Many years ago, Jug Suraiya, a famous journalist recorded an experience of watching IIPostino in one of the Speaking Tree columns of The Times of India. He says:
In the film Il Postino, the village postman gives the girl he loves a poem he passes off as his own though it has been written by Pablo Neruda, living in exile in the small Italian community. When Neruda berates the postman, the young man replies, ‘Just because you wrote the poem, that doesnt mean it belongs to you. Poetry belongs to those who need it.’
But who needs it these days? In a world where cut-throat competitions, commodification of human relationships, decline of traditions and past legacy, disrespect of the other, an all-pervading pseudo-ism, and the contagion of corruption seeping into all walks of life-in such a world, man is a lost being, perhaps the lost child of Mulk Raj Anands story who, even after the story ends, remains a lost entity perhaps till ad infinitum. Poetry and literature are meant for man and especially for a lost man. It was Matthew Arnold more than a century ago who had wished poetry to replace religion. But as the world progressed, nether religion nor poetry nor literature for that matter) did come to the forefront: all fell a prey to science and technology. Science is miraculous and its marvels have certainly eased out human life, have made it more comfortable than ever before. A tiny push button may catapult a human being into a Garden of Eden. An atom may eat up a city, nay a country, as testified by recent history. It has unfolded many mysteries, decoded numerous riddles and reached out to what lies beyond-beyond-beyond.... Much has been reasoned out and yet a vaster world still remains un-comprehendible, unimaginable as well. Science seems to begin where religion ends and end where literature begins. Machines and technology do rob man of his man-ness, his human and humane nature and somewhere his noble soul. "We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon..."-was it not Wordsworth who had wept down thegrowing materialism at the dawn of the Nineteenth Century? We have developed but has man really grown? The crisis is that lost as we are, there seems to be no crisis at all.
At the outset of the present century, when the world is torn between a fast dying was and a mewing is, and man is being shorn of man-ness, when what once used to be considered evil ways, are accepted as signs of greatness, when we fight not like weasels in a hole, but like curs on streets for a loaf of some rotten leftover, when insensitivity is the order of the day and sort of Yugadharma, and merit is butchered at the altar of and cut-throat competition, when we are the Beckettian lost ones moving up and down a glass cylinder - when-yada, yada hi dharmasayagalanirbhavtibhartah... then the ray of hope in the quanta of literature remains an anchoring force and sole-sustaining and soul-saving device. And the time is more conducive and befitting to have his wish come true. The growth of science and technology at the cost of humanities or literature in general and poetry in particular has been responsible for the corrupt society we have come to belong to. The abdomen and that which hangs below the abdomen have risen to the head of man, devouring, during the course, both heart and soul - reducing man to a biological unit and the whole generation a herd of off-springs. In the midst of this agony and angst, it needs a poet not only to feel but to voice the pain and the pangs thereof. Only he it is who can bring us the holy giddings and point at the rising star and set out on a journey of the Magi.
Many years ago, I had written a small poem, "The Century just gone by...." lamenting the gradual obliteration of the emotional cushions and literature thereof. I wrote:
Ceaselessly breaking stones 
the bright day turned Dhyani-Buddha 
at evening. 
Shades of eventide the caves of Ajanta.
And poetry- the waxing moon,
a thin luminescent arc, music a galaxy.
But not very long ago 
Night herself to days work bent. 
And the broken stones emitted 
heatproducing steel - dusky, hard and cold. 
Steel is not a concave of a sacrificial fire 
nor a convex of a stupas warmth; 
since Rodin, Dhyani Buddha a twisted dry wood. 
And the horns of a furious bull scratched off 
the murals of Ajanta! 
Poetry changed to sodium-lamp and 
music to a deafening discord.
The Lancashire mills belched out
smoke fires, reddening the
Red square: the inverted Swastika,
thence conceiving fire, aborted - catastrophic accident.
When births are mere accidents
the begotten are a Dhrithrashtra- not seeing the things seen.
All from Miller to Muktibodh** assented to
impotence and named it destiny.
The week screamed, all from Spengler to Sartre.
The long-suffering endured the 
sun-fires upon the market-place.
None could avert the doom!
The powers that be, hostages merely. 
And the result: the private cry of a pent-up cabin 
became an "ism not a drum-beat 
spreading out in ever-widening waves. 
And the long suffering endures, endures still!
As a kindergartener of literature, Ive always believed that literature has a latent potential to transform a man into a better human being. While the definition of a better human being"may differ from individual to individual, certain standard parameters may well be chalked out. As literature deals in emotions and human relationships, it seems to provide an understanding of homogeneity and kinship and at the same time develop tolerance and clemency among the community of its readers and the society at large. Ultimately, the cementing of human ties and a close bonding of community may be achieved which finally may lead to the realisation of the Vedic ideal of vasudhaivkutumbkam-the whole world is a family.

Anuraag Sharma