The Urdu-Persian mode of courtly poetry suggests the humming of honeybees in an orchard filled with fruit trees in an eternal springtime of the spirit. It is unabashedly romantic. Tamil poets declaim their verses like the waves crashing on the sands. They sound like politicians, or maybe it’s the politicians who imitate them. The new ‘English types’ reflect the din and roar of traffic during peak hour, the clink of coffee spoons or, asT.S. Eliot might have recommended, measuring life out in self-enhancing drops of artificial sweeteners.
In the midst of this din, Dr Patel’s voice preserves a rare sense of rightness. Or an assurance that writing poetry is or should be a form of artistic expression that has to be nurtured both by the people engaged in the activity and by those who perform the equally important task of listening to it. He not only reads from his own earlier book of poems, but from an anthology that he has edited and compiled out of a unique association that he has had with the students of the school started by J. Krishnamurti at Rishi Valley, near thetown of Madanapalle in Andhra Pradesh.
It is a well-produced volume of poetry by the children with whom he has worked over the last 10 years during trips made every year in January. These are enhanced by paintings and drawings that the poems inspired in some of Dr Patel’s own circle of friends, that include the artists Nilima Sheikh, Anju Dodiya, Sunil Patwardhan and Atul Dodiya.
As he describes in the introduction to the book: “Rishi Valley School is a four-hour drive from Bangalore. It nestles in the shadow of a valley that suffers from being in the rain shadow of hills around it, with the result that in the earlier part of it existence the school was lodged in an impressive but arid setting. Planting of trees started in the 1930s, soon after the inauguration of the school itself. The result of this visionary activity is a transformed environment. The hills and the valley are full of trees, there are water bodies with birds and tiny animals wherever the rain gods have been reasonably generous, species of birds that had never been seen in the valley before have started to make it their home and the valley has been declared a bird sanctuary.”
The continuity of Dr Patel’s visits allowed him to watch the children grow with the sessions. He first introduced them to some of the poets whose work he admired. He gave them a few basic rules—no clichés, no imitations, no references to daffodils, fairies, witches or goblins. Eventually, he suggested that the students read out their poems at the school assembly. “It was an uphill task nevertheless,” he says. “The average well-educated Indian student does not know how to speak at a public platform. The mercurial charming chatter with implosions of words and running together of text is a pleasure to hear on the games field or at picnics, but not elsewhere. In addition, the students at this stage of the workshop saw the reading as something painful to be quickly got over with. The idea was to rush through the poem and then run away.”
Gradually, however, the poets became as accomplished at reading their poems out aloud as at putting them on paper.
“What is a poem?” asked one of the children at the reading. “Is it meant to be read silently, or spoken out aloud?” In answering them, Dr Patel was both teacher as well as fellow poet. “Well, it’s not prose. Poetry has a rhythm. Prose also has a rhythm, but it is different from that of poetry. Poetry catches a fleeting moment.”