The Hindu Business Line : Find the right poems

"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you... " Thus, begins a poem titled If by Rudyard Kipling, included in a collection titled A Poem for CRY, from Penguin (www.penguinbooksindia.com) .

"If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too... If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools... If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch... " continues Kipling. "It is a poem that I was given in my childhood and it was a huge inspiration. It carries a beautiful message on life," says Rahul Dravid, about If. Apt for cricket teams, you'd agree.

Shobha De speaks, not about her new collection of `Cocktail Sarees' that she recently launched in Chandigarh, but of a `simple, sincere, sensitive' poem by Pablo Neruda, which wraps with this stanza: "Let's avoid death in small doses, keeping in mind that being alive always requires a much bigger effort than the simple fact of breathing." It begins on a solemn note: "Slowly dies who doesn't turn the table upside down, who's unhappy at work, who doesn't risk the certainties for the unknown to pursue a dream, who doesn't allow himself to run away from wise suggestions, at least once in a lifetime."

Search around, and you'd find that `the best poet', according to Neruda is `he who prepares our daily bread: the nearest baker who does not imagine himself to be a god'. Why so? "He does his majestic and unpretentious work of kneading the dough, consigning it to the oven, baking it in golden colours and handing us our daily bread as a duty of fellowship," as Neruda explains in his Nobel lecture dated December 13, 1971, on http://nobelprize.org. The foreword by Amartya Sen assures, "If one can find the right poems, quoting someone else can be as much an expression of one's deeper self as anything one can write oneself." The book's editors Avanti Maluste and Sudeep Doshi speak of how they were inspired by Lifelines, a bestseller during the 1980s. "Lifelines was the brainchild of a group of students from Wesley College in Dublin who, over several years, collected poems from global celebrities for the benefit of charities around the world," notes the preface.

Wish we did something similar with our regional languages too? Well, the editors have included translations, such as of Kaifi Azmi and Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Agyeya and Saahir Ludhianvi. "Learn well all that is to be learnt; thereafter let your conduct be worthy of that learning," reads a translation of a Thirukkural.

Interestingly, the project got its first contribution from the President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. "Embed the thought of Nation being bigger than the individual, in the minds of leaders and people," he wishes in The National Prayer.

Inspiring compilation.

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in