BookReview:RAJNISINGH
Pronab Kumar Majumder. ONTIME UNTIME. Kolkata:Bridge-in- Making Publication, 2007, pp.36, Price Rs. 50/-
The burden of time has occupied poets and seers since ages. Poets escape the burden of time with the help of their poetic craftsmanship whereas the seers transcend this time ridden world through mystical awareness/ timelessness / Ananta. The present book under review also deals with time. P. K. Majumdar like Tennyson and T. S. Eliot is preoccupied with time and yearns to escape the world of time by reposing in peace and compassion, the way T.S. Eliot reclines in the three “Da’s” in What the Thunder Said (The Waste Land) or as Tennyson who tries to evade the burden of time by looking back, from the painful present into the past.
Ontime Untime is a move from the transient to the permanent. The disjuncted links of the sections of this vol. Time - life - Philosophy - Ecology and Environment – Violence – Peace - Love is a metaphor for man’s onward journey from transience to permanence and appears very much in harmony after a thoughtful reading. These seven parts combine together to make a whole-unification of time bound into timelessness. In this time bound world life appears dwarfish and man in keeping himself update with time has brought havoc to the Ecology and Environment. He shun his innocence the day he tasted the fruit of progress. Benevolence and humility are the wishes that lie cold in the lap of past and violence has taken over the present completely. It is, then, through ‘Peace’ and ‘Love’ only that man can free himself from the clutches of time.
In the 1st section of the vol., entitled Time, Mr. Majumdar makes an attempt to understand ‘Time’, defines it and compares it with ‘Life’. Mind and Time are juxtaposed. Intellect and Space are shower on a perpetual race and in this race time emerges victorious leaving the mind behind.
Time, the overpowering one smiles
at the mind’s diligence
Time is the teacher of all human
Creature, it teaches good and bad.
He further goes on to say that ‘Time’ is the cosmic power to which are bound the Sun, the Moon and the Stars. It is an unresolved mystery and the human mind can only feel it and measure it with its own life span. He also talks about speed of Time, which is determined with time product activity. In the machine less age ‘Time’ was slow but in modern/machine age it has sped up but the paradox lies in the fact that in this Time of Speed Man has -
No destination to go
A long walker walks slow.
The second section ‘Life’ features life with a flowing river which is again juxtaposed with the stagnant water i.e. death. The binary opposition life vs. death again brings to the mind the central there of the poem performance vs. transience. Life, though is prone to perish yet is permanent like the river with its ‘living force’ i.e. the power to create – ‘Life expands / Death strands’. The lines
Life is not just living
Life is what is giving
echo ‘Datta’, injunction of the thunder in T.S. Eliot’s . The Waste Land, which Eliot borrowed from the Hindu Upanishadic lore. The Lines:
A sleeping Man
Misuses life’s can
Pull of water
Life’s elixir
…………….
Life is learning
Life is teaching
Heavily resonate the Victorian poets’ preaching of a life of action. Tenyson’s Ulysses and Browning’s A Grammarian’s Funeral openly condemn the Victorian tendency of escapism. Majumdar too does the same and resolves the conflict between life and time by placing then as counterparts –
Life is time’s follower
Time is life’s conveyor
One is unlimited whole
Another is its soul.
In the next section ‘Philosophy’, the poet brings in another binary opposition – Light vs. Shade / Virtue vs. Vice / Knowledge vs. Ignorance and goes on to say that this ever perpetual war between good and bad can come to an end if one listens to his conscience. He sounds like Kabir in the following lines:
The house is ablaze
In incited rage
Ignorants set the house on fire
With consequences dire
The omniscient bird beats
Forehead while fire eats.
The section ‘Ecology and Environment’ focuses on the repercussions of ‘progress’ that has turned into “speed” in the present times. Man in his effort to be on time / to match with time has completely devastated the serene rural life and has produced morbid vicinity with cantankerous people. Modernity / urbanization has led to the emergence of concrete jungles. Rivers, the elixir of life are now at the verge of extinction due to Man’s lust of gain.
Crushed under the burden of Time, Man has become emotionless, insensitive to even his own race. ‘Hegemony’ and ‘arrogance’ are the soul of violence. Killing has now become a ‘global game’.
It is through peace and love that man can reliance himself from Ontime to Untime (timelessness). The poet grabs the best opportunity to preach ever:
Let us chant mantra of peace
………………………………..
Not words of speech
Will for it brings peace
Humans need to change soul
To have peace the ultimate goal.
Trust in man only can grant peace warranty
O M shanti OM shanti OM shanty
The line ‘OM Shanti ……’ once again brings to mind the concluding lines of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Like Eliot, the poet tries to evade the burden of time by reclining in ‘Peace and Love’.
The word’ ‘Time’ reverberates throughout the vol. The poet ‘s own preoccupation with Time is suggestive of a time obsessed world - the tragedy of modern man who lives in a ‘time conscious’ time and thus gets completely entrapped in this quagmire and the only way out for him is to conquer this Ontime through timelessness / Untime.
The seven parts of the vol. run down in spontaneity despite being grouped into 72 sections. Each section is a unit in it self that suggests qualities like poise and completeness. The units take the readers phrase-by-phrase, cadence-by-cadence, and line-by-line down the last page. The surprisingly few typographical errors cannot mar the beauty of Ontime Untime.
Reviewed by:
Rajni Singh
Assistant Professor of English
Dept. of HSS
Indian School of Mines University
Dhanbad, India
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