00:00In January 2024, Outlook decided to look at poetry.
00:04As a news magazine, we are expected to be reasonable,
00:07to present the facts, to report what happened.
00:11And we do all these things and more.
00:13We do not exclude any truth in any medium.
00:16Editor Chinki Sinha says that poetry expands the scope of storytelling.
00:21It shows us that there is a moral power in the individual voice that must be protected.
00:26Poetry is evidence of other lives.
00:30Of our times.
00:31A hundred pages of poetry.
00:33A testimony.
00:34This issue was a leap of faith for a newsroom.
00:37That's why Outlook invited Amar Kanwar, filmmaker, artist, storyteller,
00:42to guest edit a special issue titled, Poetry as Evidence.
00:47Kanwar offered three propositions.
00:49Questions really, about the role of poetry in a fractured world.
00:53Kanwar's first proposition.
00:55Imagine the simultaneous viewing of multiple time.
00:59Of obvious time, hyper time, orphan time.
01:04Time that unexpectedly shoots off from beneath your feet and races away.
01:09Time measured in missile strikes.
01:11In the sudden silence after a bomb.
01:13In the distance between a knock on the door and the opening of it.
01:17Robin S. Gangom knows this time when he writes,
01:22My home is a gun pressed against both temples.
01:26A knock on a night that has not ended.
01:29A torch lit long after the theft.
01:32A sonnet about body counts.
01:34Undoubtedly raped.
01:36Definitely abandoned.
01:37In a tryst with destiny.
01:38Time folds in on itself.
01:41History repeats.
01:43The present is haunted by the past.
01:45Bashir Ahmed Dada, writing from Kashmir, counts time in absence.
01:50A memory slipping away.
01:51A face disappearing from a street corner.
01:54How do you hold on to a life that's already vanished?
01:57How do you resist time's quiet erasure?
02:00This was the second proposition by Kanwar.
02:02Imagine the morning newspaper.
02:04Headlines and couplets.
02:06Black and white.
02:07Button verse.
02:08Imagine that constellation of words.
02:11If the news reported not just facts, but feelings.
02:14If the headlines told you how it felt to lose a home.
02:18To lose a country.
02:19To lose your name.
02:20Aamir Aziz's poem cuts through the fog of forgetting.
02:24Sab yaad rakha jayega.
02:25Everything will be remembered.
02:27Memory is resistance.
02:29To forget is to surrender.
02:31Katyal names the quiet violence of exclusion.
02:34The weight of standing in the crowd unseen.
02:37What if the newspaper told you about those silences?
02:41The unspoken rule of belonging and unbelonging.
02:45Shakespeare does not wait for permission to speak.
02:47His rap burns through the margins of the city.
02:50Poetry becomes a counter-narrative.
02:52A way of saying,
02:53I see you.
02:54I remember you.
02:56This was the third proposition by Kanwar.
02:58Can poetry help us understand the passage of time?
03:02And if that were possible,
03:03could we glimpse the future?
03:05Prakash Jadav's words echo across a fractured city.
03:09Hey ma,
03:10tell me my religion.
03:11Who am I?
03:12What am I?
03:13You're not a Hindu or a Muslim.
03:16You are an abandoned spark of the world's lusty fires.
03:19Identity breaks apart under pressure.
03:22What survives?
03:23What remains?
03:24Begum Asma Khatun's poem answers,
03:27Phul Banu's mother's eyes are full.
03:29Child, independence is not ours.
03:32Independence is of the rich man.
03:34Independence is of the MLA and the minister.
03:36A broken promise.
03:38A future stolen before it arrived.
03:40But T. Keritsu says,
03:43But still swell against the tender licks of spring and bloom.
03:47Even after destruction, poetry blooms.
03:49Even after forgetting, poetry remembers.
03:52Even after silence, poetry speaks.
03:55Converse propositions were questions.
03:57And poetry responds.
03:59Not with answers, but evidence.
04:02Poetry names the invisible.
04:04It archives what history could erase.
04:06It survives where language ends.
04:08Chinkisina says that a poem is also an act of remembrance.
04:12That's why Outlook turned to poetry.
04:14Not just to understand the world, but to hold it accountable.
04:17In our war and peace issue, we turn to poetry to make sense of conflict.
04:22For poets from conflict zones like Ukraine, Palestine,
04:25Poetry becomes a tool for resistance, for memory.
04:29And in our Jal Jangal Jameen issue,
04:32The magazine's opening piece was from Adivasi poet Jacinta Kerkatta.
04:36If a poem holds the truth, could it also hold justice?
04:40Could it also build a future from what's been lost?
04:42Or maybe, maybe, poetry is evidence.
Comments