Interview with Indian poet, Vishwas Vaidya

INTERVIEW
with a poet

VISHWAS VAIDYA

While I was surfing one day on a well-known Social Network, I felt the need to comment on a post done by a friend. Someone else, a total stranger to me at that moment, replied to my comment. It was not a common reply, but a poem. The stranger’s name is Vishwas Vaidya and from that moment, I could say… “I met a real poet”.

It has been such a long time since I read a poem. I am the prose type for sure. I recall my childhood and teenage period when I read my last poems. After this, it’s been a total blank space inside my heart for this genre.

I read Vishwas’ poem and my heart was touched. He has a certain style… a mix of old and modern. He himself is a mix of several other domains. After meeting Vishwas Vaidya and completing my first “My Writing Process – Blog Tour” where I presented four other authors, I was inspired to start a new section on my website, called “Interviews”.

My first interview was going to be with none other than Vishwas Vaidya – a deeply heartfelt poet (as I like to refer to him).
I made some research online to find details about him… before starting to ask my questions.

Vishwas Vaidya is an engineer; he works as Assistant General Manager at a well known Indian company, Tata Motors Ltd, since December 1996, where he leads a team of electronics engineers responsible for designing automotive electronic control units. In the past he worked with Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He studied Control Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and graduated in 1987. Being born and living in Pune, Maharashtra, he finished his schooling from New English School, Tilak Road, Pune-30.

My reasons for choosing Vishwas Vaidya for my first interview are vast; on the one hand his poems have the power to make me dig inside my heart and bring to surface answers for many spiritual questions which can arise during a life time. On the other hand, I had chosen him because he is an engineer exactly like me, and he decided to write poems, as I decided to become a writer. And I have some more reasons related with the country in which he resides in: India.

This country has always attracted me in deep way. I was there several times and visited many places in this beautiful country. One of my favorites is Mahabaleshwar, located exactly near where Vishwas Vaidya is currently living: Pune, also where Osho’s International Meditation Resort is located. Do I need to talk about Osho here? Maybe I will do it in another article. Today I want to present to you a great poet… a Hindustani poet… Vishwas Vaidya.

***

MCS: Good morning Vishwas. Thank you for accepting my invitation for this interview. I want to give back to people the hope of Love. Your poems are filled with love. It is like you are talking only about love, without any exception. Using words you succeed to sing about women and love, without causing any external sound; but at the same time you arise inside the reader a storm of colors, fragrances, music, aromas and touch – the heartfelt touch.

Are you praising one woman in your poems or all of them?

VV: I am not praising any woman really. The lover here can mean many things creating diverse shade of meanings. A reader may think that the lover in the poem is God, or a book or a goal of life or just pan womanhood and lastly of course he/she can think of it as a real lover belonging to any gender.

MCS: When did you discover that inside you lived a poet?

VV: Two years ago when I wrote my first serious poem on Facebook. A decade before that, I was mesmerized by Tagore’s poems. When I started posting his poems on Facebook somebody challenged me to post mine. Then I found that I too can make poems strongly influenced by Tagore’s genre.

MCS: Aside from being a poet, Tagore was also a short story writer, song composer, novelist, playwright, essayist, and painter. If he influenced you so much, will you also take all his steps or will you intend to refrain to poems only?

VV: Tagore was mainly a poet only. All his other forms of writings are poems really wearing another attire. I am mainly an engineering scientist and with my kind of schedule, poetry fits in quite well where time from seed to fruit of an idea is very less.

MCS: In many of your poems you are talking about the eyes. What do they represent for you? What do you see behind them?

VV: What is the difference between Indian poetry and western poetry. In India, lovers communicate through eyes. Eyes speak the inner language of the heart. Many of our Bollywood movies lovers are shown expressing themselves only through eyes which speak a thousand words without uttering a single one through the mouth.

MCS: Please talk about one sad moment from your teenage period and about one happy moment from your childhood. How to you remember your parents in the childhood age? Do you have sisters, brothers?

VV: I was a math loving kid who hated languages. The sad moment in my life was when my grandmother expired. She was counting her last moments expecting me to be at her side before she could breathe her last. But I could not make it.
Like everybody else, my childhood too is dotted with happy moments. One of the happiest moments being cracking Math/Physics sums which no other kid (and sometimes even teachers) could not crack. My parents were a constant source of love and care. Both stayed with me even during my adulthood. My father expired six years ago and I am lucky to have my mother still with me. I have an elder brother.

MCS: What happened when your grandmother passed away? What kept you from arriving in due time? Did you ever write a poem for her?

VV: I was 17. I could not reach her due to some personal compulsions that cannot be revealed here. There was no way I could go on my own a few hundred kilometers to meet her. She still comes in my dreams calling me to meet her. People around her during her last moments told me that she was waiting for us grand kids to arrive any time before she bade farewell to the world.

