Reality and beyond...
By Anirban Chatterjee
Copyright Anirban Chatterjee 2013
Dedication
To my dearest mother, Mrs. Swati (Mukherjee) Chatterjee,
My sweet, beloved Maa, Without you there is no me,
If I am a light, you are my source,
If I am a bird, you are my wings,
If I am an eye, you are my pupil,
If I am a cloud, you are my sky,
If I am a planet, you are my star.
This is my humble dedication to you, you’ve been my
guide, my teacher, my friend, my beacon of light in this
strange world.
- Your son,
Anirban
A few words from the author
Hello, and thank you for picking this ebook up for reading. I am Anirban Chatterjee, the author, and before we start, let me share an important piece of information with you.
I have published some of the poems present in this book previously under slightly modified names or versions, under different sites such as Booksie, Wattpad, Facebook and Poet’s Corner application on android platform. Since I myself hold copyrights to every single of my works published there, I took the liberty of fitting some of them in here as well.
By the way, if you’re a Booksie or Poets’ Corner user, I beg to inform you that I am also known as The Eternal Flame on Booksie.
Now, before we start, a few words myself should be mentioned, I believe. I am Anirban Chatterjee, a student of Class XII (Science), from Kolkata, India. An admirer of the philosophy of open-source and nearly everything scientific, I try to figure out the meaning of life as it appears to me, each moment. You can contact me through my email ID
[email protected] if you have any question or suggestion regarding this eBook. Or else, you might also contact me through my site https://techtravelandtalks.blogspot.in/ where I regularly share with the world my views regarding pretty much everything. Thank you once again, and I believe you’ll enjoy my humble effort.
Yours truly,
Author
Acknowledgement
This little collection of my poems couldn’t have been possible without the help of many. I thank the makers of LibreOffice and Ubuntu Team, the software with which I wrote this eBook. I also thank google for their active Images search, that helped me pick some of the images I needed for this book. Additionally, I thank my parents Mr. Amitabha Chatterjee (The Hon’ble District Judge, Cooch Behar) and Mrs. Swati Chatterjee, and my dear cousin Rishi (Shiladitya Mukherjee), without whose active cooperation and love, this small project couldn’t have been possible. I take the liberty of thanking my maternal uncle, Parthasakha Mukherjee, who, as a celebrated teacher of English, has encouraged me to compose poetry. I also thank my dear friends Subhrajyoti Banerjee, Gaurav Tarafder (with whom I shared many moments writing poetry together) and Supriti Chatterjee (who always commented on and supported my poetry). I also specially thank Miss Elizabeth Pickles, one of my dearest friends, who inspired me to compose poetry.
In addition to the above mentioned persons, I would like to thank Indira Gandhi Memorial High School, Dumdum, my beloved school where I came to learn the very art of composing poetry itself.
Last but not the least, I thank you, dear reader, to have picked this ebook up and decided to give it a shot. :)
Introduction
Life is a difficult thing to wrap up within a few words, no matter how carefully we choose what we say or write. Nature surrounds us everywhere, no matter what our caste, creed, religion, gender, age or nationality is. In its own way, we find nature ‘communicating’ with us, sometimes too abstractly to be recognized by the limited capacity of human mind, and yet sometimes the ‘communication’ becomes as evident and clear as daylight. And in return, we see that something inside us, call it mind, soul or spirit whatever you wish, responds to that ‘communication’. This is simply a beautiful thing to witness.
Poetry is the way we view the nature itself, of which we are the products. We relate our thoughts and views to a specific set of words, which, in our opinion, reflects the truth or reality hidden inside nature. This is the beautiful art of composing poetry, channeling the beauty of nature into our own mind, trying to experience it fully, translating nature and its ways to ourselves and then finally expressing the results in form of words. This is indeed poetry.
In my life, I had hardly been a poet or even an admirer of poetry when I was younger. It all started quite a few years back, when I decided to give it a shot, to see how it feels to write something using rhymes. That wasn’t poetry in its strict sense, but rather childish poem. But still, everyone has to begin somewhere. And that was the start of my journey into the majestic realm of poetry. I do consider myself a novice, especially when comparing my works to those to some of the greatest poets of our age and the one before that. The more such comparisons I make, the more I see how humble my works are. Yet, the world of poetry is too beautiful to be deserted simply because of that. So I view things differently, and draw inspiration from works of poets such as Sarojini Naidu (my favourite poet so far), Lord Byron, Shelly and Emerson. Other notable poets who really inspire me include Walter de la Mere, whose poem ‘The
Listeners’ really made me look deeper in poetry. Coleridge’s simple, but beautifully designed and symbolized ‘Rime of the ancient mariner’ made me even more thoughtful. In my native language, Bengali, works of some of greatest poets such as Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazrul Islam and Satyendranath Dutta inspired me as well, although I rarely, if at all, write Bengali poetry. This is just one thing some people may find a bit weird, that I write bulk of my poems in English, a foreign language to me. Some may believe that I simply do it for popularity, or to get a wider audience, but the reality is something different. I don’t know why, but English simply fascinates me, more than Bengali does.
Another language which has a significant contribution to my poetry is Sanskrit, the ancient Aryan language of India. Sanskrit is considered a dead language nowadays, since nobody speaks it much. But I personally derive great degree of inspiration from the beautifully composed lines of the Vedas, ancient Indo-Aryan texts which acted as compendium of poetic philosophy and philology in those days.
Poetry is like a vast ocean, where no much how much you contribute, it still appears too little in front of what is already there. But that shouldn’t stop us, or make us feel dwarfed. Everyone has his or her own way to view and interpret nature, and this very reason gives us hope, a sincere cause, to compose poetry. Just by writing something, in whatever way seems appealing to the author himself or herself, we practically share with the world the very way that defines who we are. That is, poetry is a device to make the reader view the world through your eyes, hear it through your ears and feel it though your soul. This is simplicity, this is poetry.