The Passionate Pilgrim as a poem by Kulwant Singh Gill is a desi version of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man, rather an Indian and Punjabi version of the autobiography of man. How does the drama of life start? What’s the story of life? What’s the history of mankind? Is it in some way the story of the life of Kulwant Singh Gill? A Punjabi history of life? Whatever the context, it is but an excellent poem from him.

When the umbilical cord was sundered, the child did not shriek it, did not cry even undergoing the upheaval and repercussion or the shake it would have felt. He opened his eyes and smiled strangely.

As a child he clung to the succulent breasts of his mother as a child often does so. But what does it carry it along? It is the same mother who keeps tracking him, but what does she get from him? You say  it barring the false hope upkeeping her for so long. When will he turn up? None can be sure of. This is life where everything changes in time. Change can be marked when we find the same child grown into a passionate young man so full of promises and oaths proposing before and when he falls in love with and marries then the story takes another drastic turn.

While promising to, he swears many an oath which but forgets too, tries to live and relive in his own world peopled by his own and so that it becomes difficult for him to come out of the coterie, the cocoon of personal life.

A stern shake, the author talks about the making of a robust man with an in-built of own. During the shake, upheaval and repercussion would have ruffled and jolted him as he would have heard later on from the older guys. He convalesced without any effect. But the pang and agony the mother would have born never could he feel it.

When the umbilical cord
Was sundered
He didn’t cry.
A stern shake,
He opened his eyes
And strangely smiled.
 
As a child
He clung
To his mother’s succulent breasts
With passionate zest
To make them dry.
 
As a young man
He clung
To his woman
And died many a death
To forget forlornness
In her passionate cry.
 
As he grew old
He clung to the rosary and the book,
Looked at stellar spaces
And icons of the meditating Buddha
The dancing Shiva
With passionate zeal
To cling to the Most High.

A man with a rosary and the holy book, looking heavenwards in piety and reverence, holding faith so close to, deriving  from the meditating Buddha and the dancing Shiva is but a picture of the same child a changed into a man. How does time present man in time? The same child as an old guy is the thing. The poem reminds us of the Sikh disciples, Tibetan Buddhists, Catholics and Shiva-bhaktas.  The last stage is that of a religious man, a completely changed man living upon scriptures and holy texts.