To begin walking is to risk falling,
To grow up is to risk innocence,
To give is to risk return,
To live is to risk dying.

However,

To smile is to stake sorrow,
To cry is to stake happiness,
To love is to stake life itself.

But aren’t people going about these activities and more every single moment of life. Nobody feels the amount of risk that every person takes with every breath, but everybody feels the result of breath itself. Nobody feels the blood flowing through the veins, but everybody feels the effect of every heartbeat.

Life itself and the world it surrounds us with is full of such paradoxes. Things that you never know, things you know but never feel, things you feel but never understand, things that you understand but can’t express, and things that you manage to express but nobody understands or bothers to understand.

The poems that will be posted in this blog are all such expressions of the things mentioned above, which I have been able to express, but it is left to the reader, to understand or even choose to understand them.

For, to choose to understand, is to stake ignorance.

- GUPTA GHOST

1. Almost all the poems will contain some form of rhyme scheme(including an innovative a/a scheme). The name of the blog as you can see is ‘licence to rhyme’. It’s a licence that I have taken upon myself to fully exploit, subject however to the limits of poetic appropriateness. If something obstructs the flow of the theme, I have always taken care to do away with the rhyme, than sacrifice the theme for pretty decorations(I strongly believe in the saying “Content is King”).

2. No effort is complete without mentioning the persons behind such a venture, for if it wasn’t for the labourers, there wouldn’t be Pyramids, yet nobody knows the name of even a single labourer, although people are able to rattle off an impressive list of the person buried inside, his wife’s name and even their grandchildren’s names. That is what has been left to posterity.

Let people not accuse me of the same. So here goes a thanks to:

A) Mr. G. Satish Babu for getting me serious about poetry by doing nothing in that regard(he actually did something else, but it resulted in me getting into this, and besides I must really thank him for giving it more prominence than I thought it would get).

B) Ashish Verma for giving me the guts to put my efforts in the right direction, when all my roommates dissuaded me saying a head-on fight with Mr. Satish Babu would lead to complicated problems. If my poems ever even reached the notice board that they finally did, its hats off to Ashish Verma, and his persistence(what would I achieve without you Sadde).

C) Akshi Arora, Aparna Reddy and an ‘Unnamed Girl’ for helping me get into new and more instinctively forbidden sections, things I never thought I would ever get my pen to write, but you people pulled it off and with style and an iron grip on me.

D) Dr. Ashok Karri, who would patiently disturb his own peaceful solitary lunch, to read each of my poems and give comments on them(people and he himself would say it was nothing, but it means a lot, to find a person willing to read a piece of non-syllabus/non-career/non-celebrity literature).

E) Last of all, and maybe the crumbs of thanks left, to you, for even visiting this page.

3. Earlier my poems were on a site that I had designed(with the artistic designing skills that I possessed, it was bound to be a disaster, but I went ahead anyway(read above about RISK). It was only later I got to know that people were more willing to give suggestions and comments about the design than about the content(that really hurt a content-oriented person like me). So I decided it was high time I shifted to a place where people wouldn’t have much scope to criticise the design and rather focus their energies on the content(although there will still be such people, I wouldn’t really bother, because the design wasn’t by me).

4. Last, but nevertheless an important point by itself, PLEASE COMMENT ON ANY POEM THAT YOU READ. People improve by criticism, not by flattery. You need not have delusionary worries that you are a nobody, and you cannot comment. Even the humble ant has something to teach the mighty lion. A simple comment like “I didn’t even understand a single line” would teach me to be more simple in future(after all I am not writing to indulge my ego in my proficiency in the language, I am just writing to express my thoughts, and if they cannot be understood, there’s no point in continuing to express them).

So feel free to comment. Don’t let limits of self-imposed decency to curtail the level or vocabulary of your comments. Speak whatever you like, I won’t mind, but what I do mind, is not hearing you speak at all(if any of you ever find your comment moderated, you can stop reading my blog forever, because such a thing will never happen).