World Poetry Day

Yes, it's World Poetry Day on March 21. It's amazing how they seem to have a day for every conceivable thing, including teddy bears (it's on 9th September). I missed celebrating the first Pi day last week on March 14 (how do you celebrate Pi day, you ask? Well, it is a universally established fact that you do it by eating pies!) but another one turns up on 22nd July, so I can relax. Good old mathematicians - with admirable foresight they have provided two days in a year dedicated to one thing - a modest, unassuming constant that providentially sounds like a yummy dessert dish.

But back to poetry - Charlotte Bronte says that there is nothing beautiful in this world which is not poetry. This assertion wouldn't have made any sense to me a few years ago, when poems were no more than a boring section in my English textbook which I never could connect to, and no teacher could ever make me understand how blank or free verse could be considered poetry at all.

Then I read a few poems of Wordsworth - The Solitary Reaper (CBSE students would remember it), the Daffodil and Tintern Abbey (ISC students would remember this). I simply fell in love with them. They are such deceptively simple poems, talking of an emotion deeply felt, soul-stirring, which could never be put in plain prose half so well. If you've ever felt lonely, or that all "the weary weight of this unintelligible world" is dragging you down, his poems offer solace and comfort, a simple feeling of kinship and of hoping for higher things and better times.

I think poems are very similar to angsty songs by any rock/soft rock/pop band you care to name. In fact, they are songs without the music, or songs are poetry with music, whichever you prefer. After all the numbers by Linkin Park or Dead by April also talk about suffering and pain and a wish to overcome them. I think that no one can become a really good poet or rockstar without being compulsive loners or extremely sad for some reason. 

All the good poets I've read about were slight misanthropes and they all reached their peak before they became famous, and either died or never wrote again, or wrote awfully once they were made Poet Laureate and began enjoying popularity. I don't know why - but fame seems to kill creativity. Maybe that's why so many bands break up after a while too - because they simply can't make the same kind of songs anymore.

Poetry is the intimate expression of someone deeply stirred by feelings not easily put in words. I have never written poetry in my life, except once - my verse is usually of the 'I have a canary, His name is Billy,' variety. Therefore I have all the more respect for people who actually can write good poetry - which I've finally understood as not something that has to rhyme or be so long but be something that flows from the heart, something that must flow from the heart or choke the person if left unexpressed. The best poetry is that which is simple and unvarnished - from the poet's heart and soul to the reader's.

Therefore I make this tribute to all my favourite poets, and authors - Wordsworth, Vikram Seth, who writes the funniest poems and first made me like poetry, Charlotte Bronte, and L.M. Montgomery who wrote prose but was a hardcore poet at heart and first taught me the distinction between a good poem and a bad one - Thank you for your gift of words for generations to come!

"So you're humanities are you? But why?"

I hear so many people saying how much they hated social science when they were in school. I really don't understand it. Hate history and economics? But why? Maybe according to you there was a lot to mug up and it was just a bunch of irrelevant facts. Maybe it wasn't taught properly: I was lucky to have some pretty good teachers. But I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that science is pushed by most Indian parents as the only thing worth doing and that the other subjects are somehow inferior, and this attitude obviously gets passed on to the children. As for me, I genuinely liked science but I had horrible science teachers and frankly, the people in my class who had been attending IIT coaching classes since God-knows-when scared me. They all discussed twelfth standard science in class and did extra papers while I was struggling with the concept of electromagnetism and floundering hopelessly.

I knew when I took Humanities that it was the stream for me. Of course now I'd happily chuck all my notes and text books into the fire and jump on the ashes with glee - because the board exams are pains, every one of them - but the subjects still retain vestiges of interest. I'm defensive however whenever people ask me what stream I've taken. When I said it one lady commented, "Well, children do whatever they want nowadays," and someone else spoke about how easy it is to get marks in it. Granted that chemistry and physics are tough subjects, but it is theoretically possible to get hundreds in them both. Do you know the possibility of getting the same in psychology or sociology? Zero. And do you know how much we need to get into a 'good' college? 96% minimum in all subjects, when the very maximum for these subjects, once you've worked like hell, is 96. So don't tell me any stream is easier or tougher than the other. If you're interested in the subject it automatically becomes easy, and if you aren't, well, tough.

However, I'd love to have done some more science too if the opportunity had been offered to take up the social sciences along with it. Come on, India! It's time to stop forcing children to choose between the arts, commerce and the sciences at fifteen. You can't demarcate them any more - every one needs each of these subjects to truly become well-rounded. Don't you think that the engineer and the accountant need the beauty of literature, the vast world of philosophy and the study of humanity around them as much as knowledge of computer programs or accounting standards? And also that the student of the arts might also be interested in the hard sciences and desire to know how gadgets work and what that highly mysterious and yet attractive-sounding thing called vector is (I might be wrong and they might actually be completely boring, but vectors do sound so cool).

So, dear government, please stop dividing the streams in school. Let children choose the set of subjects they want to study each term, like they do in America. You keep ranting about immoral Western influences - let's have some really good ones at least. And hopefully you will one day put as much energy into creating a world-class liberal arts college as you did in creating the IITs and the IIMs in the 1950s. Of course, this means a complete overhaul of our education system, which will probably be the best thing that ever happened to our country. We have tremendously smart and talented people here, who can really transform this country positively, who are all going abroad to study where their skills are valued and who feel no connection to our country at all. This isn't their fault, it's the entire system's. And I pray that before the brain drain occurs with even greater intensity a change occurs. Don't you?