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I had a privilege to meet poet Ram Prasad Bisoi, a man of great humility and enthusiasm during my visit to Bhuwaneshwar on 4th March 2018. Bisoi kindly offered to email me some of his poems for my reading which I not only enjoyed with a sense of fulfillment, but it also made me contemplate on the common spirit of the creative people across the world.And it is no surprise that his poems to a large extent helped me find an answer to it. For an instance, in his title poem from his collection Life, The Splendor the poet very particularly writes, “I live my life of my own choice”. This motive is just an open secret. This sense of freedom is at the core of our creative endeavors which recurrently appears in Bisoi’s poetry.

The poet seems to be aware of the mechanization of our lives. But the story doesn’t end there. He smells something uncanny. And his wrath comes louder through his words. “Let machine prevail”, he writes in his poem titled “Consciousness”.In the time when we are more assured by the artificial intelligence of the robots than in the creative human minds, he questions what is important: technological advancement or the human consciousness?

Bisoi’s poems are not only commentary on social evils of modern times. Many of his poems celebrate the aesthetics of our social designs, nature and humanity. In a poem titled “The Lady Hawk”, the poet readily praises the movements of a lady hawk who declares herself to be the “master of my moments”. But we can see that there are some contradictions in Bisoi’s poems. On the one hand, he depicts a very contemplative mood and on the other, he rejoices the art of living in the present. But this contradiction is very natural and valid. We live in such a complex psycho-social scape that we all undergo a situation what the poet calls “psycho-shizo-effective crisis” in his poem “My Insanity”.

The crisis of living in the present time is well-reflected in his poem “Love, The Predator”. What an oxymoron! What a contradiction! But only such contradictions can help us explain the kind of life we live now where the gods are in the battle field, and our lovers are all set to stab us with their knives. Who will be savior then? Who are we to be assured with? These are the questions clearly indicating the most unreslovable crises that we have now. So, we tend to doubt ourselves. Probably, what we live is just a shadowy existence. And poet Bisoi is consciously witnessing these crises through his poems.