Ha Ha Hu Hu by V Satyanarayana

Author:V Satyanarayana [Satyanarayana, Viswanadha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353050085
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2018-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

Three

Tikkanna, who was standing there listening to our conversation said, ‘You consider Vemanna a poet?’3

I was taken aback. It’s natural, I thought, that one major poet should feel jealous of another and said, ‘Yes, not just a poet, a major poet. We think he is as great a poet as you are.’

Tikkanna grimaced.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I don’t know, we never considered him a poet. He was a yogi; he wrote some verses. Anybody can write such verses.’

I intervened, ‘Yes, you are right. Many of our modern poets are writing like Vemanna, and some now write better than he did. In fact, there are poets whose entire fame rests on such poems.’

Tikkanna continued, ‘What’s there in it? Is it poetry? Does it have an aesthetic effect? He wrote abusively of some traditions of Vedic life; he didn’t quite understand them. If you don’t understand you write like that but then, you can’t call it a composition. If it is, even prose can be called poetry.’

I wasn’t pleased but I kept my cool because of my respect for him.

‘You don’t think Vemanna is a poet? You know who said he was a poet? The same person who said you are a great poet. Did you know that?’

‘What does it matter if he said it? People make mistakes.’

‘No way, he is not the kind to make mistakes. You might be, but he is not. He wrote this thick book; we use it in our universities as a textbook. Vemanna is a very skilful writer. He can express profound thoughts in simple words. He criticizes society, condemns bad traditions, his writing flows with similes. He gained total control of the true Telugu idiom. He is a master of āṭavĕladi, you know, the metre named after dancing girls.’

‘That’s why he became a yogi. Get a dancing girl and you will be a yogi, too.’

‘No, we banished all nautch girls from our country. Now we have singing girls instead, pāṭavĕladis.’

‘Too bad, you have lost the chance of being yogis,’ he said.

‘Forget about yogis. You know what our people think nowadays? A yogi is selfish. He wants spiritual bliss for himself alone. That is wrong. All your traditional ideals are wrong. We rejected all of them. But coming to the point, you were so incensed when I said Vemanna is as great a poet as you. There is another person as great as either of you. If I mention his name, you will run away from here and will never want to look at the earth again. Vemanna at least wrote verses, be they simple in metre. But this third person never wrote a verse in any metre. We think he is superior to either of you. Recently, one of our critics wrote that there was no Telugu poetry before him, no real Telugu language. Our poetry, our language, begins with him. He is so great.’

I stopped, expecting that he will beg me to tell him his name. I wanted to make the announcement after a huge suspense, like the explosion of a cannon.

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