A continuing dialogue with life
I decided to share this very personal account of my journey leading up to the writing of the book of poems, A window for a home without walls. I want the readers of my book of poems, to understand the context in which these poems blossomed inside of me. My parents have had a profound impact on my curiosity and my dialogues. My mother taught me to be fearless in pursuing my curiosity and conducting my experiments with life. My father taught me to always understand other people’s perspectives, be open to new learning, and to be optimistic in the midst of the most adverse situations while being firm in following one’s conscience.
My story goes back to the year 1942 when my father started his political activism by burning down the British court building in the city of Ahmednagar in India. Since that day his intellectual curiosity took him from following Marxian concepts of revolution to Gandhian philosophy of non-violent transformation and Fule and Dr. Ambedkar’s vision of social justice. In 1975 the Prime Minister of India declared a state of emergency and both my parents were lodged in prison along with over a hundred thousand other political activists. He used the solitude of the prison to write a book, “Marx and Gandhi”. In this book, he articulated why a more sustainable model of progress was possible only through Gandhian approach.
He was a nuclear physicist by education, an atheist in belief, and a champion of rational and critical thinking. He had the sensitivity of an artist. He maintained a daily diary for almost twenty years in which he wrote his impressions and epiphanies of the day. He would cut a picture from a magazine or a newspaper and associate his thoughts with it. It was more of a scrapbook than a diary that revealed his sensitive side. Ravindranath Tagore was his favorite poet. He had a keen interest in Indian classical music. And of course, he married an artist- my mother was a graduate of the JJ School of Arts and an art teacher in a school when they met.
His only shortcomings were,
He never learned to cook and never wrote poetry, though he relished both delicious food and fine poetry.
My mother was a champion of women’s rights. She always reminded me to be compassionate towards those who were not as privileged as I was and to stand up for those who could not stand up for themselves. She studied fine arts at undergraduate level and earned a Master’s degree in psychology. She was an agnostic in her beliefs, Gandhian in her political ideology and feisty when fighting against injustice and superstition.
My wife Rohini and I had the opportunity to edit the transcripts of my father’s oral history interviews conducted by the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Library before he passed away. As he looked over the final manuscript of the book, he decided to give it the title, “Dialogue with Life”. Indeed his journey was a dialogue with life to understand how the values of social justice could form the basis of the freedom from slavery he fought for.
After my father passed away, I wrote an obituary for him. I began the obituary with a quote from one of his role models- Albert Einstein,
“Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.”
This morning I woke up remembering that quote. I realized that the dialogue with life that my father started continues in my own curiosity for life. Our concerns and questions are similar but our paths are different. I am therefore not surprised that I continue to hold social justice dear to my heart and at the heart of my journey is a search of freedom. I do believe that curiosity, compassion, and an open mind will create a more harmonious society. I have immense respect for the concerns and solutions that both Marx and Gandhi shared with the world but I am more fascinated by the curiosity and questions that set Buddha to undertake his journey. While my father often quoted Tagore’s poem, “where the mind is without fear and the head is held high”, my journey of curiosity and creativity led me to discover the poems within me which I have now compiled under the title, “A window for a home without walls”.
I am reminded of a quote by a Sicilian novelist and poet Salvatore Quasimodo,
“Poetry … is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.”
I hope that the readers of my book will discover their own view of life from my book, A window for a home without walls.
My book is available on Amazon.
