00:00 I am Pragya and I bring to you excerpts from the ear-opener issue of Outlook titled Poetry as Evidence.
00:07 Poetry must be brought before general public. Poetry offers that scope that we get affected and we feel.
00:14 Poetry expands the scope of storytelling. It is evidence of others' lives, of our times.
00:21 We remain grateful to Amar Kanwar who worked with us and edited this issue,
00:25 and to everyone who gave us their poems and images, to the reporters who gathered the poems,
00:31 to the designers and researchers who made it all possible.
00:35 In the introduction to the ear-opener, editor Chinke Sinha writes,
00:40 "The year of prophecy. The introduction opens with lines from Under Dadar Bridge by Prakash Jadhav,
00:47 translated by Shanta Gokhale and Nisim Ezgil.
00:51 A man in a blue shirt is holding a pen. He slowly writes his last name first.
00:57 Jadhav. The room is small, congested. A woman looks at him from the doorway.
01:02 Before the man appears on the screen, there are street scenes, the sound of a train, arriving or departing,
01:10 a bridge, a hunched man, a lot of haze.
01:13 There is a rewinding of the same scenes. The poem scrolls vertically on the screen.
01:19 There's no location, no explanations, no distractions.
01:23 Only an interrogation of identity, of a dehumanized condition of a person who speaks for many like him.
01:31 You are left with the poem, multiple poems, implosions, explosions.
01:37 In A Night of Prophecy, a 2000 film by Amar Kanwar, there are only poets and poems from across India.
01:45 I watched the film a few years ago in his studio. When I stepped out, I asked the filmmaker about Jadhav.
01:52 Kanwar said it was many years ago that he read the poem by Jadhav, who wrote it in the 1970s.
01:59 Jadhav used to be a baggage handler at the Mumbai airport. In 2001, Kanwar tracked him down.
02:06 I remember he told me Jadhav had a beautiful handwriting,
02:10 and that's why the workers had asked him to write the slogans for their protest.
02:15 Later, Jadhav was promoted. His verses had been very powerful.
02:20 The poem, an interrogation of the poet's own reality, and the identity of a fatherless son born to a prostitute, is stark.
02:30 Writing it was an act of resistance.
02:33 The poem had inspired Kanwar to make a film about protest poetry in India.
02:38 Another act of resistance.
02:40 Over the years, we have spoken a lot about poetry and its role.
02:45 Can it be used as evidence?
02:47 How do we measure loss beyond the crime scenes and the insistence on forensic evidence in the justice system?
02:54 There is another terrain of experience, memory, inheritances, identities, caste, class, gender, etc.
03:03 Within the violent hazing of our times, what role does poetry play in elucidating what people know and understand about their hazing experiences?
03:13 Does the creation of a poem hold evidentiary value?
03:17 Does the poem contain the truth?
03:19 Yes, a poem is also an act of remembrance.
03:24 Farewell by Agha Shahid Ali, a Kashmiri poet.
03:28 They make a desolation and call it peace.
03:31 Who is the guardian tonight of the gates of paradise?
03:35 My memory is again in the way of your history.
03:39 Army convoys all nights like desert caravans.
03:43 In the smoking oil of dimmed headlights, time dissolved.
03:47 All winter, it crushed fennel.
03:50 We can't ask them, are you done with the world?
03:53 In the lake, the arms of temples and mosques are locked in each other's reflections.
04:00 It is this memory that the poets preserve to rescue us from the catastrophist narrative of our times,
04:07 hailed as history, which only tries and pretends to make sense of the past in the present.
04:13 The present is a conundrum.
04:15 The present is a place of untruths, a place of all negation of the personal and multiple.
04:23 It is the daily continuity of lives under all circumstances that must stand as an alternative side to resist all unfreedoms,
04:33 all lies, all erasures, all oppressions.
04:37 Memory recognizes experiences.
04:40 It recognizes the individual.
04:42 It agonizes and liberates.
04:45 Memory is personal.
04:47 It is political.
04:48 Poets aren't done with the world.
04:51 All forms of literacy are in danger in this country, in this world.
04:56 Literary production and culture and politics are connected.
05:00 The fact that readers of poetry are not many doesn't diminish its place because in the near and far future,
05:08 the audience for poetry will be measured through time, through generations, through space.
05:15 This issue of outlook is to stand against the dangerous silencing of voices.
05:20 Poetry must be brought before the general public.
05:23 In a world of controlled speech and linear narratives, poetry offers the scope that we get affected, that we feel.
05:32 Poets have been banned for centuries.
05:34 In Plato's Republic, poets had been banished.
05:38 As a news magazine, we are expected to be reasonable and pretend that poetry doesn't form a part of what we do.
05:46 But as journalists, we must read and publish poetry because it makes us uncomfortable.
05:52 It shows that there is that moral power of the individual voice that must be protected.
05:58 Poetry expands the scope of storytelling.
06:01 It is evidence of other lives, of our times.
06:05 From my invented land by Robin S. Nagam, a poet from Manipur.
06:10 My home is a gun pressed against both temples.
06:14 A knock on a night that has not ended.
06:17 A torch lit long after the theft.
06:20 A sonnet about body counts undoubtedly raped.
06:24 Definitely abandoned in a tryst with destiny.
06:28 This terrifies me, unsettles me.
06:31 A poem could be that point where a journalist can pick up a story.
06:35 This poem is in this issue.
06:38 Newsrooms are grim places.
06:40 We scan and monitor news.
06:42 An earthquake, a tsunami, a bomb explosion, a shooting.
06:47 We dissect a lot.
06:48 We reconstruct a lot.
06:50 We analyze.
06:51 We decode.
06:52 We write opinions.
06:54 We do data crunching to look for evidence.
06:57 But what we often don't do is read poetry or recover the strangeness of the past.
07:03 And its vastness and its lostness or write about the ordinary person.
07:08 An ordinary death.
07:09 An ordinary anguish.
07:11 For months the reporters and researchers collected poems guided by the three prompts given to us by Kanwar.
07:18 It was an exercise in seeing, in feeling, in rejecting the violation of the individual and collective experiences.
07:26 In a night of prophecy, Kanwar merged different poetic narratives to arrive at a moral universal language of meanings.
07:35 The viewing of the film was the moment of conception for this issue.
07:39 An editor must be inclusive.
07:42 A news magazine must also be a space of disruptions, a place of prophecies.
07:48 2024 is an important year.
07:51 We will choose where we go from here.
07:53 The issue is a place of here.
07:56 And in the issue, poetry and images take parallel routes to make us see and understand the other.
08:03 The conflicts that divide and unite us and how memory can offer resistance to imposed histories.
08:11 Poetry as evidence is the year opener issue for Outlook.
08:15 We remain grateful to Kanwar who worked with us and edited this issue.
08:20 And to everyone who gave us their poems and images.
08:23 To the reporters who gathered the poems.
08:26 To the designers and researchers who made it all possible.
08:30 We push the advertisements to the end of the magazine for the sake of uninterrupted reading.
08:36 This is a leap of faith for a newsroom.
08:39 There were those who said, who will read 100 pages of poems?
08:43 Who will see images of people protesting against injustices?
08:47 Our audience will be measured through time.
08:50 It is poetry, there was no other way.
08:53 For this and more, read the year opener issue of Outlook.
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