Friendships are not man made, but to my thought, divine and ordained. At least, in my case, in experience by some power. In this particular case it is by Manas Bakshi. Bakshi is in Kolkata and I have never gone anywhere near his place. But being thrown into his path was divinely ordained.

Manas asked me to call him only Bakshi. He first told me he lived on a pacemaker. Dream India Dream is unique. See what he started with… It is unique with dr.  Abdul Kalam Azad.

Now coming to start with Stephen hawking.

Time
The cosmic helmsman
Waiting for
His whistle.

We can’t hear
Only time can.

Looking inward,
Before curious eyes
Outwardly inclined
It’s burning for
Emancipation from
Worldly worries

Before inner eyes
Absolved in indefinable perceptions
It’s attaining bit by bit
The coveted goal
Of a calm in mind,
Ascetic, sublime. [page 12]

Nothing more to expect

Nothing more
To expect than
A cameleer’s song in a desert
When there’s no sandstorm
But the flash
Of an ending oasis.

In this poem, there is a mindless meditation with nostalgia.

Then comes the poem ‘In the Offing’

Nothing’s pollution free today
Life embroiled in bathos,
Mind too polluted
Textures of survival
Snake-like coiled;

Pollution of myriad types
Knowingly or unknowingly
Penetrating public life,
Ingrained values declined
Rots sap our social fabric

In ‘Old Age Tragedy’, shows only horror and worse, misery.

In the poem ‘An empty photo frame’, there is skeletal existence.

The man living in her heart
(The woman) she believes,
Invigorates her skeletal existence
The shabby frame
She preserves with care
Makes often vent her
Cherished, last desire
To be happy
Even after death
If it’s burnt along with her dead body

In ‘Cyber Psychosis’

Those abandoned courtyards
Bearing historical marks
Exuding nostalgic reminiscences…
Spectral footfall of king and queen
Amid the feudal relies
Of a stately edifice
The dark shadows of the bygone times
Lurking, swirling in every nook and corner
Of the iconic bungalow
Looking haunted to scare away
The intruders after the dusk.

There is a poem ‘A poem for the common people’

The web of nuclear proliferation
Adulterated food and medicine
Who is the victim? The common people
Who will write poetry of revival?
If alive, it’s the emaciated common people.

The poem ‘Remembering Lord Buddha’

Beneath the bodhi tree
Identifying a self
For anybody else
Is like a wanderer
Often crossed between
Sensual lure and material provocation
Losing his way
Miles behind the one towards spiritual salvation.

The horror of real existence is conveyed in the poem ‘Autopsy unwanted’

In this merciless world,
The demand is more for
A patchwork of concrete elements
Than anything else
The poem ‘boomerang’ is sickening.
It beheads, defaces leaders of bygone age
Takes revenge only on the dead
Not on those living still
At others choice.

The poem ‘in the vision of a child’, the poet bereaves even the life of a child.

“Know I must”-avowed the child,
Wasted no time, to hurl his arrow
Towards the sky-
It whizzed, but within seconds
Fell flat on water at a distance

In the poem ‘Sham’, the poet portrays

At the beginning
Several chinks were there
Not duly plugged
Those chinks
Got widened from time to time…
Deaths erased
All religious differences-
Unidentified, heaped up dead bodies,
A colorless conglomerate
Hallowed afterwards
In a land of lost faith.

‘Breakdance of democracy’ is

Window on
Indian world of politics
The greatest festival of democracy and illiteracy
Or (a shadow of democracy)
Of the gullible people

Use vile tricks
Play the minority card,
Hurl mindless invectives
Catch up with the wind
Blowing to hoodwink all
Aspiring for a better way of living
Across the vicissitudes
Of vote-bank-politics.

The poet thinks deeply and produces another poem called ‘Sediment’. It is a portrayal of the painful actuality. It goes like this

It rocks
The very aplomb of survival between
Vaunted idealism and veiled realism
Delving into an awesome ambience
Where feculent remnants imbibe
That excruciating nostalgic pain
Of living with splashes of the halcyon past
Beyond the stark banalities of the present

The poet feels with all his being and comes to the poem ‘Till that metamorphic moment’:

A world often we long to contemplate
Has in reality
More frail than stable elements
It’s alluring, mesmerizing,
Enwrapping by far our mind
Only to turn evanescent at once
As the metamorphic event
Just before sundown.

Excerpts from reviews in papers and journals of repute.
This book contains very valuable information at the end, as a list of other books by Manas Bakshi. It is published by 
Dey’s illuminate Publication
37, Ramanath Kabiraj lane, Kolkata, 700012
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