FOREWORD

Whenever thoughts of Sugata come to my mind I am inevitably reminded of the tribute to Andrei Tarkovsky by Ingmar Bergman- ‘When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn’t explain. What should he explain anyhow?’ The only difference is what was film for Tarkovsky, for Sugata it was poetry. A poetry cut short by a self-imposed departure in early youth, an act of a rebel with a cause. He simply refused to participate in the carnival of morons in the neon wilderness. The anxiety of alienation from meaning was too vast to be grasped by poetry alone.

Those who are in the know of his first book of poems would find the gradual maturity of a poet as he encounters newer realities of life, the dissonance, short-circuits and discontinuities so amply offered in our modern surroundings where everything solid so effortlessly and imperceptibly melts into air and a terrible nothingness often yawns showing its deadly denture.

Sugata was progressing and in a fast pace as every young talented poet should. From romantic strains of a young lover who asks for a chance Sugata was reacting to the mega events of his troubled times he was reacting to the wars unleashed, to massacres near and far, often by flag-wielding revolutionists. At the same time he was trying to answer the timeless questions as well. While he was preparing himself for oceanic journeys his fate had other thoughts, it was busy creating a self-annihilating impulse that would shatter a budding dream which could become an authentic voice of counter-culture, opposed to the culture of morons. Sugata’s brief life reminds me of Ananya Ray, a poet of great stature. In Ananya’s case it was not suicide, but it was self- annihilation all the same. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the lures of death have penchant for sensitive souls picking up artists and poets. But the victims outdo fatality by their creations. Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Pavese or Hart Crane live on. Sugata shall also live with the strummings of his magic guitar. Here, the readers of his works have a special responsibility.

This volume includes a section of Sugata’s prose which is full of philosophical insights where visions of advanced science, its strange logic, the mystic music of digits and the shapeless geometry of time intermingle and amidst this a young, pained heart beats on its blues.

Sugata and hyper-creative individuals like him only belong to the future. We, who are hopelessly embedded in the present, in the routine mundane, shall fumble while dealing with them.
Over to Sugata…

Nabarun Bhattacharya
Kolkata
25.12.2009