Bhaskar Chakrabarty’s Diary—1982: A Selection

On July 17, 2014 by admin

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1/1 Gist. A political journalist is more than a prostitute.

 

1/1 a poem is a deer with a dream in it.

 

1/1  Defeat becomes us.

 

14/1 Piku-Sadgati— incomparable, incomparable

 

29/1 If you want to catch a thief, kick the police.

 

30/1  Kamalda’s painting exhibition—academy of fine arts.

 

3/2 Orphee. This Cocteau film I had probably seen ten years ago. Watched it again today. Timeless classic.

Kamalda’s painting exhibition.

 

5/2 Jule et Jim. Incomparable.

Kamalda’s exhibition over.

 

10/2 Have to bring such a kind of laughter into grasp that nothing will ever make it fade.

 

10/2 A man’s body lying in this room, burnt to death.

 

19/2 Akaler Shondhane. How a good film can be ruined, Mrinalbabu shows at the end.

Weight – 70 kg

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5/3 Is it because I have been able to love that I am suffering so every day?

 

17/3 They read quickly, badly, and pass judgement before they have understood.—J.P.S.

If the poet relates, explains , or teaches, the poetry becomes prosaic; he has lost the game.—J.P.S.

 

19/3 I must admit that I have never written any political poetry. But still, if someone calls any poem political, I will not be surprised.

 

22/3 Lochandas Karigaar is a memorable experience.

 

7/4 Bought a book for Rs. 50.  Sinned.

 

8/4 You can’t be misguided.

 

12/4 Sinned again. Book. Rs. 21.40. Adalat o Ekti Meye.

 

22/5 A procession of abortive poems.

 

1/6 Life is good. Very good. Death, not so much.

 

6/6 When everyone is running after money, I am writing poetry.

No money if I fall ill again. How long shall Sejdi manage.

 

9/6 I will awake from within one day. Illumined, incandescent.

Feels as if I am walking around in unknown, uncharted country. Relationships are getting denser—hesitantly. By no means am I lonely.

 

14/6 Huge trouble. Too many letters to write. Must list name and date from now on. We don’t have any secretary.

21/6 Learning to use words slowly, with time.

Terrible poverty.

 

26/6 Truly, my deepest secret poems are like the light of imagination, running in a moment from hither to thither. As if I have really been blessed with a gift of two wings. How grateful am I to life.

 

30/6 After every single poem, one has to stir in suspicion and examine it closely—whether it is a poem indeed.

 

2/7 55 poems in 6 months! Never in my life.

 

4/7 Perhaps my shorter poems are buried under my prose-poems. Wrong thinking. Disrespectful.

 

6/7 Modern Times. Classical touch of a genius.

 

24/7 No letter even today! Everyone’s busy?

 

27/7 Reality, simplicity and humanity with superb imagination. B. C.

 

28/7 Have coughed the whole night. Who can survive so many cigarettes?

 

29/7 We never came to thoughts. They came to us. H.

Not liking coffee house.

We are too late for the God and too early for the Being. H.

2/8 One has to love even being swindled in life.

 

3/8 Alone at coffee house. Extra tension. I should live with children. Have not graded any examination script the whole day.

Don’t know why, but I have never worked towards a lucrative job, marriage. Today, perhaps, I have inched pretty close to marriage. Discomfitting.

 

4/8 Hotel. Afternoon, 3.05. Daal-rice. Fried fish.

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9/8 After a trillion years, this birth. She was my mother. He, my father. My young brother, sister, didi. A few friends. And then, just vanishing into the wide yonder. Again will not see them for many trillion years. This mystery beckons me today.

 

9/8 Exhausted. Need a break for a couple of days. Somewhere deserted—rest. Trysting with song—Santosh Sengupta, Dhiren Mitra and Ramkumar.

 

10/8 Common people’s words needs to be conveyed simply to the common people—

Did the political parties ever realize this?  Ever?

 

11/8 Let there be no vacuous optimism in my writing.

