In lieu of an introduction

Already as a toddler Sugata has been searching for meaning specifically in a multilingual context. Not that he expected to find any definitive answer: the ineluctibility of meaning as such fascinated him. In a sense, he could describe the quest he was on as necessarily unending. From the very first coming of humankind, indeed, human beings have been pining for meaning, and the fact that this urge continues even now, after so many centuries of frantic human endeavor, is itself evidence of how evasive this meaning must be.

The paradox of such a meaning, Sugata perceived, is that it must remain ultimately undiscoverable. He cherished a sort of uncanny prescience that surely it behoves the aged, in particular, to exist in the presence of a luminous darkness, for the same is facing the ultimate in life: the necessity of dying, of death, of the inevitable cessation of that form of being and becoming to which one became accustomed during lifetime, now acquires a new insistence: what do we mean by living, by death? A nagging curiosity emerges, and even may take a sinister turn, so that an elemental angst invades the mind, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Thus the fear of some kind of retribution creeps in and darkens the spirit, as in the case of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner in the gestalt of life-in-death.

Within the squeezing span of meagre eighteen years Sugata’s psyche gathered the requisite momentum towards such maturity, nay profoundness, in a galloping speed. Hence instead of having sought make-believe religious rites he improvised verbal capsules, exquisite in their aesthetic ex- pression, such as the rhetorical questions as follows:
1. Don’t you want to
Hold the idiot
To your arms
When it’s raining?
2. I wake up. I hear someone crying. Is it my mother?

Immediately we record a bardic spell of these mantras.

Articulating message is one thing, and intoning suggestibility is another. The axis of the latter drive is a matter of pure aesthetic reception. From the very beginning Sugata was keen on chancing upon his core-receptors having gone through his earlier publications an orphean lute (2009) and This is where I stand (2009) – the latter reminding us of the great reformer Martin Luther’s maxim – we are at the know that our poet underwent the following process:
1. Earlier exoteric blogging days, desperately awaiting
resonance-searching likeminded youth.
2. Despite relative success in this pursuit he soon became aware of the fact that poetic activity is essentially an esoteric one, and therefore he took to his computer and started composing poems some of which have come to stay.
3. Ultimately he turned to writing without any electronic support.
So witnessed within a breathtaking spectrum of some three years, he attained a godspeed. While culling the poems for this anthology we have mainly emphasized this phase.

Is it Keats, or perhaps Rilke, who might have served as his predecessors? Even in that case he would not copy these masters. For example, while Keats asked himself as regards the causality lurking behind his sudden laughter, Sugata flings a query at us, namely, ‘what if I end up a bitter old man?’ Rilke’s phenomenology also did not suffice for his existential mould. But then, according to a perceptive scholar, and rightly so, Sugata’s muse is holding an orphean lute. The wizardly enchantment he exercised substantiates that the sensitized reader for whom he wrote is yet to be born. Till then he is bound to be recognized as a top-ranking poet of
our times.

Goa, New Year’s Eve 2011
Elisabeth Guenther
Alokeranjan Dasgupta