As a poet, I read a lot of poetry written by other poets and write a little. I don’t have a fixed time to write poems. I write whenever I find time. When I was posted in Moscow I used to write poems in the Metro while commuting from my residence to the university and office and back. I can find solitude and concentration to write even in the most crowded places. First an image, then a line comes and then gradually a poem starts taking shape. I write it down and revisit it after several days, or weeks or even months, then chisel it until all the unnecessary words are gone and not a single word can be further removed. Sometimes, I send it to the literary magazines for publication, others times I keep it with me if it is for a book length project (over 40 poems).

I have mostly written about places, monuments, people, customs, traditions, where I mix mythology, history, legends, facts, experiences and imagination to create poems. Lately, with the growing concerns of climate change and biodiversity loss worldwide, my focus has been to write about the unique flora and fauna of Madagascar and a long love poem that brings together the ancient annual weather pattern of Monsoon and the richness and diversity of flora, fauna, cuisine, costumes, fragrances of the islands of the Indian ocean, India and the countries straddling across the Himalayas. This is the first book-length poem I have attempted inspired by Kalidasa’s Meghduta.

I mostly write in series of couplets of short lines, mostly unrhymed. I don’t have any particular length for my poems. I let them grow naturally as much as they can grow, but most of my poems are short poems except for a few like ‘Prufrock at the Carnival in Rio’ or ‘Fire and Sermon’ or ‘Ancient Land’, or ‘Diplomacy’, which are basically rewritings of poems of T.S. Eliot in contemporary context. 

I grew up reading poets such as Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Sohanlal Dwivedi, Makhanlal Chaturvedi, Nirala, Kabir, Rahim, Sumitranandan Pant, Harivansh Rai Bachchan and later William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, H.G Longfellow, William Blake, Dylan Thomas. Then, I discovered Walt Whitman, Wislawa Szymborska, Derek Walcott, T.S. Elliot, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Ceslaw Milosz, Basho, Issa, Buson, Pushkin, Du Fu, Bukowski, A. K. Ramanujam, Jayanta Mahapatra, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney and recently the rich world of Indian poetry spread over 3,000 years from 28 Indian languages, including great works by Sangam Poets, Kalidasa, Vidyapati, Muddupalani, among others. They have all had an influence on my writing and I keep revisiting their works while exploring the works of new poets. 

I started writing after joining the Indian Foreign Service in 2003 and wrote my first book titled River Valley to Silicon Valley, a memoir of three generations of my family and my first 25 years, after arriving in Moscow on my first diplomatic assignment, where I learned Russian language and literature at Moscow State University. It was published by Bookwell India in 2007. My first poetry collection Enigmatic Love was published by the same publisher in 2009. My second poetry collection Fallen Leaves of Autumn was published as an e-book in 2010, my third poetry collection Candling the Light was published by Yash Publications in 2011 and fourth one Remains by HarAnand Publications in 2012. My fifth collection of poems The Seduction of Delhi was published by Bloomsbury India in 2014 and since then they have also published my sixth poetry collection The Eight-Eyed Lord of Kathmandu (2018) and the eight poetry collection The Alphabets of Latin America (2020). My seventh poetry collection The Prophecy of Brasilia was published by Colletivo Editorial, Brazil. I have put together a collection of Haiku on the unique flora and fauna of Madagascar, titled The Magic of Madagascar, a collection of unpublished poems written between 2010-2020, titled Stray Poems, and I’m working on a long poem titled Monsoon, inspired by Kalidasa’s Meghaduta. 

During this period, I have also edited a number of books which include CAPITALS (2017), 100 Great Indian Poems (2018), 100 More Great Indian Poems (2019), New Brazilian Poems (2019), The Bloomsbury Anthology of Great Indian Poems (2020) and The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems (2020).  

The year 2020 has been a productive year for me with additional time available because of lockdown since March 2020. I used this time to edit an anthology of Indian love poems from over two dozen Indian languages covering a time span of over 3000 years. It was published in October 2020 as The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems. I also used this time to read and translate Kalidasa’s Meghduta and Ritusamhara from Sanskrit into English. I also read a number of poetry books during this period. Antananarivo skies are clear and free from light pollution during most of the year and so I started looking at the night sky more attentively and carefully and was duly rewarded with sighting of all the planets of our solar system which can be seen with the naked eye viz. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, as well as the most prominent star constellations such as Orion, Canis Major, Taurus, Scorpious and Sagittarius and the bright stars such as Sirius, Canopus, Betelguese, Rigel, Aldebaran, Antares among others. This also set me on the path of writing anthems on planets of the solar system, which were published on 21st December 2020, on the day of the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. I am fascinated by the stories/mythologies built around constellations and am planning to read and write about them. So, darkness has its own beauty which is not visible under the glare of the sun and we should explore and revel in the beauty that darkness offers to us. My translation of Meghaduta will be published this year by Bloomsbury India.