A dear senior and bade bhai Devender Sir has written this post wishing ace author and poet Uday Prakash on his birthday... ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Happy New Year to All …..Uday Prakash ke Bahane Consciously or by sheer chance, I have been reading a lot of Hindi literature since I returned from Canada in 2010. Or it might be because of the fact that I have been surrounded by Hindiwalas. Or it might be because of the realization that in last 20 years since I joined JNU in 1991 and till 2010, I had read very few Hindi books. Raag Darbaari and Mujhe Chand Chahiye come to my mind. There might be some other also but if I don’t remember reading it then it might not have been that great a book. I have always enjoyed reading. The small village where I was born and raised did not have much to offer in the name of reading. School books and newspaper-that’s it! As a kid, I was hooked on Cricket Samrat and Lot Pot. I used to beg each and every one who either went to city or came through some town to bring these two magazines. My teacher parents encouraged us to read and brought occasional books for us. An uncle in the family used to work in Sonepat, a town and our district headquarter, some 40 kilometers away from our village. He used to come to the village on weekends and would invariably bring 2-3 Hindi novels, mostly jasoosi ones. He usually stepped out of his home in the evenings for baithakis for hukka and gupshup. This used to be the window for me to sneak into his room and read as much as I could in the fading lights or in moonlight before he returned. As a young kid, I was not supposed to read those books so all this happened chori chori. In 9th standard, I moved to a reputed school in Sonepat on my own insistence. But soon I started missing my parents, friends and village life. My father came to see me after one month. I made all kind of excuses against the school, hostel, food so that he would take me back to my village. As I had insisted on coming to this school so he asked me to stick to my decision. However, he bribed me with two offers. One, he opened my account with the school canteen where I would get one glass of milk and 100 grams of khoya barfi everyday. Second, he got me a membership in the district library, which was just next to my school. Armed with two of my favourite things, I soon stopped missing village and village life. Within two years, I must have read all the books in that library, well almost all the interesting ones. I totally abdicated reading literature once I was in college and tended to film world with full force. However, I got exposed to different philosophical thoughts during these days - Marxist, Osho, Ayn Rand etc. Second phase of serious reading happened during JNU days. Apart from reading sociological works, a subject I really liked, I started reading literature in English. Read the works of usual suspects like Kafka, Camus, Sartre, Marquez and others. But read mostly English literature barring Raag Darbari here and Mujhe Chaand Chahiye there. So out of my conscious decision to acquaint myself with local writing scene (one often tends to develop deeper affinity and longing for one’s land, culture and society when one stays away for long) or because of being surrounded by Hindiwalas, I started reading Hindi literature. Nirmal Verma, Kamleshwar, Rahi Masoom Raza, Vijaydan Detha, Kashi Nath Singh, Amar Kant, Niranjan, AND UDAY PRAKASH. Uday Prakash – what a fabulous writer; what knowledge of literature, society, sociology, history; what a way of saying very complex things and ideas in a very lucid, simple language; what an incisive analytical observant and chronicler; what a way of drawing the reader into his world with mere few starting sentences; what a…… Palgomra ka scooter, Warren Hastings ka saand, Tirich, Dattatreya Ke dukh, Peeli chhatri wali ladki, Mohan Das..you pick any story and you will find a world which is here and now, which is not pretty but which mesmerizes you and you cannot put the book down unless you have finished it and closed the book with a sigh. I like his work so much that I insist that other people should also read him. An interesting thing happened just a few days ago. A friend came to my house last week and I gave him Uday Prakash’ Mohan Das to read. He snapped at me saying that he had come to my place to meet me, talk to me and not to be an expert on Uday Prakash. I could sense the reason behind his snapping because I was guilty of making him read three of Uday Prakash’ books when he had come last year also. My friend went away after staying for seven days at my place, and by the time he left my place he had finished two more books by Uday Prakash. I can go on and on ..on his philosophy.. rather his world view, his concerns, his abhorrence for any kind of dogma, his empathy for dalit and vanchit……… but on January 1, 2015, in brief I want to say that he is one of my top three favourite writers. Coetzee and Rushdie are the other two. “Happy Birthday Uday Prakash saab. And Happy New Year to You All
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 19:02:12 +0000
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