Review of What is Saved - Batori hui Khushiayn

Q1 Tell us something about the person Ampat Koshy. How is he different from Dr. Ampat Koshy?

    The person Ampat Koshy is a very nice guy if you meet him or get to know him very close. But to those others who are not lucky enough to get to know him so close, he comes across as a totally unsavoury character. Dr Ampat Koshy is his alter ego who comes across as suave, dapper and a scholar-poet, a writer's writer with a dark sense of humour.

  Santosh : I have absolutely no clue about the unsavory part , and any way, people have different tastes, tell me ,  is he a maverick? Does he tilt at windmills? Is he an empath, a narcissist, an escapist? Is he paranoid?  A non- conformist?

 Dr. Ampat Koshy :  He is an autodidact, and he tilts at windmills so that may explain why some people call him the Don,

Santosh : Ha ha , You do have a sense of humour ! They call you The Don! not Don Quixote!

 Dr. Ampat Koshy : He is an empath, a narcissist and an escapist or he would not be on fb though that makes him a masochist. He is distinctly paranoid and not just non-conformist but out and out a rebel who does not know what the hell he is rebelling against anymore , except that it is probably everything, which is a rather untenable position. 

Santosh :    I remember , you once remarking  that you were a born rebel . But tell me , Does Dr. Koshy have a real  sense of humour? I have seen poets behaving in weird, quixotic ways. Let me tell you about myself , I am notorious for my wacky sense of humour , and people are afraid of my totally unpredictable utterances . Are you unpredictable too ? 

Dr. Koshy : He is a totally humourless guy, a bundle of contradictions He makes others laugh all the time, often at himself, then .hates himself and them for doing it but continues in this strange way, maybe love to himself that he is not humourless but has an advanced sense of humour.  He behaves weird always and is quixotic in always being on edge. Weird is his normal and quixotic is his thermal.

Q 2  Tell us something about yourself, which we do not know. 

Dr. Ampat Koshy : I used to be Don Juan or Casanova in my parallel quantum earth or life

Q3 Well , that is something which we really did not know . Thanks for letting the cat out of the bag [ But was the cat always out of the bag ?] Jokes apart , but the readers would like to know something about your literary conquests , which we know are many [not your other conquests ! ]  eg - the form of sonnet that you have created.The Roseate Sonnet .
.

    D Ampat Koshy :    The Roseate Sonnet as a form was created by Dr. A.V. Koshy in December 2012.  He also wrote the first one. It is a South Indian variation on the Italian or English versions of the same.

“The Rose was chosen as an inspiration because of its enduring nature as a symbol in literature worldwide.”

“The rules are as follows: the sonnet must have two quatrains first, followed by a couplet and then by a last quatrain that starts the first line with an R, the second with an O, the third with an S and the fourth with an E to form an acrostic that reads ‘ROSE.’ The form has no other constraints like rhyme or metre or blank verse having to be used, unlike its earlier forms or variants. There is no fixed syllabic count for the lines. It was inspired by a profile picture of a rose on a poet-friend Gopali C Ghosh’s Facebook, again revealing its post-modern media-driven antecedents, and parallels such new experiments in form as the ones by Mutiu Olawuyi (9/11 poetry) and Bina Biswas (five liners). It also is a brief nod in the direction of Sonnet Mondal‘s experimental caudate sonnet, in its choice of name.

The first Roseate sonnet was written by Dr. A.V. Koshy

While the first Roseate sonnet was written by Dr. A.V. Koshy, the second one was created by Sreepriya Balakrishnan. Both of them are from Kerala, in south India, thus strengthening the South Indian link. More has been written and are in the offing from other poets.

Santosh Q 4. The Roseate sonnet is creating ripples, nay waves, in the literary world.  I hear some poets have even got the roseate sonnets published in e-zines. Can you tell us the reason of its popularity?

Dr. Ampat Koshy : If you type Roseate sonnet into google you find roseate sonnets by Kumaara Sukeja, Ananya Chatterjee, Subhajit Sanyal, Reena Prasad, Daipayan Nair and many, many others, This is crazy!  You even find one by endlesselan  (Prabha Prakash) and an article on it where you find many in the comments section as a part of a contest on the form. Poets like Sudeshna Mukherjee, Satbir Chadha, Lily Swarn, Santosh Bakaya, Lopa Banerjee, and Geethanjali Dilip as well as Sarmita Dey have all written roseate sonnets, so it is a very South Indian and Indian phenomenon. An anthology of it soon to come out has already got 135 sonnets in it in this pattern. Its popularity is due to its ability to be sufficiently a challenge and yet masterable as well as the intriguing twist whereby it brings in an acrostic and changes the position of the volta while still using the stanza and quatrain-couplet possibility of form. Getting rid of the metre, rhyme and syllables count helped. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and 300 or more sonnets written in this form shows it is a great success. It strikes the right balance between the difficult and the easy. The Significant League is bringing out the anthology and it has a 50 poem sonnet from Santosh Bakaya which is an entire narrative poem! Daipayan has a whole lbog of them here already: 

https://roseatesonnetwithmuses.wordpress.com/  

Santosh :   The last stanza in your sonnet is an acrostic for ROSE, why not lily or Iris? Why this fascination with Rose?

   "The Rose was chosen as an inspiration because of its enduring nature as a symbol in literature worldwide. Its presence in the sonnet can be seen as random conjunction in keeping with postmodernism that both gives it order and brings in an element of chaos,  whether  love, beauty, religiosity, spirituality, divinity, mysticism, sexuality or sensuality is the  subject matter of the sonnet itself." 

Q 5 What are your future literary projects ? 

 Dr.  Ampat Koshy :  Twenty or twenty-five books, with various authors. :) 

Santosh : That is indeed wonderful ! Should we take this number  with a pinch of salt ? Well, I take it with a bucket of salt , but am convinced  that you can really do it ! Not just twenty five , but even more !
 Here is wishing you all the best for your forthcoming literary pursuits .