By Dr Sanjeev Chopra
Authors of most books published in the last two years – and I know this from reading the Prologue/Preface/Acknowledgments in books nominated for the Valley of Words Book Awards – have given credit to the Covid Lockdown for giving them the ‘enforced time and the confined space’ to ruminate, reflect and write their narratives. Some have captured the reality of those times: from children’s books –like Jamlo Walks by Samina Mishra and Tariq Aziz to contemporary classics like The Blind Matriarch by Namita Gokhale. While the former looks at what lockdown did to her young citizens, the latter chronicles not just the cynicism, despair and tragedies of India’s encounter with the Corona virus but also the resilience and strength of the human spirit. For those of us who have lived through these years, it was a traumatic experience as one felt both ‘helpless’ in the face of adversity, and ‘overwhelmed’ by stories of valour, courage, sacrifice – emotions which have been captured by my batchmate and friend Pramod Jain in his wonderful offering ‘Lockdown and other Poems’, published earlier this year.
As there are forty-seven poems, and each one of them is brilliant and evocative, one is compelled to choose and share with the readers a subjective selection which is representative of the times we went through during the two phases of Covid and the four clearly identifiable stages of lockdown – complete, restricted, partial and optional.
During the phase of complete lockdown, the irony of the situation is best expressed in these lines: ‘Like caged animals/Humans are condemned indoors/for their hubris, sins and wayward crimes/against nature/Animals roam freely, playfully/enjoying the new found freedom /reclaimed after centuries of chains /clamped by civilization’.
The theme reverberates in Now: ‘Now you can see Delhi’s clear, starry skies/and the snow-capped hills two hundred miles away/clean rivers, with fish on railway tracks/Maybe even dolphins off the Mumbai coast/A new generation is blessed: WoW! That’s awesome!
Yes, it was awesome indeed for people like us -the author and the reviewer, who felt that it was more like a state of Nirvana. As he says in the eponymous poem, ‘No cold, no heat, no sweat/no dust, no fumes, no noise, no pollution /One was never so close to Nirvana, Shared ‘Nirvana’ at that!
This was in sharp contrast to the lived reality of the migrants who eked a difficult existence on the margins of the city. To them, it was the rank opposite of Nirvana for ‘I will walk a thousand miles/with baggage of life and hope on my head /on the road I constructed years ago/soaked in sweat and fuelled by hot air’.
In several poems, the bureaucratic lexicon comes to the fore. As for example when he says, ‘God is on earned leave/sanctioned by a virus’. And he talks of ‘hundreds of GOs and/dozens of Dos/From PM to CMs and DMs/And all the advisories from MHA & MoH & FW: An archival feast with a lavish spread of /Fight/Flight and fright’. Thus, in Steel Frame Plus, he builds the poem on the Cartesian aphorism Cogito Ergo Sum: I think, therefore I am, by stating that as a civil servant, I exist because ‘I serve, deliver, decide, empower, sacrifice and lead’. ‘Slightly dusted, maybe; but not rusted, Tall and robust like the Chandragupta pillar at Mehrauli, I pass the test of fire; therefore, I exist.’
And what happens when the modern state – built on the Westphalian model collapses – as in the case of Afghanistan. He puts it so succinctly: ‘There’s no state, no nation,/only one’s tribe; each one the supreme one,/and grenades, rifles, bullets on sale everywhere/are the symbols of triumphalism.
Pramod has an ode for his city, but this could have been written for Kapurthala or Bareilly as well. In ‘Jammu, Oh Jammu’, he asks ‘Jammu, where are you? Oh, the old Jammu of yore,/where are you? Are you no more?? !!/ in place of Kucha houses /aging forts, rustic shops, / now all we see is buildings /and big shopping malls /and occasional temple bells, /and of course, many old wells /…. It ends with a lament ‘I search you, / My good old Jammu, and find you not, /anywhere, everywhere/ Alas, you are lost, /Eternally gone /I search in vain/night and morn!
If there is a poem on Jammu, how can Kashmir not have one? In a long, three-part poem which he started writing on the 15th August of 2016, and finished on the Republic Day of 2021, he writes, ‘Kashmiriyat conveniently retreats to /A new stadium, /History books, /college seminars and /A statesman’s speeches. Long live the Kashmiriyat’.
Then there is a poem which laments the death of our batchmate G Krishnaiah whose case still lingers in the Supreme Court, and we get adjournment after adjournment even as the killers walk free.
Finally, there is a meditation on death. It is poignant and reflective, even as it is realistic – for now that one has seen countless deaths, there is a pattern to grief and mourning which is almost universal in nature – including deaths during Covid. I quote three stanzas from ‘When I die’ in three parts: ‘She will sob. For a day or two/Perhaps three. / Weeping enough is/part of the sacrament /binding for seven births/ Obligatory, it seems’. The second stanza reads ‘Moon will set, /sun will dawn/as usual, on time, Earth will spin/And stars will shine/The universe will expand, too/the cuckoo in the mango tree /will sing its song, as before’. And finally, ‘Death is the end of birth. But is death reality? Or the end of a dream, /daydream/ dreamt collectively’
Let me end with some very insightful lines on the page preceding the Preface: ‘The wise spend their time in poetry, scriptures and humour; and the fools in vices, sleep and quarrel’. As you have read through this review, and hopefully some of you will be inspired to pick up the book from Amazon, I can compliment you for being a wise person and urge you to share this wisdom with your friends and family.
Sanjeev Chopra (born 3 March, 1961) is a retired IAS officer of the 1985 batch, from Kapurthala, Punjab. He is a resident of Dehradun. He is a former Director of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration and has written a book, “We, the People of the States of Bharat: The Making and Remaking of India’s Internal Boundaries”, published in 2022. He is now the patron and honorary consultant to a literary festival, the Valley of Words International Literary Festival, held annually in Dehradun. Chopra has held the Hubert H Humphrey Fellowship (Cornell), the Robert S McNamara Fellowship (World Bank) and positions at Royal Asiatic Society, London, the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute (Harvard).
