Verse by Verse

For Lalit Kumar,poetry is all-encompassing. He believes it has the power to reach out beyond boundaries. Like his Kavita Kosh,which Kumar describes as a little project with a big vision and tiny hope and one that changed his life. The project began in July 2006 with a vision of making a huge collection of Hindi poetry on the internet. Love for the language,passion for poetry,the fact that there is a significant amount of poetry on the internet but that it’s all scattered and to “bring people together to focus their energy on one single target” were the reasons why Kumar,a life-sciences,information technology and bioinformatics expert started Kavita Kosh. Launched first in Hindi and Urdu,the site uses the Devanagari Unicode fonts and hundreds of individuals volunteer towards its development. “I began by collecting copyright-free Hindi poetry,and zeroed in on 500 poems,” recalls Kumar and further adds how mentally exhausting the process was,as he was all alone and not many were taking interest in the project.

After about a year,Kavita Kosh began to get noticed,with more than 3,000 poems,contributors,an editorial board and an administrative plan in place. “I couldn’t have done it alone,Kavita Kosh is a result of community effort and love for literature and Hindi,” he admits. A non-profit project,Kumar proudly states it has come this far without using any money and now they have collected as many as 53,000 poems,with as many as 5,000 regular contributors. There is a flood of applications,and the final decision of what goes on Kavita Kosh is taken by the editorial team,with Kumar handling the technical,managerial and policymaking aspects.

Apart from Hindi and Urdu,Kavita Kosh also has poetry in all major Indian languages,with Kumar set to build a global resource,by including poetry in foreign languages as well. History of Hindi poetry,folklore,religious folk compositions,from the early poets to the contemporary ones; Kumar says anything that’s remotely poetic can be found here. “From Ramcharitmanas to works of Geet Chaturvedi,we have a treasure trove for poetry lovers,” says Kumar. He regularly writes both in Hindi and English and is now seeking funds from the public for

Lalitya International Centre for Arts and Culture he intends to set up in Mumbai.