This is like asking me if I have any interest left in life after having already lived for more than 68 years. Poetry expresses one's perception of life and one's interest in its unfolding. Although much of my work focuses on anxiety, doubt, anguish, pain and suffering, it has never pre-empted joy, satisfaction, peace and a sense of fulfilment. Tragic and ironic modes of experience combine or alternate with comic, absurd, or outrageous attitudes to one's own passage through life.

As a poet, one is looking for a felicitous word or phrase, an outstanding line, a musical rhythm that is rich and surprising, a theme that encompasses human truth -- with the keenness of a bird looking for worms every morning. A bird that has aged too much, of course, loses appetite or becomes too weak to feed itself. My creativity in poetry or in the other things I still pursue hasn't reached that point yet. I was never compelled to create poetry. I felt free not to write even 50 years ago when I started. Self-expression takes forms of its choice. When I don't write, I draw and paint. When an opportunity opens up, I make a film or get involved in someone else's projects that appeal to me. When I am not doing original writing, I translate other people's writing and that is as creative a challenge as any. Creativity is an occupation, absorption; it is active awareness that seeks periodic cessation and renewal. It follows a certain rhythm inherent in one's character.

I will stop writing when I can't; or it would be more correct to say I wouldn't begin to write unless I felt I was ready to take the plunge again. 50 years seem small when one feels and thinks with the same intensity and perhaps with sharper focus. My best is still to come, though my worst is not yet over. That is my way of looking at it.

Poetry appears to have lost its importance in India today. While there were a great many experimenting with form as recently as 10-15 years ago, today's poets find no publishers or platforms for expression. Do you agree?

Importance for whom in India? Poetry matters to those who read and write it, reflect on it, and their number (like all numbers in India) is on the increase. True, the consumerist middle and upper class in India whose lives begin in shopping malls and end in tastelessly opulent living rooms don't buy or read books of poetry. For them, poetry is a celebrity mushaira or a cultural festival where it is important for them to be seen.

I am not a lyricist on a ramp or a cocktail circuit genius. I am not a best-selling author. For that matter, poets anywhere in the world are not. However, I don't share the bleak view that poetry is a dying art with little or no audience. Audiences do still gather to listen to a poet reading his work. Some of them buy books and even seek autographs. They are a minority in a culture of loudmouths. But their listening skills ensure that culture will live among those who value their own sensitivity and its reach.

Image: The cover of Bombay, Mumbai: Bilder einer Megastadt von, by Henning Stegmueller, Dilip Chitre and Namdeo Dhasal.

Also see: In Ahmedabad, don't mention the R-word

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