Schoolboy Dreams ...A Different World

By Siddharth Srinivasan

Siddharths poems, written in his early teens, delve into a variety of issues, analysed from a schoolboys perspective, and range from the problems of farmers and racial discrimination to the grandeur of nature. They also create picturesque scenes, where one can be transported to a world of wildlife, surrounded by the beauty of nature and the joys of life. Some of his poems are descriptions of lives of people, leaving the message of hope, of light in darkness and of victory in the face of overwhelming odds. Siddharths poems bring out, as he puts it, the world in my mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Mar 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781482845761

Book preview

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Copyright © 2015 by Siddharth Srinivasan.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4828-4577-8

                eBook           978-1-4828-4576-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Partridge India

000 800 10062 62

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Contents

The poems are arranged according to a mix of issues: human interest, nature,

environmental justice, social justice and symbolic intent.

The Potter

The Dung Beetle

The Leopard

The Ashoka War

Looking Back

Mother

The Masai Mara Migration

The Tiger’s Plea

The Blacks and the Whites

A Miraculous World

The Farmer

The Desert

The Tree that was Cut

The Farmer’s Suicide

The House down the lane

The Beggar

The Creatures of the Backwater

The Hunt for the Tiger

Road Safety for Children

Saying Sorry

My Family

The Waterfall

Deforestation

The Forest at Night

Saving the Big Cat

The Workman – My Grandfather ‘Baba’

On the Serengeti Plain

The Loner’s Friends

For Mai

FOREWORD

A collection of short poems by a young lad - I was rather sceptical when I was asked to read them, but to my delight, I found them very interesting and intriguing. Siddharth Srinivasan, the poet, has invested a great deal of energy and hard work in penning these poems, which deal with a variety of subjects through his poetry.

All the poems are thought-provoking and sensitive. They show the author’s keen observation and finely honed sense of right and wrong. This identification with the problems of others makes him cry out in poems like The Beggar, The Leopard and The Farmer’s Suicide - a sense of beating your head upon a wall of hopelessness, wrought by the situation. The poems dealing with his family are mostly joyous and evoke a feeling of affection and security. He deals with many aspects of family life in a matter-of-fact way, which is very appealing. The young poet is very acute with his feelings and emotions, as in The Loner’s Friends, where he describes a person’s contentment and happiness with nature, to the exclusion of any human contact- essentially a young man’s version of Thoreau’s ideal.

Many of Siddharth’s poems deal with nature. There are some happy ones, celebrating the beauty and grandeur of nature, like The Waterfall, The Forest at Night and The Creatures of the Backwater, to name a few. But the threat to nature and its creatures is also vividly described in the poems Deforestation, and more poignantly in Saving the Big Cat and The Tiger’s Plea. The House down the Lane is eerie, echoing the fears of the unknown, the mysterious, generating a kind of gothic scariness, familiar in literature. It, however, ends on a happy note.

The Ashoka War describes the awfulness and futility of war. History tells us that the victorious King Ashoka, horrified by the bloodshed and destruction, eschewed violence forthwith and became a Buddhist. Siddharth describes this revulsion of Ashoka in a few pithy verses.

The poems, The Masai Mara Migration and On the Serengeti Plain are, we are told, in an explanatory note, the result of watching wildlife documentaries on The Animal Planet and Discovery channels. But there is a sense of immediacy in them that makes them appear like a personal experience!

These cover, albeit very briefly, the subject matter of the poems. Stylistically, they are sound and use a variety of poetic accoutrements like rhyme, rhythm, allegory, repetition, and pathetic fallacy, to name a few. Although all the poems are in rhyme, the meter changes in each one, avoiding repetitiveness.

A thoroughly worthwhile effort!

Hema Srinivasan

M.A. (English), M.Ed.

Educationist

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply indebted to my grandparents, Dr. N.S. Srinivasan and Mrs. Vijaya Srinivasan, for their constant support, love and encouragement, in all my endeavours.

My heartfelt gratitude to my aunt, Dr. Shobha Srinivasan, for the encouragement she gave me to write this book and for painstakingly editing the poems. I am indebted to her for the invaluable suggestions and for the keen and active interest she has shown in my poetry.

I would like to thank my extended family for all the support and appreciation that they have given me, an essential part of my inspiration to write.

I am grateful to my school, P. S Senior Secondary School, Chennai, for the opportunities and avenues it opened to me by way of competitions, which helped me gain confidence that was integral in helping me write this book.

I would like to thank my English teachers, Ms. Shylaja Vinod, Ms. Meenakshi Viswanathan and Ms. Subhashini Rao, for honing my vocabulary and writing skills and helping me improve at every juncture.

I take this opportunity to specially thank Ms. Meenakshi Viswanathan, for the faith she had in me, the vast array of opportunities that she made available to me, her constant advice