Letter 1
Dear The One,
How can you finish off a poetry book in one day? Odds are you like it instantly. Odds are it might sound better or something in those words that caused the titillation in your mind. If you have the same experience as the poet is describing—then it becomes easy to grasp, but it also provides you distraction and then satisfaction, and then this circle continues. But for maximum time, you understand it better when you live with those lines.
When it comes to poetry, you can't say—I've read it; I’ve understood it; and finally, I deciphered it. No. It demands time, patience and most importantly—a zillion times readings. To go again and again to internalise those lines. You have to swirl it around your head incessantly on your dinner, in your dreams, in the washroom with your toothbrush, on the metro, on the auto, and in the classroom when a hyphenated-personality-professor is delivering you an eloquent and well-researched lecture on Orientalism.
When you hear something your friends are talking about and they demand an answer from you, at that moment you are just reminded of that poem—that is your answer. Uttering those lines doesn't make you pretentious; rather, you are needy. Need, at that time, because the friend you are talking to is not giving you the same relief with their talk, as these lines—your recent frenemy.
You have to be completely taken in by yourself, by the poem itself. Like when you remember Faraz’s line — dil kī kyā baat kareñ dil to hai nādāñ jānāñ. You can’t memorise it; you have to internalise it. Internalise it in such a way that even when you can’t remind yourself of these lines, you can still feel them. Those feelings are there with you, lingering over your head and screaming at you— you can deal with your banal life. I’m with you.
I’m writing about these experiences because of Manglesh Dabral’s line–
इसी तरह चलता है संसार
कुछ दिन मन में विद्रोह होता है
घुमड़न रहती है
कोई दुख देखकर नीची कर लेनी होती है निगाह
In another poem I read of him-
प्रेम होगा तो हम कहेंगे कुछ मत कहो
प्रेम होगा तो हम कुछ नहीं कहेंगे
प्रेम होगा तो चुप होंगे हम
प्रेम होगा तो हम शब्दों को छोड़ आएंगे
रास्ते में पेड़ के नीचे
नदी में बहा देंगे
पेड़ पर रख आएँगे
Yours Truly,
Letter 2
Dear The One,
I miss the seriousness in me. I miss the curious-ness in me. I miss the loneliness in me. I used to take care of myself, at least in terms of food. I gave up on that, too. Anything couldn’t impress me; anyone couldn’t interest me. What’ll become of me, then, if the idea of me vanishes moment by moment?
Everything is happening with so much randomness that I don’t even have any vague notion of what I'm really doing. Why do I smile? Why do I speak without giving it much thought? It’s so awry that even when I try to become clear, I can't. It seems that I don’t have any option but to live with this idiocy.
I feel like someone has flung a bucket of scars all over my face. Closely, it appears in dots, and collectively, if you see, it’s a sea. The release of tears might make these sprinkled-scars disappear. But I haven’t cried for ages. Eventually, I think, to get poured out from my eye, these tears have translated themselves into scars.
I used to have a very tender and calm face. I’d loved life too much, and wanted to be more. But now it feels like someone has squeezed me so vehemently with their fists that I feel so tiny— so tiny that one day I will evaporate without being noticed.
To escape from all this idiocy, sometimes, I plunge myself into binge-reading. And I feel that the more I read, the more I think. The more I think, the more I understand. The more I understand, the more I find my way to justify my stupidity, my amusing thoughts, my narcissism. And other times, I feel, the more I read, the more I know that I know nothing.
Yours Truly,
—
Letter 3
Dear the One,
Here I’m again in agony, in suffering, in the inevitable chaos of life—of my life, of everyone’s life. You see hundreds of people walking outside—in the mall, on the road, in your university, in your office—and everyone is thinking about only one thing— about themselves. No one, not even one single person, is thinking about others. I repeat, no one. That’s how life is. You get filled with so many of your own problems—anxiety, discomfort, and disorder—that you don’t have the option to think about others. Even if you’re behaving well, you’re in the constant hammering of your own thoughts. If I’m behaving well, if I’m listening well, does the person think good about me? Is the person thinking about my well-behaved nature?
Isn’t it a tragedy that we present or say we perform our best selves before others, and yet we feel people don’t like us, people don’t love us? We always grapple with the question, "Are we sufficient enough for other ones, especially the one that I like?" The notion of not being loved enough is always there, making us scrunch up our faces. By clinging to the notion of being lovable enough, we harm ourselves. Harm, not physically but mentally.
I always think that people who we find smart or brilliant in any field are not loved enough. So to get hold of that love they think they deserve, they fill themselves with words, information, books, poetry, arts, coding, and many other things that we find weird. That society attaches to smartness. Being weird suggests not being loved enough. Weirdness, clumsiness, and nerdiness are manifestations of wanting to be loved more. By habit, it becomes a routine. Routine of the accumulation. The accumulation of knowledge, thoughts, and, more importantly, emptiness. This continues until their deaths. Till death, they are weird.
Every invention and discovery we see is the inventor’s or discoverer’s way of wanting to be loved. They think they always deserve attention, but we fail them every time. To sum up, I must recommend you give another glance at the film Before Sunrise. Isn’t everything we do in life to be loved a little more?
Yours,
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