The spirit is restless, anxious and melancholic and the flesh is weak, weary that sums up the modern man. "I have no interest anywhere/ `85 no direction is befitting `85 I silently ruminate for nothing/ but always without rest." For its excellent treatment of modern man’s predicament, Jaswant Deed’s five-verse anthology has deservedly won the Sahitya Akademi Award for 2007. With its wide-ranging scope, this collection of cerebral, experimental, complex and variegated poems makes a substantial contribution to contemporary Punjabi poetry.

Focusing on the tension between spiritual and material modes of life, the past and the present, the country life and the city life, the East and the West, making and failing of relationships, the autobiographical poems dyed in imagination plunge the readers into deep thoughts. It is interesting to see how the poet presents the themes of universal significance as profoundly personal. The witty, ironic, poignant lyrics are a picture of many conflicts, tussles that inhabit modern man’s soul.

Identical to the poet himself, the fractured and fraught poetic persona, feeling restless, with a kamandal (a mendicant’s vessel) in hands, sets out in search of "tek" (rest), but time and again is chased and tormented by worldly desires.

"Haath kamandal kapdiya, man trishna upaji bhai", Baba Nanak’s words sparkle in the title, Kamandal and a few religious poems—Bhakti, Gajadhari, Kutiya and Tere Dar Pe. It’s in this sense the book has a religious tinge. A yearning for deliverance haunts the poet.

The poet draws his subjects primarily from his own life and surroundings. A nostalgia for his rural roots and the consequent melancholy colour the poems Tabar, Pudina, Pind Duji Waar, Pindo Suneha. His complete honesty in terms of dialect is striking.

Jaswant Deed’s poetry is a far cry from the mainstream Punjabi poetry. It subverts the glorified ideal of faithfulness in the man-woman relationship.

In Vichhoda, separation instead of tormenting is relieving for the partners, and how true in the modern context!

Jaswant Deed, professionally related to television, uses visual details deftly and abundantly in his poems. The poet ironically celebrates the elemental greed, craftiness, cunningness and slyness of cats and snakes (the recurrent images) to describe the nitty-gritty of modern life.

The rugged style and ironic portrayal of the vicissitudes of modern life make Kamandal a must for those interested in modern poetry.

Dil Toun 140322 - Kamandal By Jaswant Deed - Parandeep Kainth

"Santape Birkh" Poetry uses forms and conventions to suggest differential interpretation to words, or to evoke emotive responses. Devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. The use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Similarly figures of speech such as metaphor, simile and metonymy[4] create a resonance between otherwise disparate images—a layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between individual verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm.

Dil Toun 140325 - Santape Birkh By Ajmer Kainth - Parandeep Kainth

Dil Toun 140320 - Shabdan Di Shatranj By Savitoj - Parandeep Kainth

Dil Toun 140313 - Kavita Sanmukh By Ravinder Ravi - Host - Parandeep Kainth

Dil Toun 140327 - Tu Menu Sirlekh De By Harpreet Kaur - Parandeep Kainth

World Theater Day Message 2015

The true masters of the theater are most easily found far from the stage. And they generally have no interest in theater as a machine for replicating conventions and reproducing clichés. They search out the pulsing source, the living currents that tend to bypass performance halls and the throngs of people bent on copying some world or another. We copy instead of create worlds that are focused or even reliant on debate with an audience, on emotions that swell below the surface. And actually there is nothing that can reveal hidden passions better than the theater.  

Most often I turn to prose for guidance.  Day in and day out I find myself thinking about writers who nearly one hundred years ago described prophetically but also restrainedly the decline of the European gods, the twilight that plunged our civilization into a darkness that has yet to be illumined. I am thinking of Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust. Today I would also count John Maxwell Coetzee among that group of prophets.

Their common sense of the inevitable end of the world—not of the planet but of the model of human relations—and of social order and upheaval, is poignantly current for us here and now. For us who live after the end of the world. Who live in the face of crimes and conflicts that daily flare in new places faster even than the ubiquitous media can keep up. These fires quickly grow boring and vanish from the press reports, never to return. And we feel helpless, horrified and hemmed in. We are no longer able to build towers, and the walls we stubbornly construct do not protect us from anything—on the contrary, they themselves demand protection and care that consumes a great part of our life energy. We no longer have the strength to try and glimpse what lies beyond the gate, behind the wall. And that’s exactly why theater should exist and where it should seek its strength. To peek inside where looking is forbidden.

 “The legend seeks to explain what cannot be explained. Because it is grounded in truth, it must end in the inexplicable”—this is how Kafka described the transformation of the Prometheus legend.  I feel strongly that the same words should describe the theater. And it is that kind of theater, one which is grounded in truth and which finds its end in the inexplicable that I wish for all its workers, those on the stage and those in the audience, and I wish that with all my heart.

Krzysztof Warlikowski

Translation: Philip Boehm
Supported by Theatre Communications Group and the U.S. Center of ITI

 
	



© Bartek War