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Penning songs of true freedom
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GIRISH SHRIVASTAVA speaks to Sahitya Akademi awardee Rajesh Joshi, a Hindi poet who believes that the essential role of literature is in its anti-establishment potential and that poetry is the only true and trusted voice in an era o f consumerist madness... .
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ALL IS well if it ends well. The brouhaha and high-pitched politics over the election of the President of Sahitya Akademi diminished with the touching presence of literary and cultural luminaries at the awards function at Rabindra Bhavan this past week. True literature binds us, unites us and also heals our injuries, even in the severest times of disintegration!
Rajesh Joshi, who received the Sahitya Akademi Award 2002 for Hindi, speaking about the present all-pervading values and mounting violence of all sorts, opines that literature - specially poetry - is the only true and trusted voice vis-a-vis market and madness in our times. It has the potential to discern, to resist and to interfere. True literature according to Joshi is essentially "dissenting" and anti-establishment.
A reckoning force of Poetry of Resistance, Joshi was born in Narsinghgarh, Madhya Pradesh in 1946, began his literary life as a freelance writer for journals like "Vatayan", "Lahar", "Pahal", "Dharamyug", "Saptahik Hindustan", "Sarika", etc. and edited magazines like "Naya Vikalp", "Naya Path" and "Vartman Sahitya". Author of twelve books including four collections of poetry - "Ek Din Bolenge Ped", "Do Panktiyon Ke Beech" and others - with one long poem "Samargatha" and two short story collections "Samwar Aur Anya Kahaniyan" and "Kapil ka Ped", four plays and one collection of children's rhymes "Gend Nirali Mithoo Ki".
Today Rajesh Joshi is one of those widely published and publicised Hindi authors, who successfully transcend all barriers of language, creed and nationality. His poems have been translated into almost all Indian and foreign languages. His award winning "Do Panktiyan ke Beech" (Between Two Lines) bears witness to the development attained by Hindi poetry in recent times. His poems are perfect examples of the flowering of his own poetic tradition and innovation and of experiencing even in the minute the immensity of the universal. The poet's immediate concern is to protect the elemental existence of man, which is according to him being eaten up by an increasingly consumerist culture, violence, chaos and the media vulture.
Referring to the Gujarat carnage, economic liberalisation, globalisation and growing poverty, the poet is all against such a regime which, rather than learning lessons from history, is hell bent upon upsetting the course of history. "Such mock-heroism," according to the famed poet, "may have dangerous consequences." He warns the so-called propagators of `cultural nationalism' and calls for a befitting reply to unmask their fascist schemes through open dialogues and the "power of the pen" - for "pen is mightier than sword'.
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