Perhasps it is the style du jour that makes Whispering Mind such a pleasure to read. There is nothing whimsical or sly about the poems, which seem to shun the idea of repressed emotions that can build up and fester in the mind; the focus is on narrating a love story that is universal in scope and timeless in its appeal. The lines are light and quick rather than ponderous and self-occupied. Babe and Darling, the material incarnations of Yin and Yang, are a couple who can’t live without each other, they have to go from excess to excess, travel across different corners of the globe, and partake of the local cultures and issues. Their love is portrayed through poetic conceits and matching melodies, and at some point of time it turns introspective, so that instead of journeying through landscapes, Babe and Darling explore emotions, or the meaning of relationships, or the “intense feeling experienced by the heart, mind and soul.”

Like any classical poet, K.P. Shashidharan appears reluctant to expend more words than he has to; the poems flow along extremely precise lines that echo a catalogue of emotional themes, which can be considered to be a part and parcel of contemporary living. There is no mention of the illusions of childhood, of family, and of the world, the poems have their own internal logic of focusing completely on concrete reality. The Theme One begins with these words “Amazing shadesemerge when life passes through the prism of experience. Life is short to have all experiences.” These lines might as well be taken as an expression of the book’s leitmotif. As Bade and Darling take their large journeys across myriad landscapes and through the sea of emotions, they observe and learn from the experience of other.

The tallest structure stood
Known for beautiful rendition to artistry
Engineering genius
An overriding hallucination
Vision, ecstasy, dream suspended
Never before in the horizon
Since the Stone Age man
Came out of his cave!

The above quoted lovely lines are inspired by a vision of world’s tallest skyscraper Burj Khalifa. Not many poets would like to find anything poetic in a tall skyscraper, but Shashidharan is capable of peering inside the highest windows, as if it were someone else’s dollhouse. Once they have satiated their voyeuristic tendencies in one place, Babe and Darling move on, to a next destination where they can partake of new insights and experience Considering the equality of attention that Shashidharan imbues into every culture or landscape, it would be easy for his work to fall into a sort of literature that draws its leitmotif from the idea of melting away of national boundaries in an era of globalization. But that might not be the case. He is only interested in observing, without ever being judgemental about anything.