Ashay chitre biography for kids

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Ashay suffered from the injuries inflicted on him by the poison gas leak from the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal on December 3, 1984. Those injuries were physical---his lungs were irreversibly damaged. But that was only one part of his life-system that was clinically tested after his arrival in Mumbai shortly after the event. The damage caused to thousands of others in Bhopal that night has been on record since.

The psychological impact of the unending night of December 3, 1984 haunted Ashay till he actually died in the early hours of November 29, 2003.

I am his father and a writer. I also paint and make films. Ashay wondered all his life since the event why I did not write on the Bhopal catastrophe, or why it did not occur to me to make a film, exhibit a series of paintings, compile or research a book on the subject.

Ashay was plunged into pessimism since. Though he tried to fight back, his fight only deepened his despair. He was a victim of human callousness hiding behind the gigantic corporate ‘personalities’ of Union Carbide, the State of Madhya Pradesh, the Union of India, the United States, the prevailing judiciary systems, a section of the media ---and nameless or unnameable other beyond count.

He seemed to me to think that Bhopal had made him some sort of an untouchable, a pariah, a clinical case nobody would want to handle, a terminally sick person cut off forever from the rest of mankind like many others whose horror he could understand because it connected with his own.

Sometimes I urged him to write himself and hoped that this would heal him of his sense of illness even though it would not cure him of that illness itself. I confess now that in a way I tried to distance myself from him, imagining that he would then realize that we were all on our own and on the edge all the time. And if I---his own father---distanced from him, who could come closer from nowhere?

We lived together. We shared a home. Where I live now is a co

Indian Marathi and English poet (1938–2009)

Dilip Purushottam Chitre (17 September 1938 – 10 December 2009) was one of the foremost Indian poets and critics to emerge in the post Independence India. Apart from being a notable bilingual writer, writing in Marathi and English, he was also a teacher, a painter, a filmmaker and a magazine columnist.

Biography

Chitre was born in Baroda on 17 September 1938 into a Marathi speaking CKP community. His father Purushottam Chitre used to publish a periodical named Abhiruchi. His grandfather, Kashinath Gupte was an expert on Tukaram and this served as Chitre's introduction to the poet. Chitre's family moved to Mumbai in 1951 and he published his first collection of poems in 1960. He was one of the earliest and the most important influences behind the famous "little magazine movement" of the sixties in Marathi. He started Shabda with Arun Kolatkar and Ramesh Samarth. In 1975, he was awarded a visiting fellowship by the International Writing Programme of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa in the United States. He has also worked as a director of the Indian Poetry Library, archive, and translation centre at Bharat Bhavan, a multi arts foundation. He also convened a world poetry festival in New Delhi followed by an international symposium of poets in Bhopal. He was educated both in Baroda and Mumbai.

After a long bout with cancer, Dilip Chitre died at his residence in Pune on 10 December 2009.

Works

Poetry

Chitre was a bilingual writer, but wrote mostly in Marathi. His Ekun Kavita or Collected Poems were publish