The Nehru Centre Library launched its series of poetry evenings yesterday. mid-day catches up with award-winning poet and writer Puranjay Khanna, the first poet to inaugurate the series
The first edition of the Nehru Centre Library’s poetry evenings featured poet Paranjay Khanna’s work. Pic/Resham Shah
The love of poetry is sometimes viewed as a hobby for the pretentious. But for poets, it’s an expression of life, as the recital held this Saturday at the Nehru Centre Library demonstrated. Like most libraries around the city, the Nehru Centre Library, located in Worli, regularly hosts book discussions, seminars, and launches, but it was centered around fiction and non-fiction prose. In March this year, the library started hosting group poetry sessions with 10 poets, based on the theme of the month, and now, individual poetry evenings held bi-monthly.
“We thought of inviting young poets who have published poetry, and have one eminent poet to be in conversation and moderate the session,” Head Librarian Arati Desai says. “We have a great database of young authors and personalities who’ve published prose and poetry.”
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Poet and writer Puranjay Khanna inaugurated the first set of individual poetry evenings, with advertising professional Urna Bose, herself a poet and a writer. The 31-year-old recipient of the 2022 Dadasaheb Phalke Icon Awards is “extremely grateful”, he tells us, to be presenting his work at the first poetry recital. Second Star: Poetry of the Conscious State, the book for which he won the award, is a record of his transitory states of life, right from age 12 to 31. The poems act like a chronicle of the emotional states he was in at various times in his life, progressing from the fears and hopelessness of a teenager, onto the sense of hope and stability that comes with adulthood.
“This book is meant to take you into your imagination, the place where you become introspective and wonder who you are as a person,” he explains. “The name comes from the film, Peter Pan, when Peter is flying to Neverland… he tells Wendy, ‘Second star to the right, and straight on until morning.’”
The poet, who wears a bright red tilak, is eager and enthusiastic about life, and how it influences his writing. For him, his own writing acts like a time-travel portal, when he revisits the pages and sees the traces of his former self. “The poems are my own vulnerability out on display. On my 31st birthday, I published my poems, because they are a celebration of life, and what better occasion that denotes that?” he says. “Every single part of this book, is about life…it’s almost life itself.”
“Through the poetry recital, I want to send out a message: No matter who you are, or where you come from, or what your situation is, it always gets better,” he concludes. “Your purpose will ultimately show itself.”
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