MCS: You love Math/Physics. Who are your models?

VV: Maxwell and Newton. Maxwell by the way was a published poet.

MCS: In the “Destiny’s Journey” poem you compare man with “a passing fragrance”. I find it to be very interesting, the combination between three very distinct non-material notions: fragrance, breeze and time. This poem made me think so much and deep, that I feel that I can already write an entire book about the fragrance’s travels through the breeze’s help, into the dimension called time.
My question is: what were you thinking about?

VV: My father’s demise makes me think often regarding the paradox that a human life is. It is transient like a fragrance. It gets over before you know. But every fragrance is blessed with a potential to leave its immortal memory behind in your heart. In that sense every fragrance is immortal. And so is every human life. Every human life though short-lived can leave behind its lasting legacy.

MCS: You compare the human life with the transient fragrance, which gets over before you know. Still you mention both fragrance and human life to be immortal. Do you want to add more about this subject? If not… I will ask you… what do you feel about reincarnation of the soul in a different time and space in various human bodies? Did your belief remained the same during your life, or was it influenced by society?

VV: An immortal life has nothing to do with re-incarnation. Look at Mahatma Gandhi. His life lasted hardly seventy years but eighty years after his death, the fragrance of his contribution to mankind lingers on. An immortal fragrance is paradoxically short-lived but its memory keeps lingering on resurrecting the fragrant feeling eternally.

MCS: Are you a cynic person? Where are you hiding the cynicism about which you are talking in “Coming back to life” poem? Your eyes are telling me that you are anything else except a cynic person. What deep sadness can provoke inside you the cynic side?

VV: I am far from a cynic person. Now you know how to read my eyes which partly answers one of your questions about eyes. We all are chasing one goal or the other in life and love. Sometimes our heart is filled with sadness regarding the futility of the chase, which provokes the cynic side.

MCS: Reading your poem “Loving for your beloved”, one question arose in my mind. Are you referring here to a living beloved or about a non-incarnated one? Which longing prevails inside your heart?

VV: A good poem is always open to myriad interpretations by the reader… like any other work of art. You may take it as a living beloved or simply as goal of your life if that is what has haunted you. It can just be an idea you are chasing. A discerning reader will be able to apply different lenses of meanings to my poems and derive a rainbow of meanings. After all, enjoying a poem is also an art!

MCS: Tell us about your book. How was it born? Moreover, why did you choose the title “Symphony of the Night-flower”?

VV: As I said above I started writing in response to a challenge thrown at me. The engineer inside me was busy cracking the riddle behind the sublime greatness of the immortal works of legends like Tagore, Gibran and Chekov. I believe I cracked a portion of the riddle and formed the answer in the form of a set of rules, which if you follow can result into a great poem. This formula was so successful that my poems started receiving global fan following. And chorus of publishing my poems grew louder each passing day. That is when M/s Aasra Publishers from USA noticed me and requested me my draft for publication. In India we talk in languages of eyes and fragrances. Night-flower is a lasting romantic motif ever present in many old songs and poems. Its oozing fragrance intoxicates the lovers making them lapse into tender moments. The poem’s title is woven around this theme. There are a few Bollywood scenes/songs woven around this delicate theme.

MCS: You mention twice the Bollywood movies. Who are your favorite actors? Why are they your favorite?

VV: Sanjeev Kumar and Dileep Kumar are my favorites apart from Meena Kumari because they can convey myriad different emotions through their eyes, voice and other means of acting.

MCS: I saw that you read articles relating with the art of cooking. Is your passion for cooking or for eating? Or do you prefer both?

VV: I am an innovator. My chief profession is being an engineering scientist who has won many patents and awards. As an innovator, I like to explore new territories. I know basic Indian cooking and make your mouth water with aroma of my creations. But it is not really a passion. I joined that group to explore new experiences.

MCS: Ok… Coming back to the engineer inside you… I know that you received the Gold medal for topping all branches of engineering in your final year. What did you feel in that day: before and after receiving that honor? Did you somehow write any poems at that moment?

VV: I was far from a poet that time. However I did write a poem on my Alma mater to celebrate the occasion. That being my very first poem in my life. I did not expect the honor before it, since one can never be sure to top a few thousand students. This one event has been a guiding light my whole life and empowering me to achieve new heights. By the way the photo pertains to my success in Diploma Engineering exam from VJTI College, Mumbai. I went on to finish the Degree course in Pune followed by Masters in IIT, Delhi with top honors.

MCS: What are your co-workers saying about your passion for poetry?

VV: My co-workers deeply appreciate the poetic turn my life has taken and treat me as a role model.
One young man even proposed to form a music band to sing my poems. I have won so many engineering innovation awards and they agree that poetry writing has helped me in thinking out of the box.