 

15/8 One more insignificant day.

 

18/ 8 If the front door is bolted, smash it to smithereens.

Munna has fever. I feel it coming too.

 

24/8 Ceaselessly, to stand upon a rickety, tremulous life and write poetry.

What excrutiating poverty.

 

25/8 So weak I have become. Continuously thinking of ma.

 

26/8  Be calm be calm just be calm.

 

27/8 This life I have wasted by writing.

Had I not written, this life I would have wasted more.

Terrible poverty.

Losing joy in life again. Any which way, must rummage among the daily nuts and bolts of life for happiness. Must.

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29/8 Spending since morning.

 

30/8 Weight—68 kg

 

2/9 Idiot! Learn how to lie. You will be happy.

Have I to lie in order to be happy?

 

4/9 Why don’t those who want new kinds of writing from me go to the stationary shop?

Coffee House.

 

7/9.  Theory of rebirth. A consolation to earth-loving humans.

These days the young ones engage in opinion-mongering.

For me Bibhutibhushan’s Ichhamati is  no less than And Quiet Flows the Don.

 

9/9  I painfully realize today that there is nothing I can do other than writing poetry.

 

15/9 Can we not ever get the vast star studded night into language, into poetry?

Being my own friend and my own enemy

I have done, continually, so many plain chores, wishing to die silently.

 

16/9 In every moment of life, rejection entangles us. One has to accept it. One has to love more.

Anger, excitement– I must eliminate from life. I have forgotten the habit of walking on roads. Have to start afresh in a quiet way.

 

17/9 I have always played with danger since childhood. Paying the penalty for that today.

When Sejdi, too, tells me to write prose, I feel really anguished.

 

20/9 Greed, I must win over.  Restraint, a valuable gift. Impassivity, stay with me.

Beware. Disquiet ahead.

 

22/9 Someone who slipslides away from another with finesse has no right to say anything against the nuclear world.

May I stay with the sorrows of the ordinary people all my life. May I come to their help.

 

23/9. Still, all said and done, we want to be milked, debased.

 

24/9. If I could timetravel into the past, I would start afresh from childhood.

Poor show.

 

27/9. Khareej. With almost no dialogue Mrinalbabu could hold up the sick malady that entwines our city life.

Charuprakash Ghosh.

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28/9. Holiday. We don’t have birthdays deathdays.

 

1/10. Played football with my students at school. Cannot play so well nowadays.

It is time to expend my days with some reserve.

 

2/10. Curiosity, o enemy mine…

 

5/10. Shall write novels after marriage.

 

6/10. Life, like this?

Daktarbabu has erased my dreams. With what instruments, I don’t know.

 

11/10 The fragrant boy floats by on the motorbike

Who does he call on? Do they

Give him love and care? Offer him pineapple? On a plate?

Does someone swap stories with him by the hushed pond?

I know how he looks, his voice like silence.

Some of that silence in my writing? Maybe some darkness stirred in?

 

Abhi came looking for me. Why?

 

12/10 False promises. Yes, I did give some.

Truth is all there is today.

 

16/10 I think I am becoming mute.

 

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18/10

  1. Gavaskar
  2. Arunlal/Srikant
  3. Bengsarkar
  4. Biswanath/Ashoke Malhotra/Mohinder amaranth
  5. Sandeep Patil
  6. Yaspal Sharma
  7. Kirmani
  8. Kapil Dev
  9. Madanlal
  10. Ravi Shastri
  11. Dilip Doshi
  12. Sibram Krisnan/Maninder Singh/Kirti Azad/Balbinder Singh Sandhu

 

22/10  No way out. Have to quit cigarettes. Or, at best 10 a day.

Almost everyone is saying—why do you look so ill.

Beginning to feel nervous.

Amused to see that a few young poets are writing poems in prose form.

 

25/10 Allurement must not allure me. Must be careful.

 

31/10 Must accept this job straightforwardly. This life.

