Ingmar Bergman has died at the age of 89. Since the late 1950s, when cinema became an abiding passion for me, Bergman was one of my mentors in screenwriting and filmmaking. The near-religious moral torture reflected in his work found a resonance in his work, though his father was a Lutheran clergyman and mine an agnostic Hindu, it seemed to me that we battled similar paternal ghosts. Most of the dozen or so short stories I wrote were proto-screenplays, and when I made my only feature film Godam (1983) at the age of 45, my guiding lights were Luis Bunuel, Ritwick Ghatak, and Ingmar Bergman. Bunuel's surreal flair, Ghatak's intense lyricism, and Bergman's relentless narrative drive were among decisive legacies in the evolution of my own style. Today I realize that my former idol was thirty years older than me and was a Scandinavian. He was younger than my father but of the same generation. I was two years old when Bergman won his first major cinema award for a screenplay; and he went on to make more than 50 films. As an Indian, I knew it was a near-impossibility to make independent art house films a career. Though even in the West, it is never easy. Bergman's best work is classic; you go back to it again and again and find subtle resonances and complex textures that you missed before. This is what timelessness is about.

Fifty Years of Being A poet

My first Marathi poem was published in 1954 in a literary magazine. I  was sixteen then and was still in high school. My first published poems in English appeared in my college magazine in 1957.

Some of my early work has survived and some has been lost. Much of my early work has been preserved by Viju ( who became my wife in 1960) and now forms part of my three-volume collected Marathi poems (824 pages)--Ekoon Kavita 1,2, and 3. My published poetry in English is found in three collections published so far: Travelling in a Cage (1980), The Mountain (1998), and No Moon Monday on the River Karha (2000).

In addition, there are my uncollected English poems scattered over back issues of small magazines and journals published in India, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.A. as well as about 300 unpublished poems.

Among my translations of poetry from Marathi are Says Tuka (1991) and Anubhavamrut: The Immortal Experience of Being ( 1996) and I am currently finalizing my selected translations of my contemporary Marathi poet, Namdeo Dhasal. Among my younger Marathi contemporaries, I have translated an entire first collection of poems by Hemant Divate (Virus Alert; 2003). I have translated a number of major English, American, and European poets into Marathi although most of these remain scattered and uncollected.

Poetry has been my main activity in life and it is deeply connected with my work in other genres of literature, my painting, and my work in cinema.

Even in the most civilized societies of the world, poets receive ambivalent treatment. Some of them are celebrated, revered, quoted, given awards and prizes. But few of them are ever remunerated sufficiently to make a living as poets. The economic value of what poets do is considered extremely dubious. What is given to them often looks like charity or patronage. The most they can hope for during a lifetime are niche audiences scattered far and wide and small publishers crazy enough to publish poetry without any regard to sales.

On this background, I should consider myself very fortunate that my selected poems of the last fifty years translated from Marathi and English by Lothar Lutze have just been published by A1-Verlag, Munich under the title Der Banyanbaum Ausgewahlte Gedichte. This book contains poems written between 1954 and 2004 and they are about my changing world (and me responding to life as a poet) spanning half a century. A similar selection of my Marathi and English poems is under way.

I feel no regret for having been no more than a poet. It was what I chose to be and to do within my span of life.