The words flow out...

What is it with me these days? I know I’ve always liked prose. But I have never been “a-verse” to verse either. In fact, I discovered that I like writing only when I started writing poems – poems for people I knew – funny ones, sweet ones. In my engineering days, a poem written for the birthday boy/gal was a certainty. I could write about a teacher and have everyone in splits. They were never poetry, really. I would say that I can rhyme words. That’s it. It’s Anant who’s the poet of the family. Having tried some deep, profound stuff myself, I just realize how shallow I am. So I gradually came to my senses and stuck to the good ol’ long drawn paragraphs.

But I never thought that I would end up being so daft that I would actually avoid poetry. As I come across any piece, I start reading it with a critical eye. As one line follows another, I begin to give up – on the poet and wonder why he can’t say what he has to say straight. I have begun to have ‘standards’, which I am not very proud of. And by standards, I mean that I would like a Lewis Caroll or a nice Winnie the Pooh by Milne. P G Wodehouse can work wonders and so can Ogden Nash. But If it’s not Wordsworth or Keats or Shakespeare or Byron or Browning or Frost or Tennyson, fat chance I would finish reading it. It’s not about whether it’s an epic or a sonnet, if it doesn’t make sense in the first few lines, it won’t make sense to me at all.

Have I really become a dry person? Has education ruined my imagination or my ability to let my mind take flight? Am I not naïve enough anymore to believe? Or is it courage that I have lost? Have the numbers, facts, statistics and drab uncreative chapters killed the Peter Pan in me? Or is it my deteriorating grey cells that have made me incapable to comprehend something new? While I keep wondering about all of this, I find that I can still read. And write. What else does one need anyway.