Shankar Pandey

“Solitude is a powerful tool; the master who uses this tool must have courage, conviction, experience and vision!”
― Alok Mishra

“In the beginning, poets make their best efforts to fit words into their rhyme and lyric. However, as time passes and the ink mystifies, poets tend to let their thoughts conjure a rhyme in tune with the extraordinary struggles of ordinary life.”
― Alok Mishra

“Only if I knew
that knowing it would bring
a burden I could seldom carry
and ferry among those I know,
only to be rejected.
Who knows what I know?
Do I know if they know?
Who knows all those who know?”
― Alok Mishra, Thoughts Between Life and Death

“Literary criticism, to be precise, and when pursued beyond the boundaries of academic jargon, directly serves the collective consciousness of humanity! It should be carried out to encourage mass participation in the perusal of serious literature or to find seriousness even in the most playfully written literary works. Extending the hypothesis, every author has a thread or two hidden to conceal the life lessons that are layered beneath the entertaining episodes in the storyline. Readers, at large, given their busy and callous lifestyle bereaved of the aesthetic values, may conveniently ignore toiling to reveal those layers; it is, therefore, incumbent upon literary critics to make it happen!”
― Alok Mishra