जब घाटी से देखा तो, सुंदर दिखता था
शिखर
अब शिखर पर हूँ तो ज़्यादा सुन्दर दिखती है घाटी
अपने से बाहर जहाँ से भी देखो
दूसरा ही सुन्दर दिखता है ।
अपने से बाहर
Against the Valley,
Lay the beauty of the Mountain Peak.
From the Peak,
The Valley charms ever more.
When seen from with-out
The Other always appeals.
Be it the dichotomies of experience, or the latent longings which characterize life, a poem holds them all in one warm embrace. The ingredients of poetic sensibility compel a writer to see a little more than others can see and dig a little deeper than usual sense-perception may allow. Leeladhar Jagudi’s work and wisdom highlights this tender balance between living and writing. In this anthology of interviews Prashnavyuh Mein Pragnya, Jaguri talks of poems, poets and the translation of an observation into a creative composition. Since there are twenty-four interviews done across twenty-two years between 1996 and 2018, this anthology could have benefitted by being sequentially arranged, to give the readers a sense of Jagudi’s thought-journey. The anthology is a peek into the repertoire of a poet who can see both the valley and the peak and belongs to neither, because his anchor lies in a witnessing self. For he says,
‘अकेलापन जब अनोखापन बन जाये तो उसकी महत्ता अलग किस्म की हो सकती है’ (p. 123)