A poet in jail!

Of the much news in bold letters hogging the front page of a leading daily, one bizarre news did not miss my eyes for more reasons than one. It was about a 50-year-old lady, Baby Ghosh from Howrah, a poet, who had sent over her poems to the Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, for her comments. She has also been going over to Nabanna, trying to seek an audience with the Chief Minister, in vain.

Apparently her works are appreciated by her neighbours and friends, which might have emboldened her to send it over to the CM, a well-known poet herself. Failing to elicit any response from the CM, the aggrieved poet threatened over the phone to blow up the Secretariat resulting in her arrest and remand in 14 days judicial custody. The lady confessed her extreme disappointment in being snubbed and denied an appointment. Mamata herself may not be aware a wee bit about the poet or her poems and her cultural czars manning the departments may have been the culprit.

Mamata, before becoming the CM was easily approachable and was a peoples’ leader. The over-zealous officials in their effort to create a halo over Mamata have erected a wall around the CM, distancing her beyond the reach of common people. This paradigm shift may not be understood by simple rural folks, much so any poet, who live in the world of their own.

The other aspect is the explosive emotional mindset of the people, who seem to get angry too soon. The threat to bomb could not have been intended at all and could have been the result of pent up frustration and anger at being denied a certification of her poems worthy by the state’s greatest poet of all, or so, Baby Ghosh must’ve thought.

I hope the law will take kindly and warn her sternly before letting her off. The CM and we could have an opportunity to read her work, if it really was worth going to jail

I wrote this many months ago, as a last stanza of one of my poems:

i long forgot to ever react
devoid of anger and of tears
the wind too seems cold with me
blowing the paper and my soul free

Sampath Kumar
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