MCS: What does your mother prefer: the engineer inside her son or the deep poet who was born two years ago by coincidence?

VV: My mother is a constant source of appreciation of whatever I achieve from childhood be it a scholarship or a medal. She appreciates everything equally.

MCS: You are a “cocktail of engineering, poetry, romance and innovation”. Tell us more about your romantic life.

VV: As Plato says in his famous dramatic monologue “Symposium”: purpose of love is procreation.
The procreation can be in the form of producing a work of art. An artist romances with his art to procreate works of art. My engineering creations as well as poems are both the outcome of my romantic life in that sense and so is my daughter Swarali who is a young poetess herself. All my discerning readers are in love with my poetry and that sows the seeds of new poems as works of art.

MCS: Your favorite quote…”Promise is a promise!” by Ratan Tata. I find this quote to be one of the most powerful which I ever read. Did it somehow happen to you to not keep a promise? If yes, what did you feel when you realized that you failed to keep it? Also, during your life, did someone make you a promise that was not fulfilled? What did you feel in that moment towards that person?

VV: You need to read a little bit of recent history where our company came-up with $2000/- worth of world’s cheapest car. That was a promise made by our boss Ratan Tata to humankind and we all worked towards it day and night to fulfill this seemingly impossible feat. This quote has nothing to do with my breaking or making any personal promise to anybody. One needs to be making honest promises to one’s own destiny and keep fulfilling it. Perhaps that is the most divine way of fulfilling the tryst with one’s own destiny.

MCS: I know this part of Tata’s history. I remember how happy I was several years ago when they announced the first time about this car. I even arranged to import it when it was supposed to be ready. But… I will not comment anymore about this subject.

Thank you so much Vishwas for your time and for all the revealed details. Do you want to add some more for our readers now?

VV: Look at the art of poetry as a way of living your life. That way every day of your life can be turn into a line of poem and your life turns into an epic poem as you meet poetic wonders every turn of your life. To quote from my poem, “The Day I Met You”:

Two stanzas of our life..

blended into a poem..

The day I met you!

***

Vishwas Vaidya doesn’t have a website or a blog. But you can find him on his Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/vishwas.vaidya.94

You can buy Vishwas Vaidya’s book of poems, published by Aasra Publishing, from the following links:

For buyers outside USA click the Amazon link below:
Symphony of the Nightflower – Love Poems by Vishwas Vaidya | Amazon

For buyers residing in USA follow the links below below:
Amazon

Do explore and comment on YouTube recitals of his poems below:

Symphony of the Nightflower
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfvM3TsfVFk

Midas Touch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNXqrfwdopA

POEMS by Vishwas Vaidya

Symphony of The Night-flower

The “Night-flower” is oozing..
With a fountain of heady fragrance..
Ruling every breath of my night..
With music of her infectious zest!

Eyes of my heart..
Stay glued to the doorway..
Breathlessly weaving dreams..
Throbbing with foot-steps of my beloved!

Every beat of my heart..
Has anyway surrendered..
Its martyred existence..
To the reign of her eyes..
Crowning every moment of my life..
With music of silent tears..
Longing to sweeten her lips..
With their wet smile!

How does it matter then..
If she never turns-up tonight..
As long as my tears..
Emulate silken touch of her lips..
Connecting dots of my dreaming thoughts..
Into a live illusion of her wet kisses..
Weaving a neck-lace of immortal moments..
Drenched in the fragrance..
Of the misty-eyed Night-Flower?

© Copyright 2014 Vishwas Vaidya All Rights Reserved.

Destiny’s Journey

“I am but a
Passing fragrance
Floating on the
Breeze of time”
Hummed my life,
“Born as a
Flying spark
Of creation,
Exuding its
Fountain of
Fugitive colors,
On the face of
Every passing moment!”
“I am but your
Wedded companion
And your every new glance
Is the first glance
to me!”
Echoed the beat of my heart,
“As our eyes weave together
A timeless journey
Lapsing in the womb
Of Eternity”
“Where are you headed to?”
Questioned my eyes,
“What other destiny
Can we really have….?”
They chorused together,
“When our journey
Is our destination…!”

© Copyright 2014, All rights reserved, Vishwas Vaidya

Coming Back To Life

The sky is gazing
At dark eyed clouds,
Cynically smiling
Behind star-lit tears!
Why don’t you come back
To my life once again,
And tickle the shackles
Of my silent cynicism
Into a garden of giggles?
Cup of my life,
Is brimming
With restless moments
Why don’t you smile,
Into my life once again,
And charm my unrest
Into endless waves of
A drizzling dream?

© Copyright 2014, All rights reserved, Vishwas Vaidya