Priti Aisola on "Moving On"

A child-like wonder at, and gratitude for, the little beauties of nature is very evident in Anand’s poems. In his poems there is deep concern for the physical environment – how its landscapes are being transformed and water bodies are being devoured to make place for concrete structures and tarred roads. For example, the poem “Vizag’s Hills” describes how hills once teeming with life have been deforested and cut into, to provide ‘dead wood’ and ‘dead stone’ for houses. Similarly, in the poem "Banyan Square" he speaks of the ‘massive’ Banyan tree, whose world has been uprooted to make place for progress’ concrete structures and pukka shops. True the Banyan survives in memory ‘for the square’s known after it still.’ This memory will have to suffice.

What comes through acutely is a strong awareness of a past that cannot be reclaimed. It could be communal or personal past, or it may refer to the natural environment that has seen some dramatic changes. In "Three Soap Trees", he quietly mourns the fact that no ‘epitaphs’ are written on the death of trees, fields, open spaces, on the disappearance of childhood’s and youth’s familiar spaces.

Anand’s poetry is replete with images to do with journeys, water and fire. There is plenty of colour – black and white and deep and bright colours and pastels. And each is rich with multi-layered meanings. So many of his reflections, his lyric poetic moments, his philosophic musings center around water in its different forms – puddles, ponds, pools, streams, lakes, rivulet, rivers, rainfall, the monsoon…. In "Monsoons, 2004", he chronicles heartbreak against the backdrop of the monsoon and explores its changed meaning in his life.

Each image that he evokes has the authenticity of experience and the lucidity of something seen by the inner eye.

His passion for cycling and motorcycling comes through in his poems. Cycling becomes a metaphor for negotiating ‘the traffic of his (my) thoughts’, for escaping sleepless thoughts, for calming a certain restiveness that moves ‘from unslept night to sleepless day’. There is pain as on ‘reality’s’ road ‘dreams die (dying) in sight of open eyes’, and there is the courage to go on in spite of that.

A delving into the process of writing, into the well-springs of creativity, and anguish over ‘insipid writing’ also finds a significant place in his work. Silence has a disquieting connotation in his work.

Underlying his poetry is ‘the enigmatic search’ for some elusive resting-place as he journeys through different spaces – those within the self and those without. Spaces in ruins and spaces that have been swallowed by the irreversible march of urbanization preoccupy him.

-- Priti Aisola, author of See Paris for Me

Thanks a lot for your very detailed and sensitive notes, Priti, it's been an immense privilege to know and interact with you!