Sudipta Chakraborty is not an armchair poet ensconced in an ivory tower, untouched by the sweat, grime and strife of real life. Throughout a long and varied career he has been, and continues to be, inextricably entangled in the thicket of common humanity. Being a denizen of this forest teeming with uncountable people has made him acutely conscious of its stoic, unfeeling silence. Not a voice is raised against atrocities, against the erosion of values.

This loss of altruism and the indifferent abdication of our responsibility to transmit humane values to our children pain the poet deeply and imbue his poems with disillusionment:

“ We snatch away the bright bits of confetti— Innocence from children, peace from the old;

We do not, we cannot mourn, we don’t know how,

Is everything for commerce?” [ from a poem in the compilation ‘Mouno Aronyo’].

Yet he is not entirely despondent, he hasn’t given up. Through these poems he strives to train a beam of light through the fog of our inertness. And perhaps, now and again, he glimpses personal islands of joy:

“I took just a sip

From your cup, I woke up in jail; But that’s OK, that’s quite all right,

I don’t want to make bail.” [ from a poem in the compilation ‘Mouno Aronyo’].

‘Mouno Aronyo’, Sudipta Chakraborty’s latest book of poetry, is not itself quiet, or quiescent. It flings arrows to pierce our indifference; it radiates light to illuminate our dark, lonely and bitter existence.