London. Queen’s Walk. 10 June 2014
Poets for hire… in London in 2014
London surprises you every time. I mean, just look at what happens on crossings in New Delhi. You find the same kind of ragamuffins selling pirated books, or similar looking amateur kid gangs doing the same act of threading their unexpectedly slim body through an astonishingly small ring and a boy (generally a boy) beating the same sort of beat on his small dhol… I’ve been travelling all over the city for years now and even the beggars there don’t change. Delhi street performers don’t employ creativity too often. But London is different. Vastly different.
Yes, there will be the lone guitarist singing some haunting song or a group of people belting out exotic musical beats and a tourist who comes to London after a gap of a few years might say, ‘This looks and sounds similar.’ But the music is different and the musicians aren’t the same who’re simply grey-haired now. So there is a change and you just need to notice it. Even people who dress up as some character out of a movie or a comic book or a literary novel opt for a different inspiration every year. I remember not seeing even one of the characters I saw in 2010 on the Queen’s Walk nor near Trafalgar Square. Yes, London is definitely either too creative… or too mindful of the severe competition even in this end of the entrepreneurship train.
But I’m not going to talk about any of these people who set up their attraction even in ‘No Bustings’ parts of London. There are a few pictures at the end of this post that will be self-explanatory and you’ll know all you want to know about street performers here in London and how they change over time.
So what is this post going to be about?
We’re going to talk about ‘Poets on Hire’ and creative folk like Ranjit Bolt who simply come up to you and say, ‘I write limericks. Will you buy a copy of my autographed poetry pamphlet?’
Ranjit Bolt… the playwright who also composes limericks…
Yes, you can meet Ranjit on Queen’s Walk… we met him there. But you can also read about him on the internet
I looked at him with surprise in my eyes. He smiled and said, ‘I’m an Indian… well, half-Indian and my name is Ranjit. Ranjit Bolt.’ He had to repeat his name thrice and even spell it out for me. I’m sure he must’ve thought that tourists from India aren’t very bright. He then went on to inform ne that he is addicted to gambling and is now reduced to sell his poetry pamphlets for 1.8 GBP. ‘I’m also on Facebook,’ he added, as if he could see the lurking doubt in my stance and eyes and smile and even my voice. In the short conversation we had, he told me that he wrote plays that were performed in the National Theatre right behind us… and that he had also won an OBE. The medal hung from his neck but then like any good tourist who wants to remain safe, we must have betrayed our discomfiture and our silent need to distance from him. He smiled and went his way but not before asking me to check him out on the net.
I did and Ranjit is now in my list of friends on Facebook… and the net does have articles on him and how he allowed gambling to destroy him. The article in The Guardian does mention that the experiences of Ranjit Bolt ‘makes gambling seem a dark and destructive business, and, of course, it can be. But that’s pretty obviously not the whole story. Like all addictive activities, it offers astonishing highs – highs as high as the lows are low. If it didn’t, who on earth would take it up in the first place?’ The article quotes him as saying: ‘During a lucky streak, for instance, I get a sense of quite astonishing and implausibly sustained wellbeing. There was the time, to cite one of many, when I turned my last £2,000 in the world into £82,000 over a spell of about three weeks.’
For these past couple of days I have been thinking about Ranjit and one of the thoughts that came to me was that this man is probably in the middle of some exciting experiment and is trying to live the life that he ultimately wants to write about. If that is indeed the case, I’d want to read his play… and maybe come again to London to watch its performance.
Well, we were talking about performers on the streets of London… and we also saw a man sitting on a chair with a placard that said: Poet for Hire.
I said to Specky, my wife, ‘Let’s go and meet him and ask what he does.’ He was busy talking to some other person at that moment so we decided to enter Tata Modern and come back to talk to him. Unfortunately, when we came to the same spot again after an hour or so, the poet on the Queen’s Walk had gone… and I was left with just a photograph that I happened to click before we had gone to see the exhibition inside Tate.
Yes, London is an exciting city with surprises popping up from every possible direction. Let’s see what happens next.
Street performers on Trafalgar Square… 01
Street performers on Trafalgar Square… 02
Street performers on Trafalgar Square… 03
When the tide is low and the weather is warm… the sand artists too come out to impress. On Queen’s Walk near OXO… 01
When the tide is low and the weather is warm… the sand artists too come out to impress. On Queen’s Walk near OXO… 02
Arvind Passey
13 June 2014