Ugliest is: CRY FOR HELP—Bhaskar Chakrabarti

 

2/11 A cow is ingesting sand. No wonder we call it a cow!

 

4/11  Absolute Poetry.

Drinking warm milk chases away tiredness.

 

5/11 Let there not come a day when one has to discuss literature with four researchers in history from Baranagar.

Pintu told me once that humans become dishonest with age.

Am I going the other way round if this is true!

I am yet to read the book Against Nature. Belal told me that the book was a favourite of Kamal da’s. Where is Belal?

 

9/11 The dream that I saw last night. Ah, so many writers would have leapt up, thrilled…

 

11/11 Why think about one’s illness?

Need hospice care? Offer it yourself and some day you will get it in return.

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12/11 Could it be that instead of writing what is my own, I am scribbling something else? No, this is abnormal thinking. How do I get peace.

 

14.11 Pleasing, but my last meeting with Mr. Bhupen Hazarika. The gentleman has nothing new to offer me.

 

18/11 School again. Filth. Within the small world of mud and puddle.

Fist of fury. With Bablu.

 

20/11 Have written much this year, so I hear.

This game, I shall continue to play.

 

21/11 Sinned yesterday. Felt sick in the morning.

 

22/11 The letter that was supposed to arrive , never came.

Have to live but how to escape so much anxiety?

Ans. 1. By writing poems.

  1. Savouring secret friendships.

 

23/11 I want to live.

 

24/11 I shall do an ultimate experiment with the six lined poem.

 

27/11 Aloklata I want my eyes in the photograph.

I feel ashamed thinking about what was in store for Jibanananda all his life.

 

28/11  Ten at night. Home alone. Reading Eliot’s Jouney of the Magi out loud and free. Feeling good.

“There was a birth, certainly,’

We had evidence and no doubt.’—still incomparable.

Night, 2:30. No trace of sleep even after medicine.

 

30/11 Coffee House. Adda after a very long time. Was rather vexed at the words of a smart journalist. Impossible to get any work done unless one stays away from such company.

 

4/12 It is shameful how I quake at such a tiny abscess.

 

9/12 Stop writing letters.

 

10/12/ I wonder why no one is recording Himanshu Dutta’s songs by Akhilbandhu. The voice that I had heard a couple of years ago is now way better. He is today a remarkably mature singer.

11/12  Lonelier. This time, more so.

 

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12/12 Oranges—after so many years.

 

13/12 Letter writing has become an odd habit. Getting lonelier all the time. Though I am no more sorry about that.

Perhaps I will never receive a letter from anyone again.

 

15/12 The world that lies so real, alive, I wish to live close to her.

 

18/12 Why should I go the coffee house? Why?

Must quietly swallow this life’s strange poison. Then, many more tales.

 

20/12 I am writing poems but they are moving contrary to poetry. Toward prose. Still, is there no poetry in them? There is a mulish obstinacy to traverse thus. Besides, not writing about incapability would be a sin. Glibness it would be.

That the mind is getting turgid is beyond doubt. That I am not a man of poetry but of prose: thinking in this manner gives me some peace.

 

26/12 In our country courts are wordless, still.

 

27/12  At certain moments, I am amazed when I think of how I have spent the beautiful days of my life. Worries and panic—this illness. And writing. Writing that perhaps has no value to others. May be this writing is my own necessity. Still, did I not want to be immortal? Yes, I did. But not anymore. I do not want to learn anything more. May be that is the reason I have finally, slowly, learnt to live.

The holidays are being uselessly spent. Not travelling at all. Where to go?

Bethuadahri?

 

30/12 In all my poetry I think I may have tried to tell the  story of our kitchen.

Perhaps I have traversed from ‘no’ to ‘yes’

31/12  The copious amounts of discussion that goes on about Rabindranath in magazines and journals – if only Jibanananda was blessed with an iota of that.

There is no such adda where one can listen to a bit of music and songs in the evening.

I love your eyes.

 

1983

1982—73 poems. Beyond my wildest imagination.

 

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