PRIYA CHAITRA TAPASVINI

PRIYA CHAITRA TAPASVINI in Kannada is all about love and pride: two principles of the life force. Love & pride as opposite streams of the life force, together constitute life. They are opposite principles. The salvation of life lies in binding the opposite principles into a holistic harmony. Indians call the principles as Prikriti and Purusha facets of life and nature. Chinese represent it in Yin and Yang symbolisms. Almost all great civilizations of yore recognized the interplay of the negative and positive energies of nature that drive life and natural processes forward to a recondite objective. End indeed is incomprehensible. But means are within the reach of human experience. This volume of poetry is a labour to this end, an effort towards the recondite objective.

Love and pride are polar opposites, yet inseparable partners, siblings and comrades in arms in the evolution of nature and life processes. They are opposites, therefore inseparables. They are opposites, therefore inter alia spawned the nature and life that created us. They are opposites, therefore there cannot be love without pride and there cannot be pride without love. Love and pride are opposite and inter-complementary. That is the beauty of the nature and life. This volume of poetry strives to catch the sublime beauty in words.

In spiritual realms, love and pride represent divergent aspirations. Pride is emphatically treated as the antithesis of the love principle. Love expands and binds while pride restrains and divides. Love is treated as gateway to salvation while pride, a passage to hell and sufferings. Not really. Truth is that both love and pride are sheer life principles that render life rich, fertile and beautiful. As far as spiritual realms are concerned, both are blocks to that end. The concept of universal love no way contributes to the perfect detachment fundamental for uniting with the basic force behind all. Anyway, our concern is with our life and the nature around us, and love and pride are the principal directors guiding us in the drama that we unfold. Having come to life, we are under obligations to play our parts, and love and pride play important roles in fulfilling the obligations to our creator to reach our individual goals.

Love like Yin or Prikriti is considered female energy while Pride like Yang or Purusha is male. Pure female energy and pure male energy are just concepts and abstract. Everything in nature and life are constituted of these opposite energies in different shades. Love without pride and pride without love are sheer concepts and nonexistent or unstable like quarks and Higgs boson (God particle) in physical world. Love and pride together is life and nature. Poems in this volume represent this truth— hopes, fears, desires, frustrations, cravings, disillusions of life and the nature that guides life.

Truth is that love sans pride is impotent and insipid while pride sans love is hollow and directionless. Interplay of love and pride makes life what it is worth of—potent, tasteful, fertile and purposeful. Pride is incomplete without love and love is incomprehensible without pride. Love is all for pride, its hell or heaven while pride is the very oxygen by which love survives. This is the theme of this volume of poetry.

I have tried to describe love and pride individually and in their interplay in the poetry of this volume. Poems in this volume as a whole should be able to bring out the beauty of love and pride and various nuances of their interplays to the fore. Readers must judge how far I succeeded in this delicate objective.

The poet in this volume of poetry represents pride principle while love principle is personified as Priya Chaitra Tapasvini—a sublime image of most charming and most wonderful love of pure devotion, dedication and sacrifice ever born on this world, whom I know as most perfect and prettiest in all worlds. This volume of poetry is lovingly dedicated to that one.