By Dr Jay Sankar Basu, Professor of English, Kolkata (India)
Επιμέλεια: Εύα Πετροπούλου Λιανού
A Few Words on Dr Jernail S Aanand, a Man with a Seer’s Vision
Dr Jernail S Aanand, contemporary Indian poet of distinction in English, writes, in one of his poems:
‘I am not a man, I am a plan’.
It at once lifts me. I react spontaneously, and write to him:
“Dr Aanand,
In our time of widespread spiritual amnesia, your line, ‘I am not a man, I am a plan’ stands out as an epiphany, a holy revelation, a flicker of truth, a realization of self vis-a-vis the grand design of Creation that proceeds in time from Timelessness. It touches me deeply. It will stay as a prop to lift me from the soulless, sordid materialism around. Thank you for posting your poem.” [quoted from my earlier post]
Dr Jernail S Aanand is a poet of profound vision, that telescopes a large canvas where
we crawl as tiny insects, shorn of pride and
and perhaps half-realising our puniness vis-a-vis the ever unmappable and the ever- receding horizons of the simultaneous order
of the created and evolving scheme of things.
‘I am a plan’ means a lot beneath and above and within itself. In the depth of wisdom it coextends to the Tagorean articulation:
“In my will is Thy Will ever taking shape”.
Yes, indeed, each of us and each of what we
perceive as ‘existent’ is the fruition of a great
plan, the beginning and the middle and the end
of which is unknowable. Our experiential existence is but an infinitesimally tiny grain
of that great plan taking shape moment by moment.
I reminisce what I wrote then to Dr Aanand
and reiterate my gratitude to him once again for offering me an opportunity to co-author
wih him a book of poetry, titled The Luminous Halo (if I don’t err in recalling the title).
©® Jay Basu [Dr Jay Sankar Basu]
Dr Jay Sankar Basu is working as Associate Professor of ELT at CLTCS [Centre for Language, Translation and Cultural Studies] under the aegis of School of Humanities, NSOU, a UGC NAAC-accredited ‘A’ Grade premier State Open University. He is a published author from India and abroad, on a wide spectrum of subjects ranging from Critical Discourses on fiction and film studies to poetry in bilingual media of English and Bengali. To date the number of his ISBN-marked published books in English is forty-three [43]. He has been featured as a world poet by Vocea Literara, Romania, Pentasi B, China, and Lone Stars Poetry Magazine, Texas, USA. Serbian translations of his poems and an elaborate bio-note of Dr Basu were anthologized in The Serbian World Poetry Anthology, 2020.
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