Reading poetry to your children is like giving a health tonic to their soul. While my Twitter was flooding with #WorldPoetryDay, I couldn’t resist to write something about it. Here is what I remember. During my childhood, I have seen my father reading poetry to my mother, an extremely peaceful act at home. As children, we watched it curiously. Later when we grew up in ‘superficial non-literary circumstances at college’ – we still realised the magic of poetry is in appreciating it – not trying to make one. While I was a teenager, my father, one day me called upstairs of our home and read me a poem called ‘Kurumulaku’. It set the tone in me. A dramatically written one with subtle references to multitude of things. Years later, somebody sent me that poem randomly to my Facebook messenger. It delighted me. I shared with many who could read Malayalam. On a flight journey with one of my client, I reluctantly showed this poem to him (getting some inferences that he reads literature). He was overwhelmed by it.
To me, poetry – reading or writing – is like a pilgrimage to your own soul. If you can’t be a poet, be a poem.