Debasish Parashar

#FundamentalRightToDream

Here is the award-winning Official Cinematic Poetry Video of ‘Fundamental Right To Dream’ from the 4th Inđija PRO POET 2020 International Poetry Festival, Serbia. This Video is produced and edited using stock footages in a very basic home set-up. The audio as well is recorded, mixed and produced at home. 

This video was officially selected, published and televised across Serbia & Worldwide as an official entry to the prestigious ‘Inđija PRO POET 2020’ International Poetry Festival, held in the first week of June 2020, in the the beautiful city of Indija, Serbia.

This Poetry Video is about keeping our dreams alive at any cost. The COVID19 pandemic too shall pass. We will have a better tomorrow !! We need to believe in it more than ever before ! You have a FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT TO DREAM.

CREDITS :

Poem & Recitation : Debasish Parashar

Video By : Antaripa Dev Parashar

Debasish Parashar is a Multilingual Poet, Creative Entrepreneur, Singer/Musician, Lyricist based in New Delhi, India. He is an Assistant Professor of English literature at the University of Delhi. Parashar is the Founder & Editor-in-Chief of Advaitam Speaks Literary journal. He is associated with the World Poetry Movement. Debasish has read in various national and international literary festivals including the 30th Medellin International Poetry Festival and Dylan Day Project 2020 by London Welsh Centre.Debasish was honored with the ‘Festival Charter for Interpretation’ award at the Indija Pro Poet-2020 International Literary Festival. Widely anthologised, his poems are translated into more than 20 world languages.He has been published in more than 30 countries of the world.

'A Letter to Mika Nivola'

Title : A Letter to Mika Nivola

Sun, Jun 21, 2020, 12:55 AM

Hola Mika, 

Greetings from India !

Sorry for the delay in response to your previous communication ! Our lives are going through some unprecedented changes and challenges. Hope you are safe and sound in your place ! Thank you for reaching out to me ! It’s a hot summer day in Delhi. Summers are expected to be very hot here. People and their never-ending expectations ! I am waiting for the monsoon to hit Delhi soon. I love rain and winters ! I have finished reading your letter. It is more than beautiful ! It is a visual treat ! I am already walking on the streets of Medellin. Our Medellin. Medellin of the World. There is music playing on my sound system. Ed Sheeran featuring Andrea on Perfect. Here I am walking on the streets of Medellin. Perfect. The wooden rooms, the old men half naked and smoking, smoke rings lost in the air, the sky of Medellin may be blue, the crates of red eggs, the megaphone and the sunny afternoon. While reading your letter, I started visualising the expression on those old faces. A mixture of dry ice in a lemonade and fading sunsets. Their faces are more naked than the remaining part of their bodies. A conviction as you said marinated with sweet and bitter nakedness of life. The eggs I visualise are redder than in your description. Perfect. Poetry out there. Poetry here. Poetry. Skin, Ears, Eyes, Taste or Smell. Poetry in red eggs toasted in the olives of nostalgia. Poetry in the vanilla and fruity flavor of whiskey finely preserved and matured in an American oak cask . I have not been to any of these places. Travelling is different from living. I am already walking on the streets of Medellin. Reading is no less than walking. The woman with her baby cheering to a poet from Somewhere on earth. Medellin. Poetry is not perfect. Poetry has dust on its unkempt hair and hands made of clay. Poetry has fingers covered in mud and veins drenched in sweat and blood.

