New Delhi: Veteran lyricist-poet Gulzar celebrates the metaphor of exile in many ways in a new collection of poems which he has dedicated to the planet Pluto. In “Pluto”, Gulzar addresses his pet themes – relationships, his relationship with god, nature, time, the art of poetry – with characteristic wit and brevity, and the uncommon ability to find meaning in the mundane.
The poems have been translated into English by Nirupama Dutt and the book, published by HarperCollins India, include, for the first time in a volume of his poetry in English, a selection of the poet’s own sketches.
“Pluto lost its status as a planet recently. Scientists said: ‘Away with you. We will not include you in our family of nine planets… you are not one!’ I had lost my place long ago when my family said, ‘How come a mirasi in a family of businessmen?’ Silence echoed that you are not one of us,” says Gulzar.
“My heart is saddened at Pluto’s sorrow on being rejected thus. It is so far away… so tiny… so all my ‘pint-sized’ poems I gift to it. Some moments are fleeting, ephemeral. We often fail to grasp them. I like to hoard them,” he says. According to Gulzar, many of the 111 poems in this collection are unconventional. “But then that is not such a bad thing, is it,” he asks.
Dutt says Gulzar is an artiste of the little things that matter: the short fleeting moments that he captures so originally and the small wonders that still excite him. “This comes through most spontaneously in the short poems that the poet dedicated to Pluto, the planet that was banished from the family of its planets! It is the metaphor of exile that he celebrates in many ways in this collection which looks at the grim and the joyous, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the stagnant and the fluid, the amusing and the annoying with the poetic flourish so typical of him,” she says.
