Bhaskar Parichha
First: the credentials. Mihir Chitre is into poetry, storytelling and also advertisement. With a few early recognition of his work, Chitre’s poems have been published in literary magazines across countries – Canada and the US mostly. If copywriting and poetry writing have a symbiotic relationship, Chitre should be finding himself in the comfort zone. And he actually is.
‘School of Age’ has more than six dozen poems and that itself makes the book a robust one. The themes are varied and his approach to poetry is forceful. Take the first few lines of the maiden poem in the collection ‘Happiness’: ‘you wake up one morning/in a room of nothing/but a bed, a pack of cards/a mirror and a bird/waiting across the window/you’re happy with what you have/ but not without expecting/the room to behave itself.’
Or this one on the system of rules: What’s the point where law parts ways with justice? your evening ritual in Amsterdam can get you a life sentence in Singapore/A Saturday well-spent in London/is felony in Saudi Arabia’ (Law).
Scores of the poems in the collection have such radiant life-sketches that they impel the reader to reflect and reveal: ‘On the streets of Santacruz, I try and think of the pain of the passers-by/Of the schoolboy, who spilled half the sugarcane juice/of the only glass his mother could buy him/or that of another mother/whose son’s stopped searching for her in the forest of age'(Nirvana in Santacruz).
In the preface, Chitre writes about what it takes to be young at heart. He says, ‘if the end of youth is the end of innocence, the end of innocence is the end of faith.’ If Chitre’s poems look like rapid-fire rounds, he is not the one who turns out to be dogmatic. ‘The remains of my ideological, moral and physical collision with the world make for the margins of this book. In my poetry, I stand naked and look myself in the mirror of words.’And what is poetry? Chitre has the answer: ‘someone said, all poetry is an excuse to get laid/Imagine always being a couplet away from the next f***'(If Only).
Chitre time and again plays with the words in gay abandon. He doesn’t mince words and uses no restraint. Some poems in the book are wistful, some are truth-seeking and some are with both feet on the ground. In ‘Melt’, for instance, he muses: ‘The entropy of a system/Increases with time, says the second Law of thermodynamics /the older you grow, the more disorder within you.’
Chitre’s use of metaphors is quick-witted, sharp and many of the poems in the collection have a backdrop of the poet’s own environs. Taken as a whole, the outlook of this anthology is one of youthful indulgence. Such an extravaganza of pubescent poetry!
School of Age
Mihir Chitre
Dhauli Books
Gobindeswar Road, Old Town
Bhubaneswar