says Ira Glass, American radio personality.
As a writer or a poet, one must be aware of what is happening around you by applying all the different senses. It is said the Greek poet Homer was blind yet he went on to create the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are considered foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Amir Khusrau, the Urdu poet started writing at the age of nine. French author, Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for literature says, ‘I doubted if my books would fetch me enough money’. Writing, as an expression, is not about money but earning respect.
Many writers and poets, and even artists got their due recognition only after they passed away such as John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe and Frank Kafka, to name a few. These geniuses produced masterpieces but their creations took their own time reaching the readers who applauded their works. I firmly believe that a writer should not be in a hurry for a big name, rather to touch upon more and more hearts by writing something that they have not been privy to in their lives.
Books are our best friends. They are an important part of our lives. They never let one down. They will teach one how to think, write and expand one’s horizon like no other teacher. When I was in active corporate life I never got the time to read yet I had the self-discipline of reading ten to fifteen pages every day whether it was in the washroom, or while travelling, during recess, or any other spare time that I got and that kept the simmer of a poet and writer alive in me.
The world is f
ull of miseries and will require countless writers and poets to keep human frustration under check..
Kamlesh Tripathi is a Mumbai based author, poet, who has written several books such as ‘Gloom Behind the Smile’, ‘One to Tango’, ‘Ria’s Odyssey’, ‘Aadab Lucknow’, ‘Mirage – a collection of Short Stories’, and ‘Awadh Assam and Dalai Lama – The Kalachakra’. Prior to this, he has also served the corporate world for about 36 years in companies like Mahindra & Mahindra, Escorts, Reliance Industries and Reliance Retail.