Yash met me at a workshop that I took in Nagpur. It was Summer of 2016. He was apparently a shy, naive innocent teen. Introspective and seemingly way too green. He lingered in silence during the two-day event. Nearly a year later, he reconnected with me with an enthusiasm for poetry. He shared his poetic verses, and life took a very different turn altogether.
I was confounded and I was determined to guide him. I started understanding him a little more.
Defiant style attracted him to dark poetry but the fear of failure would always suspend him to take any steps in life. He was draining in his life creating nothing, but circumstances were about to get “farthest.”
“A pot smoking, ink pen devotee that draws energy from dark poetry, invading humour, Dev-Anand and extreme laziness”, Yash Singhania finally came out and exposed himself.
His book, “A Cynic’s Shadow” originated. The work turned critically acclaimed with reviews from hardcore poetry readers. His work changed me as a person.
I have been a poet all my life. I was always surrounded by hundreds of writers and I always correlated with poems at large. However, I had stopped scripting poems, ever since a retired disaster took away that inner zeal and passion in me in 2014.
Couple of poems from Yash just took me to a zone less travelled by.
Oh! my Ram,
Your sins have led
To the death of
Our lord – The saviour.
Birthing a religion,
On a magicians death
Who was born to a virgin
And turned water to wine.
He the father
Of the first addicts.
Who stripped their conscious
To tightly bind them
With clothes of belief.
Stranding them stark naked
In cold nights.
Starving them to
Let vague hope fill them.
Ricebags for the preachers
and hellfire for the nonbelievers.
The purple-clad pedophiles
Scream his name,
To silence the screaming children.
Sin! Sin!
My dear Ram
Because he died
For your sins.
-Yash Singhania.
In ancient era, poetry was filled with chaos, and poets were the ones who started a religion. They hid gods in broken lines. The modernist poets have hardly scribbled very random rhymes to drain feelings and through the number of poets has improved drastically, real poets have died a gruesome death.
But here comes Yash Singhania with A Cynic’s Shadow. A poetic masterpiece that brought me closer to the ancient era poets. A book that has revolutionized the notion about poetry yet again. A book that, I am sure, will revolutionaries how poetry is recognized.
Yash mixes religion, culture, and life, as we know it, with short quick sentences. I mentored him, and I still am, but he had a fan in me. A secret fan.
