New Delhi: Poet-lyricist Gulzar has now come out with a book of poems and the topics range from the political climate in the country and intolerance to the plight of the common man, and from atrocities against Dalits to Indo-Pak relations.
The 52 poems in “Suspected Poems” are written by Gulzar in his inimitable style and reflect and comment, sometimes elliptically through a visual image and sometimes with breathtaking immediacy and directness, on the political reality in the country today.
The poems, originally written in Hindi, have been translated into English by Pavan K Varma.
In the poem “There’s Nothing New in New Delhi”, Gulzar says, “There is nothing really new in New Delhi/ Except that every five years a new government comes in/ And converts old issues to new schemes./ Opening scabbards anew /They unsheathe again all the rusted laws/ That can cut neither grass, nor necks!”
“Gulzar Sahib writes poetry of an order that has few parallels today. His poems are, therefore, hardly ‘suspect’! So when he told me that the next volume of his poems would be called ‘Suspected Poems’, I was both amused and intrigued,” says Varma, who has translated three other volumes of Gulzar’s poems.
“But, this is the first time I have worked on a collection that is ‘suspected’! As always, there is a method to Gulzar’s occasionally elliptical genius. To my mind, these poems are all part of a specific genre. That genre relates both to larger public issues and to politics.
