SOA Literary Festival: Noted Poet Rues Happenings In Society

Bhubaneswar: A sense of fear appears to have gripped the society as the situation has undergone change in recent times, Jayanta Mohapatra, the first Indian to win the Sahitya Akademi Award for English poetry, said on Saturday.

“The situation is not what it was a few years ago. The sense of freedom, which I used to experience personally has disappeared,” Mohapatra said while participating in a ‘Face to Face’ programme at the two-day first SOA Literary Festival, which concluded at the SOA Deemed to be University here on Sunday.

“Whatever that sounds illogical has become logical today. I don’t like it,” he said in an oblique reference to the current situation in the country involving protests by students and others and the face-off with the police.

In an interaction with Dr. Dipak Samantrai, the celebrated 91-year-old poet walked down memory lane while expressing his love for mundane things like sunshine, moonlight, birds and flowers. “I always wait for sunshine to light up my life,” he said adding he didn’t like the idea of an overcast sky.