Pujit Aggarwal

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no! It is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand ‘ring bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me prov'd, I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd. Shakespeare was essentially a multifaceted poet.   He is widely recognized as the most outstanding dramatist in the history of western literature. His 37 plays are imbued with a vision that includes horseplay, laughter, and a tragic sense of life that runs, like an invisible stream, under the comedic quips and antics of clowns, jesters, and buffoons that animate his comedies, tragicomedies,...

    My formal education finished me over a quarter of a century ago. The vortex of work sucked me in, propelling me into a spiral of apprenticeship, learning on the job, and a punitive regimen of tasks that had to be completed within the specified time allotted to each.   You were not allowed to wrap it up and deliver the package in a hurry. Your supervisor brooked no crease or crinkle on the wrapper. If so, you went back to the drawing board to rehearse the operation meticulously so as to meet the irreducible criteria set down by Quality Control. Only then were you were handed in an absorbent napkin to wipe the beads of sweat that bedewed your brow. Learn to earn the guerdon.   Your productivity, even in the short run, does not go unrewarded. Besides monetary and material incentives, your seniors proffer you something that immeasurably exceeds the importance of money and status. It is appreciation and empowerment with enough leeway to realize your potential.   ...

    Personality development should ideally be an integral part of formal education, like sex education and ethics. You cannot stride out of the sublime portal of an institution waving a degree or diploma in your hand to hear the job market proclaim that you lack smarts, tact, finesse, dynamism, alacrity, presentability, confidence, and brilliance to qualify you for the post.   What the interviewers find missing is personality. They advise you to work on it. Develop it. Enrich it. Once you have accomplished it, the market will unroll the red carpet for you to tread on towards the corridors of power and glory. Mere paper qualifications are not enough, cowboy. You need complementary skills to fortify your horse for the daunting tour of the rodeo.   So, you join one of the parallel coaching outfits to equip you with all the accessories of the armour the job market found missing.   Their cast iron, prefabricated modules consist of theory, practice, photocopies of not...

    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...