WEAVES OF TIME

Sangeeta Gupta, the Persona Sangeeta Gupta's, what may be called, mission in life, has been to encourage and support creative talent by at first fostering her own life values. It is how the worth of her art and poetry has come up to measure. So, one would say, that her's is a yeoman service under our country's presently shaky circumstances. From moment to moment the poet artist has made available to the reading or viewing public some fine examples of good writing or genuine art. The better of her creative works are the triumphs of a comparative unknown. The best of her select creations being of an amazingly high quality. She has never gone for a vanity publication. So at first, ethical, Sangeeta Gupta is a genuine person, like any of the chosen of the writers or artists. Thus she has the wisdom to see that even when art comes in diverse forms, each and all must blossom fully; but she also knows that even those who make it can decline. There is no guarantee in this one matter. This is why Sangeeta Gupta is open and entertains the country's waifs and fledglings. Now a word or two more about this extraordinary person's own poems: while like much modern poetry it too deals with the usual incidents of common life as well with social and animal sensations, and all that in a language approximating to normal conversational prose, yet at its peak moments it invokes the great self-affirming realities of the imagination. In other words, her's is not merely the poetry explored by the human senses and its adjunct, human reasoning. Rather, her poems also revision the great wonder of life. Yes, she is able to spot the miraculous in the seemingly ordinary. She reads the pulse of life well. Thus, her poetic lines are of a kind that stand or fall by their rapture of inspiration and by the way, they convey the feel of Creation much beyond the incidents of common life, and this in a style that elevates her language quite above that of prose. As such her poems do make the receptive reader stand still. One is not implying that here is 'otherworldly' poetry. On the contrary it is rooted in the physical, even the urban landscape. But then that landscape is being renewed from poem to poem, so as to give a taste of that ever living presence, that turns time into the timeless. But of course for this Sangeeta Gupta rarely employs the language of argument or philosophical discourse. Her words are compellingly lyrical. That is to say that they are organized round those verbal nuclei that exist as it were in their own right: expressive units whose self-powered resonance coincides with the meaning which is connected with one another in a sequence that builds up into resonant perceptions. This way her individual poems do constitute wholes, though contrapuntally, not logically. But with the falling of standards in the arts, and the rampant politicization thereof of the social order itself in general, some genuine writer's poems are at moments definitely sidelined. Art and poetry are thus tending to be judged by somewhat odd yardsticks. This is unfortunate! One may end by saying that while Sangeeta Gupta serves the community with gusto and with a far seeing vision, her own poetic voice in our discordant age symbolizes the unifying harmony of the heart line. Over her are provided no samples from her writing or her art but let us have faith that Sangeeta Gupta is a crusader of culture; her recent triumph being film-making of documentaries on the arts and their creators. In sum, Sangeeta Gupta's persona is unusual. But then she has something in common with all pioneers: such like souls understand well why poems of spirit matter in a largely arid age. 1st July, 2013, New Delhi KESHAV MALIK (Poet & Art Critic)