I am sitting in the living-room of our apartment. Our living-room has large windows facing a T-Point adjacent to the famous Ring Road of Delhi. Andrea is hitting the right chords of Perfect. The curtains of my windows are drawn close to protect us from the scorching heat of the June sun of an otherwise noisy Indian summer. Closed curtains also gives the feeling of a closet. There is so much happening outside ! To know less is to know more in these unprecedented times. This time, the summer is different. Less noisy and less polluted. The government officials have estimated the numbers of virus infected people in Delhi itself is going to be more than 5 lakh by July end. It is quite a spectacle. A spectacle of numbers ! They have become so indispensable in the way of perceiving reality. We are straightjacketed into a dense matrix of numbers. Big data, statistics, surveys, meter readings of power connection, grades and even citizen identity. Poetry gives me a fresh lease of life to breathe in this age of numbers. Perfect. I remember somebody made us dance to that Ed Sheeran song on the night of our wedding reception. Sweet memories of nervous steps and faint blushes. Love. Perfect. Perfection has no history, only half extinguished memories. A few kilometres away from my place, an Ashram is refashioned to equip itself as a temporary facility with 10000 beds to quarantine virus infected patients. Dark and grand. Andrea is about to finish singing the song. I am writing to you. Poetry is how a human being made of flesh and blood negotiates with his surroundings. Poetry is reading the synapses and silences of time and space. To err is poetic. To perfect is luxury. To read is forgetting. To write is human.

I am not sure if I could give satisfactory answers to the questions you raised at the end of your communication. I am sure, this is just a beginning of a creatively stimulating friendship. We need to keep writing letters like these. I really hope to meet you in person someday, and I would not mind the International Poetry Festival of Medellin be that meeting ground.

 

Namastey
Debasish Parashar
New Delhi, India.

(Mika Nivola aka Miguel read Debasish Parashar’s poems in Spanish virtually at the 30th International Poetry Festival of Medellin. This letter is part of a series of email communication between Debasish Parashar and Mika Nivola.)

A Country Without Ghosts

A country where people do not die
A country without citizens
People travel with ease
between the living and the dead
with a shovel in hand
and coffin soil stuck inside nails

A country where people do not die
is an island
where faces are more human than the dead
and smiles are more real than cigarette smoke
Living is not a luxury anymore
especially when a dust is powerful than my throat
and my lung is more vulnerable than a boat

A country where people do not die
is a country without ghosts

I wish I want to be more than a citizen
a forever migrant
roaming across the seas, slums and streets

Poetry liberates me from poets and their poetry
Songs liberate me from musicians and their music
What is more liberating than a migrant heart
that beats to the waves of dust
and flowers rooted inside the crust
Crust is where rocks dance with ancient fire
borders melt
to turn me to a poet without a country

Living with the dead is not so strange
Afterall

Haikus

Cactus grown nations
you stop watering my blood
hard blood too can dance

What a foot massage
Poor soft hands smelled of mothers
who died back a night

Danced to the curfews
A Kashmir a trivanga
fractured artless numb

Stone by stone I find
the Queen’s Necklace, Empire’s pride
chronicle of dust

City by city I search
ashes of my presence past
chronicle of dust

Blindly the sea strikes
my shores of dire emptiness
Erosion is love

Sweet remembering
Songs of protests on the streets
Gunshots in the air

Leaf by leaf a tree
All that grow in me are leaves
Me becoming free

Old walls artful grey
vineyards of simulation
unfolding con-texts

If they had histories
I could have been found in the
archives of your eyes

Perched on your red lips
pouted Nellie vomits blood
A dove got peace thrills

Debasish Parashar is a Multilingual Poet, Creative Entrepreneur, Singer/Musician, Lyricist based in New Delhi, India. He is an Assistant Professor of English literature at the University of Delhi. Parashar is the Founder & Editor-in-Chief of Advaitam Speaks Literary journal. He is associated with the World Poetry Movement. Debasish has read in various national and international literary festivals including the 30th Medellin International Poetry Festival and Dylan Day Project 2020 by London Welsh Centre.Debasish was honored with the ‘Festival Charter for Interpretation’ award at the Indija Pro Poet-2020 International Literary Festival. Widely anthologised, his poems are translated into more than 20 world languages.He has been published in more than 30 countries of the world.

New Delhi, India

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Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic is an initiative sponsored by the Poetic Media Lab and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University.

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