NEWSMAKERS
Emotion and law
MITA KAPUR
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Union Minister Kapil Sibal talks of how his recent book of poems is not unconnected with his daily life.
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Photo: G.R.N. Somashekar
To be tech-savvy is one thing but to create poetry on sms is quite another. To have it coming from a cabinet minister, grappling with science and technology, is more than ‘quite another’. I Witness: Partial Observations moves from socio-political, science and tech to love. For a person with a background in law, one expects Kapil Sibal to write prose, but he lucidly spells out that there is a “deep connection between law and emotion. There are two categories of lawyers: one who look at law in cold script and those who look at the emotional philosophy underlying the law. Whether it’s against dowry, or on criminal justice, or banking regulations or anti-corruption, social injustice has been done...the emotion can’t be denied”.
He is perennially faithful to the Classics. “I love Shakespeare. I prefer rhyme to blank verse, and T.S. Eliot’s ‘I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled’ makes as much sense to me as ‘Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherised upon a table’. I’ve always felt one reason why poets are not popular is because there is an internal churning within their minds that’s exceptionally personalised and that’s not very easy to relate to. Wordsworth and Keats are more popular because of the universality in their poetry. I love E.E. Cummings as a poet.”
Kind satire
His poems traverse the socio-economic, political, judicial scenario within the country with a fair measure of ironic piquancy. “The length and breadth of the poetic landscape wasn’t planned; it just fell into place,” he said. “It is a kind satire on contemporary India. I have been kind because I think, as a country, we are not even in an adolescent stage; we ourselves have to find the way. It would be unfair to be unkind specially for a nascent democracy.”
Some of the poems that speak of inequality, injustice are Sibal’s expression for “seeking a sustainable polity which moves towards equity — that is at the heart of my poetry, like in ‘The Trust Vote’, I say ‘the government won, democracy was the loser’.”
Facing frustrations and the ensuing struggle is a “part of life. I don’t deal with my frustrations — period. There is always an element of hope for me, as there is in all my poems. In some of the poems, I say, people will have their own way.
The poem on Atal Bihari Vajpayee was one “ I had recited in the Rajya Sabha. It is a part of the published record of the Rajya Sabha. It’s not a criticism of Atal ji, it is an attempt to bring out the conflict within Atal ji.”
Clarity
The simplicity of his language reflects his general approach, “it’s not so much simplicity, as clarity,” he smiles. The talk moved to education, thinking out of the box, knowledge management… “there is a huge conflict going on; a new generation is asserting itself; another India is trying to brace itself and trying very hard to understand the new India. This conflict is going to be resolved in the favour of the new India,” he finished emphatically.
“There is a huge chasm between the way India is perceived by the world and the way we portray ourselves, which is the cause of my frustration. The world has great expectations from India, it has started believing in India. We have not been able to believe in ourselves.”
Dealing with the disparities within India may not be easy and Sibal feels “Yes, there are disparities but remember 10 years back we didn’t have a 400 million strong middle class. There is a section of people who are moving ahead and there is a vast number of people who are where they are or moving so slowly that it’s imperceptible. We need to quicken that pace to reduce that disparity.”
Worries and concerns about the moral fabric of the country peep from lines that talk of freedom being a fallacy. “Freedom for whom? True freedom comes at the time of death. From the moment you are born, it is essentially an unfree world because you are a product of the environment in which you grow up in. ”
The romantic
His wife affirms that there is a romantic in Sibal: “whenever we fought, he’d write a poem for me.” He laughs, “but there is a romantic in everybody.”
Dealing with dualities, he writes of “two different lives, the one without is open, the one within deprived....my world is out of sync with the one around me.” The poems on science and technology are “about nano stores, nano satellites, catching some nano truths. This is the future of India, the faster we grasp it, the better.”
On letting go: “By nature I don’t hold on to things... I have been looking for a universality in my poems which will appeal to today’s generation...”
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