An Evening with the Poets

My friend was pleasantly surprised when he received an invitation to the poetry reading function of the Sahitya Akademi.The Akademi was celebrating its golden jubilee and poets from all corners of the state were invited to read their poems in the jubilee function.
It was positively a great honor for my friend for though he was a good poet and quite senior a practitioner of the poetic art, he rarely got any invitation to any meeting. He just didn’t have the necessary wile to be famous. And now, suddenly recognized by the state, he really felt elated.Butr diffident as he was, he asked me to accompany him on that day.
It was evening when we reached the meeting place. The whole area was nicely decorated. Massive hoardings on the nation’s culture were displayed. Big paintings of dead littérateurs adorned the walls. Poets from all over the state had come and had occupied the hundreds of rows of chairs neatly arranged in front of the podium.
My friend, dressed in immaculate white, felt a tingling sensation on entering the meeting ground .For the first time in his life he was feeling the importance of being a poet.
We took our chairs in one of the middle rows. After the customary welcome, the poetry reading session statrted.The president invited the poets one by one to the dais to read their poems.
It was really nice for the poets to recite their own poems. In the first one hour we had the pleasure of listening to all our famous poets. Huge encomiums were showered on them by the president of the meeting. Famous as they were, it was not decent for them to listen to other lesser known poets and hence they left the place as soon as they finished reading their poems. Still many poets waited expectantly waited for their turns.
But just at this time came the bombshell. The president announced that in view of the shortage of time every poet would be allowed only two minutes to read his poem. Hardly had he finished, there rose a murmur of protest among the poets. Some one quite loudly remarked, “This boot-licking slave of a president could give as much time as they wanted to all the big names. And now he asks us to finish our poems within two minutes!”
The president (quite a seasoned president he was) pretended not to have heard all these remarks and announced name after name. The poets, though dissatisfied, did not make an issue of it. No body wanted to lose the opportunity of reading his poem to such a vast audience.
But taking all of us completely unaware, the platform suddenly turned into a battlefield. It all happened in this way. An old poet was reading his poem and he had not quite finished when the name of the next poet, a young one, was announced. The young man dashed onto the stage and seeing the old man still reading his poem and thus taking away the allotted time to him, pulled him away from the microphone and started reading his poem into it.
But the old poet, determined to complete his poem, gave a push to the young man and moved close to the microphone. Not to be outdone, the youngman gave a spirited blow to the old poet who tripped and almost fell to the lap of the president of the meeting.
But the president, keeping strictly to his two minute schedule, went on calling out the names of the poets and the poets crowded onto the stage. Soon they started snatching the microphone from one another. The stage became a regular boxing arena with free blows freely exchanged between the poets on the stage.
Soon the supporters of the warring factions took up the cause and with war cries joined the battle. Chairs were hurled into the air like missiles on their missions and all the decorative fittings were wrenched from their places to serve as readymade weapons.
Seeing this sudden development the president announced the meeting closed and silently slipped through the back door. Many in the audience also quietly made their way out. We were totally shaken and my poet-friend, unaware of this chivalric dimension of poetry, nearly fainted. We also could not make our exits as we were locked in a place with fights raging all around us.
But when the police whistle blew, most of the war heroes made a dash for the exit and soon vanished into the dark. Some of us could not just manage that as it was difficult to negotiate our way through broken chairs and glass splinters. And by the time we reached the exit, the police was already there.
My friend was a bit ahead of me in order to get out of the area as soon as possible. He was halted by a stern-looking police official and was asked, “Are you a poet?”
My friend understood the import of the question and mumbled, “No, no, I am not at all a poet. I just came….”

------------------------------------