In
line with John Keats—'The poetry of earth is ceasing never.' Varinder Parihar is
of the view that nature is the poetry of the earth. The present generation of
mankind has lost its ear for this divine symphony. Instead, science and
technology have disturbed the ecological balance of the universe, resulting in
as Philip Larkin says- 'But all that remains for us will be concrete and tyres.'
All this pollution of the earth bodes ill for the future of mankind. The
promise, that the scientific progress will usher in an era of happiness and
prosperity, has been belied. The world is now being converted into a concrete
jungle where consumer culture tends to thrive over the garbage of polythene
bags.Kudrat (Nature) is Varinder Parihar's second collection of poems, the earlier one Main Kite HorSee (I was elsewhere) was published in 1997. In these nature poems, the poet does not celebrate nature like Wordsworth but converses with its objects in a confessional tone. In the poem Patte (Leaves), he considers autumnal leaves the musical instruments of the wind. In Baddal (The cloud), he says that he fell down from the clouds into a grove, while someone else took birth from the womb of his mother. It is of course the poem Aara chal Reha See (The saw was moving) which is most heart-rending :
They say-
the log was weeping bitterly
the paths around were mourning
the winds were sighing deeply
the birds in bewilderment cried hoarse
when in the cacophony
the saw moved on
slowly, very slowly.
Born at Malsian on March 31,1956 he spent his early youth at Nakodar. After his graduation from there, he went to Doaba College and DAV College, Jalandhar for his Master's Degree in English. In 1979 he went to England and settled down at Southampton. His marriage in 1983, made him the householder but the urge in him to compose poems in English and Hindi could not be resisted for long. It was in 1986 that he met the famous poet and translator, Michael Hamburge, at a meeting of 'City Writers' at Southampton. He advised Varinder to compose poems in his mother-tongue, Punjabi. It was however, in the early nineties that he adopted Punjabi as the medium of his expression in right earnest. Now he has emerged as a Punjabi poet, with a distinct voice of his own, both in the U.K. and the land of his birth.
Now when he is on a short visit to Ludhiana, he is staying with his elder brother Prof Bhupinder (Aziz) Parihar who is well-known as an Urdu Poet. Perhaps both the brothers are carrying on the legacy of their father, (the late) Shri Bachint Ram 'Aish Karnanvi', a renouned poet of Urdu and Punjabi. Incidentally the place of Varinder Parihar's birth, Malsian, where his father was posted at that time as a school teacher, has been hallowed by the legendary Urdu poet Pandit Labhu Ram Josh Malsiani and his son Balmukand Arsh Malsiani who was also an Urdu poet in his own right. Later these poets made Nakodar their second home and lived there for long years. Like the Lake District of England, Nakodar had been the hub of the Urdu poetry for many decades, immediately after the Partition.
On the eve of the release of his book Kudrat in Punjabi Bhawan, Ludhiana. Varinder Parihar told me that poetry for him was not a pastime but a way of life. He utilizes his time for reading and writing when the family is watching the television. He is a prolific writer as well as a voracious reader. He skips into the countryside whenever he can and the sea-beach also beckons him off and on. An aspect of nature at times plunges him into the vortex of deep contemplation. His endeavour is to make eloquent the long silences of nature. He warns that nature will retaliate if mankind persists in plundering it so ruthlessly. The ecological imbalance may turn out to be the beginning of the end of time.
To his contemporary poets he urges to evolve new idiom by discarding hackneyed modes of expression. New metaphors will emerge when the mindset becomes modern in accordance with the changing times. The paradoxes of life need be resolved by adopting humanistic outlook.