What I love about Unerase poetry is its devotion to quality, not quantity. They do not churn out content just because they may lag behind if they do not. This is what makes them one of the best platforms for poetry lovers. May it be Rakesh Tiwari’s ‘Missing,’ Aranya Johar’s ‘A Brown Girl’s Guide to Gender, Gaurav Triparthi’s ‘Lord Ram in Court,’ Navaldeep Singh’s ‘Tiranga, or Simar Singh’s ‘The Legal Rapist;’ Unerase Poetry has always delivered the best.
If you go watch all the above mentioned performances, you will find one thing common in them – they all, with the help of spoken word, shed light on the issues that have been fighting for our attention since a long time – while some are screaming out loud, others are silently waiting for the awakening of the human race.
Ramneek Singh’s ‘Hawa Mubarak’ is another masterpiece. Some lines just pierce straight through your heart. They break your heart; shatter your soul. What is ‘Hawa Mubarak’ about? It’s about the brutal murder of trees. The best part about this piece is that the poet do not preach. He does not tell us how we will suffer if we chop the trees. We aren’t worth being taken care of. The speed at which we are destroying this planet, we deserve nothing but death. So, it makes sense to not give much importance to the ill-effects of deforestation on human beings and their health. We will vanish someday, anyhow. How does our lives matter? Why should we matter?
The focus here is on the trees and saplings and n number of ‘green’ on earth which is on the verge of extinction. All thanks to the bigger cause, ‘development.’ The opening lines will haunt you every time you silently watch someone murder a tree –
“Katt te ped ki chhaati se agar nikalta khoon, tu unke kattne par dukh karna aasan hota par khoon ke alava kaha hai hamare paas maapdand chot ka andaza lagane ke liye”
His story of a baby plant growing up in constant fear of getting chopped and wondering ‘katkar marna achcha ya ghutkar’ will give you goosebumps.
While the content was heart-wrenching, I, as a listener, felt that there should have been pauses at places. That would have given the listener time to digest some of the heavy messages that came up every now and then.
We writers are always being told to write short sentences (though we love writing long sentences that eventually become paragraphs, written without a single full stop). I feel that the same is applicable to all kinds of speakers. If you are speaking, pauses are important.
Delivering a message in one go makes the listener breathless, which is wonderful for poems like “Hawa Mubarak,’ but these ‘breathless’ sentences should not be overdone.
Keeping that one point aside, ‘Hawa Mubarak’ is definitely a must-watch.
Where to Watch? YouTube
Also Read: Ek Nayi Shuruwaat by Krishna Singh: Review
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