Dr. Lalit Mohan Sharma’s book ‘Inclusive Voids’ containing nearly a hundred poems, dealing with the most fundamental emotion, love, and converse with us in intimate tones

Dr. Lalit Mohan Sharma is a gifted bilingual poet. ‘Inclusive Voids’ turns out to be a milestone in his quest for the self and the non-self. Containing nearly a hundred poems, it opens up before us the chest of beauty that lies concealed behind a face which smiles and suffers silences also at times. The sheer range of emotions expressed in this book is spell binding, and the chaste expression of feelings like love and pain, and anxiety over the present scenario – everything points towards only one thing: this book is a fine specimen of craftsmanship and a welcome addition to the world of literature.

It is not possible to map a poet’s mind and his imaginative breadth from a reading of his poems, because after all, a poem is only a little particle of his imaginative life. Still, the taste of a small rice can tell of the quality of the steaming dish.  The poems have touched me for their lucidity, flow, and most of all, the honesty of feeling and clarity of expression. Some of the poems deal with the most fundamental emotion, love, and converse with us in intimate tones, making us feel the highs and lows one feels when love impacts human senses.

To surmise that nothing touches you

May betray a pride in contentment

Yet how can you overlook how others

Suffer get touched in mind or in body?

[Nothing touches]

 And

An eager ambition in mind plays

To imagine so much about a woman?

[Reminiscing a Face]

In ‘Liaison No More’, the poet talks of a bargain between two persons, but between two lovers:

It is as a condition of being together

Two minds hold the key to unlock hearts.

The poet cannot be but a commentator on contemporary happenings. He cannot live in a vacuum. Dr. Sharma is a conscientious citizen who knows that nation and a citizen cannot be held in contradiction. Rather he believes that in order to make the nation great, a citizen too has to be great in equal measure.  It embodies a great political and economic vision which lays its store by the fact that we need enlightened citizenship for which the state too must be vigilant to inculcate, rather than curb and crush individual freedom of thought:

Individual rulers are never the nation

Each citizen is worth his weight

It is citizens that turn a nation great.

[The Country First]

The poet is aware and worried too that the rulers know how to turn and twist the narrative, and he calls it living by deception, in his opening poem ‘Cult of the Nazi’ which, like Shakespeare’s opening scene, sets the tone for the entire work:

If the homes are turned into rubble

You can’t blame the bulldozers but

You can leak stories to the media in order

To orchestrate narratives of noble intent.

In ‘Buckled Mind’ he has a dig over minds which are too inclined towards spirituality at the cost of physical living, because such tendencies distort reality, and if one can blend the two realms, he can experience a feeling of déjà vu. ‘The divine is sudden and spontaneous, /not enforced through meditation tunnels’ observes the poet.

‘What is the Hurry’ presents a general feeling in a wonderful way.  On the first page of a thriller, it is written, “don’t turn over the last page, you will lose the joy of the thrill”.  The poet also wants to see the last section of his life, but then, stops short of it realizing that knowing it beforehand could take away the joy of living this life in ignorant bliss.

Dr. Sharma turns to theorizing also, and makes a fine distinction between prose and poetry. In my opinion, prose is cut and dried and has said what one wanted to say, whereas poetry does not subscribe to such finality. It is open ended. Dr. Sharma in his own style remarks:

Prose treats the immediate to record

Facts straight like a mirror,

Poetry interprets the very immediate

In terms of its lasting imprint…

[Two Voices]

He goes on to add that prose deals with “mundane reality, its brutality” while poetry “takes exclusively on ethereal/or the everlasting in a lofty subtlety”. He treats words like “naked wires” and language as a transformer “to whom we always turn/When feelings insist on a release.” [‘The Artist].

His most cryptic views are found when he is defining myth in his poem ‘Entrapment’. He thinks that words cannot be strung into a sentence without vowels. In the same way, the historical march of the civilization can be understood only when these events are woven into a story with the vowels of the myth:

Words survive as if without vowels,

To string them all into a full sentence?

Why myths fly into the sky as a emotion?

Breeds like a malignant cyst?

‘Cool Illusions’ is one of the most impressive poems, in which he talks of relationships which are built frame by frame… but words often create illusions, and

An allusion cannot survive all the time.

The actual thrust of real life does usurp

The pleasant turns of active imagination

Even living together, same the roof, does

Prosper on illusions of love and kinship…

Dr. Sharma’s penchant for political commentating helps him bring history from its slumber to an ethereal region of the mind.

History has to be won over to

Re-define the geography of the mind and

Redraw colonial maps of subjugation.

Subversion of iconic legacy is the cost

Paid for selective celebration of the past.

[Selective Celebrations]

In the poem ‘Inclusive Voids’, which concludes this long journey, the poet wonders

Are we now too self-centered to worry

On what doesn’t touch us directly? Can

We afford to be so independent in mind

That emotionally we turn so exclusive?

Little voids surround us, or we now

Inhabit in voids all inclusive to ourselves?

In fact, there is not end to the depths to which a poetic composition take you, particularly if it comes from the pen of a well-read scholar, like Dr. Lalit Mohan Sharma. I found this book particularly rewarding because it has a lot to offer by way of a commentary on almost every aspect of life, that too in a language which is so full of ‘rasa’ – a soulful language, which he calls a transformer to bring emotions to life.

I welcome this work of immortal verses and wish great success with his pen to our dear friend, poet, philosopher and partner in various literary ventures, Dr. Lalit.

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Published under International Cooperation with "Sindh Courier"