There is something bizarre and almost violent about the title ‘Pani Ko Parade’. Water is supposed to flow. It slips through fingers, softens stone, floods fields, carries memory, and disappears before anyone can command it. But a parade is about order. It is about discipline, display, obedience, and control. So when Dinesh Adhikari brings these two words together, the discomfort begins before the first poem.

That discomfort is the core of this collection, and precisely why it is worth reading.

If you are searching for a poetry collection that offers comfort in a neat, lyrical way, then ‘Pani Ko Parade’ is not for you. It is not trying to soothe the reader. If anything, it does the opposite. It keeps asking questions that are difficult to escape. What happens when time keeps moving but people remain trapped? What happens when power becomes too comfortable with itself? What happens when private grief begins to look painfully similar to public failure? And, perhaps most importantly, what does poetry do when the world around it has become too absurd to explain plainly?

Adhikari’s answer seems to be this: poetry must witness. It must disturb. It must refuse to look away.

The poems in this collection move between the personal and the political with remarkable ease. A poem may begin with the self, with memory, with a father, a house, a body, or a private feeling, but it rarely remains private for long. The personal almost always opens into something larger. A small emotional wound becomes a social wound. A domestic image begins to carry national anxiety. A poem about existence sounds like a poem about citizenship. This is one of the strongest aspects of the collection. Adhikari understands that in a country moulded by politics, personal despair is scarcely only personal.

In poems such as ‘Astitwa’, ‘Satta’, ‘Yojana’, ‘Gham’, ‘Ba Arthat Ba’, and ‘Gharbhitra: Gharbahira’, the poet returns again and again to the same unease: the human being is fragile, but the systems around him are often harsher than they need to be. The individual wants meaning, dignity, tenderness, and some kind of light. But what he receives instead is power, delay, violence, bureaucracy, distance, and silence.

Adhikari does not treat suffering as decoration. Many poems about pain become sentimental very quickly. These do not. His poems are wounded, yes, but they are also alert. They do not simply say, “life is painful”. They ask who benefits from that pain, who causes it, who ignores it, and why ordinary people are expected to keep surviving with grace.

This is where the book’s political voice becomes important. Adhikari is not writing politics as a slogan, although at times he comes dangerously close. A poem like ‘Jawaf Deu America!’ is direct from the title itself. It sounds less like a written poem and more like someone standing in the street demanding accountability. But that boldness works because the anger feels earned. The poem pushes Nepali poetry beyond the boundaries of local suffering and situates it within a broader global conversation about war, power, and domination.

Still, this directness is also one of the book’s risks. Sometimes the idea becomes stronger than the poem. There are moments when Adhikari’s moral urgency is so clear that the poem does not always get enough room to breathe. The reader understands exactly what he is trying to say, but isn't poetry most powerful when it does not say everything too quickly? When Adhikari trusts image, silence, and suggestion, he is far more effective than when he leans into declaration.

But even when the poems become heavy, they are never empty.

The recurring presence of time also contributes to the collection’s emotional weight. Time in ‘Pani Ko Parade’ is an active element. Time behaves almost like a force. It burns, erases, exposes, separates, and judges. In poems like ‘Antim Tayari’ and ‘Samaya: Pani Mukhagnichha’, time feels ritualistic and destructive at once. It is water, but paradoxically, also fire. It carries life, but it also performs the rites of endings.

The book also has a strong sense of civic exhaustion. ‘Yojana’, for example, feels painfully familiar in the Nepali context. Plans are made. Promises are announced. Development is imagined, drafted, discussed, and repeated. Yet ordinary lives continue with the same uncertainty. The poem captures that distance between official language and lived reality. It understands the frustration of a society where hope is often postponed by paperwork.

The collection’s emotional centre, however, is not only public anger. It is also loneliness. Again and again, the speaker seems to stand in the middle of a world that is too loud, too damaged, and too indifferent. There is a constant search for meaning, but no easy belief that meaning will arrive. This gives the book its existential mood. ‘Pani Ko Parade’ is filled with questions about death, identity, memory, and the fragile position of the human being in an unstable world.

Some readers may find the collection too serious or too intellectually demanding. That criticism would not be entirely unfair. There are poems where the thought is more memorable than the music. There are also moments where repeated concerns around time, power, existence, and injustice begin to feel thematically familiar. But then again, perhaps repetition is part of the point. These are not problems that disappear after one poem. They return because life keeps returning to them.

But Adhikari’s human sensitivity saves the collection from becoming overly abstract. Even when he writes about large ideas, he does not entirely lose sight of the person standing inside them. His politics are not detached from feeling. His philosophy is not detached from pain. His symbols are not detached from ordinary life. This grounding makes the collection emotionally credible.

That is also why the title remains so consistent. ‘Water’s parade’ feels absurd, but it captures the absurdity of our time. Even what should be free is disciplined. Even what should flow is forced into formation. Even life itself is made to perform under systems it never chose.

Dinesh Adhikari’s collection deserves to be read because it refuses comfort. It does not let the reader escape into beauty without also facing responsibility. It reminds us that poetry can still be a witness, a wound, a protest, and a mirror. In a literary world where some poems are content to look pretty, ‘Pani Ko Parade’ insists on staying awake.

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Pani ko Parade

Author: Dinesh Adhikari

Publisher: Nepalaya

Year: 2025