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Did you know that Raveena Tandon’s favourite poem is Blake’s “Reeds of Innocence”? Or that Tarun Tahiliani, the fashion designer, loves “the murky night and the image of the bird spotted through ‘verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways’” in Keats’s great ode? This little book of “favourite poems of famous Indians” provides brief, but interesting glimpses into people we see, hear of and read about all the time, but hardly know. It also tells us a few things about India: what it reads or doesn’t read, and what it remembers of this reading and why. And there is something oddly touching about the mix of nervousness and joy with which famous people respond to an unusually private question like, “What is your favourite poem?”
The royalties from this book will go to CRY, and the children’s cause is both moving and a bit limiting. Some people have felt that their favourite poem ought to be appropriate for children. Hence, Amartya Sen, who also provides a crisply readable foreword, chooses two poems. Shakespeare’s sonnet XVI (“you must live, drawn by your own sweet skill”) is his real choice: “it can keep one awake at night”. But he feels that it is quite “unsuitable” for a book dedicated to helping children. So he adds Sassoon’s “Morning Express”.
Sen also writes about a “robust frivolity” that constitutes the world as much as “tragedy and grim resolution” do. This is an important reminder, since many contributors have chosen lugubriously patriotic poems, or slightly mouldy, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury pieces possibly dredged up from their schoolday memories. There is a distinct predilection for the sentimental and the sanctimonious, the Nice and the Good. “Where the mind is without fear” is the winner (Aamir Khan and Prannoy Roy, with nine others), followed by Kipling’s “If”. “Prufrock” and “Daffodils” haven’t done badly either. Sonia Gandhi has, of course, gone for “Ekla cholo re”; Shabana Azmi and Amitabh Bachchan have chosen poems by their fathers, the latter’s choice full of the gravitas he sells so successfully these days.
The president of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Gulzar, Jagjit Singh and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar have chosen their own poems. The editors, Avanti Maluste and Sudeep Doshi, write how they began “at the apex”, asking A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, first, for a poem: he “promptly responded with one of his own poems” — a loftily bad one about “the tri-color fluttering at the Red Fort amidst National Anthem”. But the occasional dreariness is made up for by the likes of Naseeruddin Shah, who remembers having to memorize Browning’s “Pied Piper of Hamelin” as a punishment, but adds that the poem “had something to do with my becoming an actor”. Shah Rukh Khan’s father had given the 14-year-old SRK Abraham Lincoln’s verse-letter to his son’s teacher, which reads now like a schmaltzy commentary on the making of a Bollywood legend: “teach him also that/ for every scoundrel there is a hero”. And Aparna Sen gets goose bumps every time she comes upon Yeats’s rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Shobhaa Dé’s Neruda speaks of “being alive” as something that “always requests a much bigger effort than the simple fact of breathing”. There are 91 famous Indians in this anthology (26 women and 65 men) who have chosen poems by 52 male and six female poets, among whom 35 are Western and 23 Indian.
Good poems are like interesting human beings. There is something to notice, in spite of familiarity, every time one encounters them. Prahlad Kakkar chose Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”. The opening lines are deceptively familiar: “Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future”. But had you noticed the “perhaps” in line 2 before?
