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Journalism of Courage
Bureaucrat-author Mukul Kumar’s Catharsis masquerades as a poetry collection that sneaks in 50-odd stories in its 50-odd poems.
He is a storyteller, a fiction writer, as is apparent from his earlier works As Boys Become Men and Seduction by Truth, as well as the narrative thread that lingers along all the poems in this collection.
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Kumar, an Indian Railway Traffic Service officer based in Delhi, draws inspiration from his own personal life. Many poems are autobiographical, such as A Bureaucrat Searches For The Poet and I Have Created, while a poem like Confessions of an Artist is inspired from the writing process itself.
Kumar also delves into politics, with 26/11, Kashmir and Kargil, focusing on the gravitas of emotion surrounding the politics, rather than the right or wrong of it. His verse is generally free, with a dip into rhyme every now and then. There is liberal use of imagery, sometimes tired, sometimes bold.
Kumar, however, is great with character-building. The first poem in the collection, Mr. Das, compresses an office-man’s dull, drab and distastefully monotonous day into two pages worth of delicious description that ultimately screams one thing: his life sucks. The poem stunningly examines how the middle/upper-class of urban India can be victimised by their own mental hells to bother with those less fortunate.
One such instance: Transfixed, Mr. Das will not be fazed by/The accidental fall of a man who/Will be no more or the lacerations of/A female by the lascivious eyes and/Twitching hands; these unwelcome/Tremors might spill over to/Disturb the sequence and harmony of/A replicated existence.
But therein lies a shortcoming. Its poetry yearns to be a story. Rhythm is mostly absent from the collection, with anastrophe (subject-verb-object inversion) often awkwardly employed to force a rhyme. Kumar’s free verse sometimes feels like sentences disjointedly broken into stanzas, which might have worked better as prose. While some descriptions are too clichéd, sometimes the subject matter is melodramatic.
Kumar’s poems work best when concise. In A Dahlia of Forty-Five and When I Was My Mother’s Son, his quick delivery of a series of concrete images are far more effective than the rest of the collection because they don’t fall prey to repeated deployment of tired metaphors. His talent for character- and world-building, essential for fiction, glimmers in these poems but is never allowed to shine given the form he has chosen.
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