Arunoday Singh: I don’t think I’ll ever write my memoir!

Bollywood actor Arunoday Singh has compiled the first collection of his poems, and shares how he’s more comfortable to find his rhythm in poetry vis a vis prose. A self-confessed “compulsive poet”, he reveals about his muse from his school days, his quarantine poetry after divorce, and why he never names his poems.

To a fickle human mind, it’s somewhat difficult to create linkage between an actor — who has the typical, cliched demeanour of a Hindi film villain — and a sensitive poet. But, as actor Naseeruddin Shah states on the cover of the book, Unsung, it’s actually true that the “formidable physique” of actor Arunoday Singh “houses a gift for words”. The 39-year-old, however, vouches for poetry over prose, to share his musings with the world.

Actor Arunoday Singh has recently come up with his book of poems, Unsung.

“Having the persona [I have] doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to have a sensitive soul. That has nothing to do with how you look or how people think you are. That’s who you are... I think there’s a little bit of a poet in everyone, doesn’t matter where they come from,” says Singh, who is an erstwhile student of literature. Feeling elated to invade the poetry space and showcase his prowess, in his recently released debut collection of poems, he almost swears to steer clear of writing a memoir; in spite of the fact that many young actors have already taken that route. “I don’t think I’ll ever write my memoir! I don’t need to; I’ll leave poetry behind. I’m too young to even think about [writing a memoir]. My life has been very exciting. I’ve had a great life. But I think unless you have had a life of some momentum or that’s affected the world, you should skip the memoir. Nobody needs to know about my life (laughs). If they care enough about you, they know about you. I don’t need to write anything more, and you don’t need to know anything more about me than what I’m writing. All the private details of my life are mine,” says Singh, who reveals, quite candidly in this work, how he had first found his muse in a girl during his days at the boarding school.

Singh has been part of films such as Mohenjo Daro (2016), Blackmail (2018) and the web show Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein, and at heart is a compulsive writer of poetry. He says he can “write anywhere”, and even mentions in the book: “I have paused making out, to write something down before I lost it.”

Cover of the book of poems, published by Penguin.

There is, however, no reference to the time periods when he wrote these, now published, poems, but some of them are his “version of a quarantine poem”. Referring to one of them, he shares how he wrote it during the “first lockdown”, and explains, “A couple of months ago, I got divorced; otherwise I would have spent the lockdown with my wife (Lee Elton). When I write I ‘learnt to dance, the year they outlawed the music’ it meant I was now free again, and ready to be clear and clean and on my own terms, and then there was a lockdown. So that’s my metaphor for being quarantined... That’s the thing I like about poetry, it has nothing to do with how I was feeling when I wrote it. The point is, how it makes you feel, which is why I never name them, because I don’t want you to have an idea of what to think about, at all. Just read it and some of it will be terrible and some of it will be sweet, and somewhere in between is OK.”

Author tweets @HennaRakheja

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