Dark Room Poets, an enlightening initiative
   Date :05-May-2019

 
 
 
By Vikas Vaidya:
 
Letting youths know about poets in the dark
 
An exercise inviting an academician, literatteur to explain everything about a poem
 
 
Somewhere a song ‘Tum itna jo muskura rahe ho’, sung by Jagjit Singh, was playing faintly and he was listening to it. Understanding the meaning of every word of the song, he was rejoicing. Then he, suddenly, became curious who the poet was. So he did research, and came to know who the poet was. He was Shahid Kabir. Much to his surprise, the poet turned out to be from Nagpur. He felt ashamed of himself as how come he was not aware about Shahid Kabir! Then and there he decided to find out such poets and let people especially youths come to know about them.
 

 
Meet Husain Rasheed, a young chap who did Industrial Engineering from Shri Ramdeobaba College of Engineering and Management (RCOEM), some courses from Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Indore and some consulting works for Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal. Later, in 2017, he took admission in Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad. During his stint at ISB, Husain started reading literature, mostly Hindustani poems and listened to ghazals sung by Jagjit Singh.
 
It was during this period, the Shahid Kabir episode happened. “There are many poets like Zeeshan Sahil, Anis Moin and others whose contribution to poetry is not known to public. I started thinking on this lacuna and along with my friends Shephali Bansod and Maninder Singh prepared some videos where we put the work of several poets whose works remained in the dark. People responded to it and that encouraged us,” said Husain bubbling with joy. But Husain forgot that he was missing his study at ISB and was supposed to conduct research as a part of his curriculum. That needed to be completed. So he stopped the video work and tried to focus on studies.
 
At ISB, poetry-addicted Husain could not concentrate. Should he continued with ISB or concentrate on poetry. Of course, he left ISB permanently and came to Nagpur. To his video project he had given a name ‘Dark Room Poet’ so he continued with the Dark Room Poet theme in a different way. “We prepared a list of great but unknown poets and took one poet every week for our project. We took one poet’s work and gave it to five youths. They read it and responded positively. We asked them to choose one poem and read it thoroughly.
 
 
The idea behind it was, we wanted them to recite it in informal get-together organised by Dark Room Poets. They recited the poems. But it did not stop there. We asked them to tell the poet’s information, his style of writing poems, participants’ views about the poem they chose. Along with this exercise we started inviting an academician, literatteur who explained everything about the poem. They told us how the poem is written. It is not just you write simile and complete the poem. Youths must know the essence of the poetry, they must understand how poem takes birth,” explained Husain Rasheed. The Dark Room Poet started doing its work.
 
The venue was not fixed. They did in the park, at Futala, at malls, house parties, in cafes. They covered every venue. There is no community of poets. Youngsters in age group of 18-19 years to 26 years started joining the crusade and Dark Room Poets keeps moving ahead. “Along with this we are starting some courses on poetry and personality development named ‘From Page to Stage’. Secondly, there is one ancient Urdu story-telling form named ‘Dastangoi’. We want to revive it. From next month I shall start its shows. Another project I am taking up is Sonetry. There are people who don’t read or listen poems. For such youngsters I came up with a concept which is an amalgamation of songs and poems. It will generate interest among them about poetry,” informed Husain. “Now our members are composing poems, started performing at Akashvani and on various stages. Youths should understand that poetry as a serious art. Poetry is a food for soul. Whatever we suffer in life can be expressed in a better way through poem. A person after so much sufferings in life try to express it through poems, gradually builds emotional intelligence,” explained Husain. Husain left everything and devoting his time for poetry but he is aware that it would not fetch him the money for livelihood. He has not kept his reading limited to Urdu. He is following Punjabi, Gujarati, English, Marathi poetry too. But he has a regret which he expressed while talking to ‘The Hitavada’, “We lack in literature teaching. Our educational institutions have language teachers but no specific teachers explaining literature. We really want literature specific teachers. We have music school, dance school, acting schools but there is no such school which teaches writing. My efforts are to convert Dark Room Poets into a first school that will teach how to write poems. We will be starting on-line courses soon. I don’t want to earn money but it is my that people should say Husain Rasheed has done some good work for the upliftment of literature.”