Its always nice to talk to a Poet who goes by the Nomenclature of Dr Bhupati Kumar Das and he has a penned a book of poems which is aptly titled " God in Colours" which is quite relevant at all times.
Below is a conversation with him where i had a few questions and he patiently answered it!!! and if you want to know more you could always click on the hyperlink below
https://www.facebook.com/godincolours/?fref=ts&__mref=message_bubble
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1. “God in Colours” is a very profound name. How did you come up with a name like this?
In this book ‘God in Colours’, I wanted to explore the various facets of God – the various nuances,
the oft- changing flavours, the evolving images and the conflicting interpretations. The Vedanta
wisdom which says, ‘You are the cloud, You are the rain, You are the healer, You are the pain’, has
influenced and overwhelmed me regarding the concept of God quite early in my life. I feel one must
have faith on a power superior to human spirit and endeavour so as to make the process of
journeying through life work. The image of my God takes root in this context. God is one and above
all. Only the interpretations vary. God to me is benign, benevolent and beneficent who, in the
ultimate sense, symbolizes the powers of love, peace, happiness and bliss. I like to visualise God as a
good human being. He is supreme and yet has feelings like love, hope, anger, alienation, sympathy
etc. More importantly, my God also fails sometimes. This image of God helps me keep faith in
humanity. So I thought how do I name the book of poems which reflects all these varied emotions. I
toyed with the idea of naming the book, ‘glimpses of god’, but ultimately, on deeper thought, settled
on the name,‘ god in colours’.
2. What do your poems deal with?
From my childhood, I was comfortable in creating pictures of moods and sensations in simple English
words. My random thoughts and feelings have often found expression in the form of poetry as I feel
the overwhelming urge to capture them in words. More than two decades ago when I wrote my
early poems, the perennial theme in my work were love and life. Love is a universal feeling which
gives a person strength to face ups and downs in life. Life is interesting and exciting because of the
rewarding relationships formed during the journey of life – no matter whether it relates to a
relationship of ‘a mother and a child’ or ‘a girl and a boy’ or ‘a wife and a husband’. I have examined
and dealt with various forms of love in my poetry – love for the country, love for the parent, love for
the son, love for the beloved, love for God, love all encompassing. Then as I matured over time, my
poems started capturing a whole range of emotions in life – hope, frustration, anger, love,
spirituality - as well as various facets, manifestations and ambiguities of mystical nature. My poems,
therefore, depict various visuals of human life and living and carries soft notes of love- waves.
However, I am little uneasy with close rhymes in tight structure. So my poems are free flowing, open
and very often without rhymes though a central thread of rhythm runs through them always.
3. One notices a lot of pathos and angst in your poems? What is the reason for it?
As I live life deeply, emotions and feelings have a permanent role in my psyche. The rat- race to
achieve the best in the school and colleges that I went through, considered to be amongst the best
and subsequent high pressure life in the upper echelons of corporate world only heightened these
feelings of restlessness and frustrations and left an indelible mark. My humble creative urges arising
out of these experiences found expression in the form of poetry which refreshed my soul in times of
despair and from which I derive great peace of mind. For me, poetry works both as an artistic outlet
and a therapeutic medium.
For me, life is a voyage to be experienced in totality. Life has so many different facets, so many
different ways of driving home a message. To live a healthy and enriching life, one has to be capable
of tasting life in full – through ups and downs in all its contours of hard emotions and stark realities. I
am quite philosophical about life and death. To me the concept of death resides in the very basis of
living. Therefore, one must have faith on a power superior to human spirit and endeavour so as to
make living meaningful.
In reality, I am an eternal optimist though at times the optimism is tinged with melancholy,
disappointment and despair. I strongly believe that one should never give up hope in life. In fact, one
of my earliest poems is on ‘hope’. It goes like this – i wait for / the tomorrow / that would bring /
hope and laughter / to me / when that tomorrow / turns today / the illusion called hope / runs away
/ i would run after it / stumbling but not falling / someday i would run faster / and catch it / the
hope.
For me, life has a fair share of disappointments, frustrations, agony and sadness. So, unless a person
is inspired by something beyond the boundaries of everyday -living, life may degenerate into a
mechanical walk-across from birth to death. I believe, living life is much more than that as it
normally celebrates the triumph of human intellect and spirit.
So my poems reflect the emotions experienced through this entire process of living life. Writing
poetry has been a rewarding experience for me. For, it has provided me a medium for sharing my
feelings, inner thoughts and general life perspectives.
4. One notices that you have written a poem on the September 11 Bombing. One line lingers
“tragedy and sorrow have no nationality and no colour”. Tell us about it.
I wrote the poem “September 11, 2001” on the very night the twin- tower terror attack took place.
The poem was published on the cover page of English Daily, “Sentinel” on September 13, 2001. My
wife was travelling in USA that time. When I saw the pictures of deaths and destruction on the twin
towers of New York in the TV that evening, I was worried, angry and sad. While waiting for the news
of the well-being of my wife, I did not realize how the night had passed and in those agonizing
moments, I penned the poem.So I know how much people suffer on such instances of mindless
terror. Pain is experienced in the body and sufferings in the heart. And body and heart are same for
everybody irrespective of caste, creed and colour. Tragedy and sorrow have no nationality and no
colour as tear tastes the same and sweats of fear smell the same of all the people in the world.
5. Your poems reflect what society is going through!
I believe literature including poetry can mould the society. ‘Literature is a mirror of Society’. A poet’s
or a writer’s dreams, ideals, hopes and aspirations, thoughts and feelings, experiences of life – all
these put together, when articulated, make literature. And hence it mirrors what is happening in the
society or in the civilization. As someone said, ‘no man is an island’. The air he breathes, the sound
he hears, the ambience, the voices, the dreams he has – all are linked to society and finally all these
produce literature either in prose or in poetry form. So the input or the raw material is society and
the output is literature. In that context, my poetry also becomes a faithful mirror of life which
reflects the concerns and thinking of contemporary social milieu. I only hope my poetry would bring
back the new generations to written work of poetry and prose who, as someone said, are paralysed
for words without the comfort of a keyboard, to appreciate the beauty of love, life and nature.
