Homesickness, especially on foreign soil, can resuscitate one’s attachment with the mother tongue. It happened with Avik Chanda, now a management consultant based in Hyderabad, when work dragged him around the world a few years back.
On Wednesday evening at Crossword, a collection of his poems, Jakhon Bideshe, was unveiled by film-maker Sandip Ray, while Barun Chanda, Avik’s father and Satyajit Ray’s lead man in Seemabaddha, looked on.
“A kind of homesickness grips you when you are abroad for some time at a stretch and then you meet some Bengalis and bond with them. I would look up the Net for Durga puja coverage and there would be a sense of nostalgia in me. Jakhon Bideshe arose from that,” says the economics graduate from Presidency College who did his Masters from Delhi School of Economics.
Avik has been writing for the past four-five years and has also been published in English “on and off in the US and the UK”. It was at the instance of a few Bengali friends settled abroad that he decided to try his hand at writing poetry in Bengali.
Words came spontaneously, says the 34-year-old, when he sat down to pen his thoughts. “I was in the habit of reading Bengali literature, at times maybe Sharadiya Desh, so it wasn’t a problem. But I tried not to get influenced by the writings of other poets.”
Crisp and lucid language creating powerful imageries spouts freely from Avik’s pen. “I started thinking of a theme and came upon this idea of stitching together the poems I had written abroad. I had read Bengali poets who wrote about their experiences when they were in foreign countries. Buddhadeb Basu had written when he was in the US and so did Nirendranath Chakraborty when he was in Europe,” explains Avik.
Most places his work has taken him to — Cologne, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels, Milan, Rome, London — roam the pages of Avik’s poetry.
Jakhon Bideshe is published by Pratibhash. On Wednesday evening, Barun Chanda, Shankarlal Bhattacharya and Sujoy Prosad Chatterjee read out some of Avik’s poems.
Now, the young poet has set his sights on a novel in English.
