On a Country in Captive: A Review on Aruni Kashyap’s There Is No Good Time for Bad News

Aruni Kashyap’s poetry is an organic blend of powerful realities and raw emotions. While many of his contemporary poets devote their attention towards the technical nuances of poetry, Kashyap’s focus beams on what he wants to say rather than the how behind it. The form never overpowers the ideas that he ardently tries to convey through the perfectly cut lines of his debut poetry collection, There Is No Good Time for Bad News, which depicts the plight of a state that was brought to nemesis by the insurgency. His poems offer a spatial tour through the unexplored regions of the Northeast to the streets of Manhattan, where numerous lives are entwined into a single destiny. It resonates with the traumatic experiences and suppressed voices of the survivors of the Assam insurgency alerting the world to the brutality inflicted by the authoritarian state which deprives the people of a happy and peaceful life. The poet draws deep from the turbulent personal experiences of the people around him which he then fine-tunes into the shared experiences of the narrator, narrated and the reader. These verses are stained with the everyday violence encountered by the people of his homeland and unquestionably create a lasting impact, with the conversational style of language that is astutely employed by the poet.