Kamala Das-a Rebel Writer

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For those who do not know, "An Introduction" is Kamala Das's most famous confessional poem — a classic of sorts in her own lifetime. In fact, after a brief two-and-a-half-minute biographical sketch, the film opens with lines from this famous poem. And the impact was spellbinding because after this reading, her face comes into view with the opening lines. "If I had been a loved person, I wouldn't have become a writer. I would have been a happy human being." She stops, as if to ponder, to collect her thoughts. "I suppose I started writing because I had certain weaknesses in my system. I thought I was weak and vulnerable. That's why we attempt poetry. Poets are like snails without the shells, terribly vulnerable, so easy to crush. Of course it has given me a lot of pain, each poem. Each poem is really born out of pain, which I would like to share. But then you live for that person, the sharer of your pain, and you don't find him anywhere. It is the looking that makes the poet go on writing, search. If you find someone, the search is over, poetry is over." I cannot fold/my wayward limbs to crawl into/coffins of religions./I shall die, I know,/but only when I tire of love;/tire of life and laughter./Then fling me into a pit/six feet by two,/do not bother to leave/any epitaph for me. Thus writes the 71-year-old Kamala Das in one of her recent poems. Though troubled by various health problems, she hasn't lost her zest for life. The doorbell hardly seems to stop ringing, especially before lunch. Nothing can be more frustrating than to be disrupted, especially when the subject is making a profound statement: "I suppose by writing poetry we are forming a crust over us. Over the essence. The essential self. But even then I think it is like breaking the back of a cockroach at night. Without knowing people unwittingly crush our backs, crush our egos. They walk around

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