Pujit Aggarwal

    All of us who have had some exposure to English poetry must possess the whole or part of the poem by heart. There are a multitude of flowers more eye-catching than daffodils, but Wordsworth, in his short poem, virtually immortalises their vivacity and splendour.   There was a very intimate correlation between walking and creativity. Wordsworth’s affinity with nature in all its multifarious forms was different from an instinctive engagement with nature exemplified by several poets before and after him. Wordsworth’s equation with nature is endowed with awe, mystery, reverence, and an awareness of the power we associate with the pervasive transcendence of divinity. Nature manifests itself as a stern, moral disciplinarian as well as a nurse, a nanny, and a playmate.   The poet sketches out the spectacular beauty and vitality of daffodils in four stanzas of six lines each. The alternating rhymes close with a nifty rhymed couplet. During a solitary, brooding walk, he s...

      I was an average student though the school I was studying in, was quite pricy and elitist. I somehow managed to keep afloat by swotting up the syllabus a few weeks before the ogre of the final examination started looming larger and closer.     My top priority was just to scrape through. Parents, ambitious as ever, worried about my poor performance. They sought help from tutors who recommended supplementary coaching to compensate for the deficit in me or the mainstream pedagogy.   A bunch of private tutors was deployed to optimize my potential and boost my grades. The brunt of additional coaching began to take its toll and reduced me to a frazzle. I started suffering from insomnia. I dozed in the classroom.   The inefficacy of the remedial modalities prescribed by the gurus and super gurus compounded the anxiety of my parents. Since eminent educationists with their formulary were unable to haul me out of the mire of mediocrity, only an exorcist co...

    When words are overused or flogged to death in conversation or script, they lose their meaning and degenerate into tokens that we exchange on social or ceremonial occasions.   "Could norning" utters a warm voice on the telephone. "Good morning," you mutter drowsily. It is rather early in the day to pull a friend out of bed just because you shared with him a course in Creative Writing at Yale a quarter of a century before.   He did not open the conversation with ‘good morning’ but that is what you heard on account of years of conditioning. If he further adds that he recently took his children to the zoo and they had a lot of fun marvelling at the liars and tigers, you automatically hear ‘lions and tigers’.   Each of us is touted as original and unique. In most cases, this gift lapses over the years as you fit into the slot designed by society. Heredity and environment interact to varying degrees to process you into a finished product. Words like fortune, chan...

    It is a handy book of poems, so exiguous you can fold the paperback edition and insert it in your pocket. You can slow-read it in a couple of hours while reverting and re-reading parts of it. Poetry, by its very nature, resists perfunctory or fast reading.   It comprises about 100 verses or songs that celebrate the ineffable glory of divinity that permeates the entire cosmos. Cast in prose, each verse illustrates how God manifests his power and majesty through phenomena and objects far too obvious and unadorned to draw our attention to themselves. It is a collection, a liturgy, which you can open anywhere and pray without the mandatory accessory of a church or temple. Invoke Nature in its infinite variety and hear it in your inner ear,—the Lord chanting mantras with your lips.   Rabi—short for Rabindranath Tagore—was a little over 50 when his name swept across the world for becoming the first non-European Nobel Laureate for his modest book of poems, Gitanjali. Tr...

     Schadenfreude is a loanword in English borrowed from German. It means feeling joy, satisfaction, or an instantaneous ego boost in the misfortune of the other with whom you have a nominal equation: he may be your competitor, rival, condescending, holier-than-thou patron, or neighbor you are not particularly fond of You cannot experience this unashamedly negative feeling if the sufferer of misfortune is a total stranger or someone you have had no contact with.    Anthropologists say that schadenfreude is quite natural and common amongst all cultures, despite the strictures imposed by priests, pundits, rabbis, and mullahs. Rejoicing in the fall of someone is patently immoral unless the sufferer has been a very nefarious, depraved, and malignant person. He has already been covertly feared, cursed, and despised by most of his actual and potential victims. Consequently, what he has suffered, after causing undeserved injury and damage, is a justifiably legitimate ...

     ‘No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.’  (Thomas Carlyle)      Carlyle was an eminent Victorian philosopher whose influence on history, art, culture, and literature has been remarkably pervasive. Every great man exerts a centrifugal force that affects the meteorology of his immediate and outermost environment. Sometimes the impact is so deep on the political and cultural climate that it gradually turns into a permanent one. Till another great man emerges from the ever-spinning whirligig of time to introduce a new order or reverse the entrenched, otiose order to vacate the space for a better alternative,      Ashoka has been memorialised in TV serials, Hindi films, and regional films. Strangely enough, there is hardly any documentary evidence, reliable vestiges, or relics to substantiate whatever we know about this mighty king. Only some stupas with inscriptions and sculptural motifs ...

      This is a somewhat peculiar title for one of the most anthologized poems by the celebrated poet, Rudyard Kipling: ‘If, followed closely by an elongated hyphen or dash. He chose this punctuation to foreshadow several conditional clauses across the four stanzas, which the last line of the poem clinches with the main clause. The concatenation of precepts washes over you like a cascade of crystalline water.       The teacher who introduced the poem to the class for elocution practise was a man with a baritone voice to boot. He took enormous pains to underscore the subtle shades of nuance in the subtext so that we could project them in our performance. When he delivered the finished product, he virtually swayed in a trance.       It was not part of his duty to probe and explore the essence of the poem and what it communicated to the reader by way of its message or lesson. All the same, he would conclude the module with a set o...