Poetry corner

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Beware of poets. They are always on the hunt for an audience.

If you like being their captive, then there’s a place in Delhi where many poets can recite their poems to you. Better still, you’ll get chai and samosas for free.

Once a month (every second Saturday), Ghalib Academy in Hazrat Nizamuddin Basti hosts something called shairi nashasist—Urdu for ‘poetry-sitting.’ The session lasts from 4pm and goes on… til all the poets in the big hall finish reciting their compositions. The poems are rendered in spoken Hindi/Urdu of the Dilli lingo. But the banner on the stage is always headlined in English, with big red letters boldly proclaiming that the evening is the “Monthly Literary Meet.”

The auditorium crowd for the poetry-sitting mostly consists of poets itching for their turn to claim the stage. These are poets published and not published, good as well as bad. Everyone’s welcome. One attendee in the poetry-sitting held last weekend was a senior police officer from Jammu & Kashmir. Others came from localities across Delhi, and from neighbouring towns, including Hapur. One poet arrived from distant Agra.

The most common muse of the poetry-sitting participants happens to be… well, ishq/pyar/mohabbat/l’amour/love. The poets sit stiffly on their chairs, waiting to be summoned on the podium. On that elevated height, the verse writer finally finds the dream audience to whom she reads aloud her new lines, either from memory, or from the mobile phone. A spirit of mutual sympathy lingers. Every speaker is applauded with gushing cries of wah wah, bahut khoob, bahut ache, ati sunder, too good, and kya kehne.

Some of the poetry-sitting regulars include Hashmat Bhardwaj from Dwarka, Parveen Vyas from Gulmohaur Park, Goldie Geetkar from Lakshmi Nagar, and Seema Kaushik from Faridabad. Almost all have parallel professions—Hashmat is a lawyer, Parveen runs an NGO, Seema is an engineer, but Goldie is a full-time poet.

Explaining why these busy souls chose to sacrifice their precious hours for the poetry-sitting, Aqil Ahmad, Ghalib Academy’s longtime secretary, says: “Poetry is a nasha (addiction), it is a pyas (thirst), and as long as the poet doesn’t share the poems with others, the poet feels restless.” The soft-spoken gent started the monthly session 25 years ago to “gather together citizens from all walks of life for literature’s sake.”

The academy additionally holds a monthly nasri nashasist, which means prose-sitting, in which citizens share their short stories and essays. The prose people will meet this Saturday. Chai and samosas will be served at the seat.