ORIGINAL TEXT BY JERNAIL SINGH ANAND
CRITICAL TEXT BY MAURO MONTACCHIESI
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THE COSMIC VOICE
Jernail S Aanand
Suppose you are travelling in a bus,
comparable to living
In a house
In the bus, people are talking,
And some are fighting too over space.
In human homes,
You can listen to the clamour
Of understandings and misunderstandings
Now, suppose you are standing
On the road,
And that bus passes by you
You do not hear anything
Except the sound of the bus
When it passes
Cutting the winds
In that sound is blended
All the sounds that are raised
Inside the bus
The voice ....shoooooooooon,
Overrides all the voices
In which everything
Human and mechanical sinks
The voices and the noise that we create
Sinks into the voice of the planets
Which move like packed buses
Giving out a unified sound of
Oooooooooooooooo
This is the voice of the void
The cosmic voice in which
All the individual voices
Of men, animals, birds, beasts,
Winds, oceans and mountains
Are finally sunk.
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THE COSMIC VOICE — Jernail Singh Anand
(Complete critical review by Mauro Montacchiesi)
EPIGRAPH
“There is no sound that is not born from another sound.”
— Ancient aphorism - Rigveda
PREFACE
The Cosmic Voice by Jernail Singh Anand, Composed between 2023 and 2024 in the symbolic cultural centres of the Punjab—Patiala, Chandigarh, Amritsar—marks a turning point within the author’s acoustic-metaphysical and rooted in unseen spiritual dimensions research.
The poem addresses a central theme of Eastern thought: the dynamic interplay that connects individual sounds and the great cosmic sound that dissolves boundaries, reconfigures meaning,
and restores them to their original unity.
Anand uses a simple, everyday image— a bus passing along the road— to open a conceptual breach that expands toward the immensity of the cosmos.
It is a poetics of the transfiguration of the ordinary, where the most banal element contains the key to infinity.
AUTHOR PRESENTATION: JERNAIL SINGH ANAND
Jernail Singh Anand (Punjab, 1955) is one of the most influential voices in contemporary Indian poetry.
President of the International Academy of Ethics, cultural ambassador, author of more than 160 works published in India, Europe, and the USA, Anand has built a poetics that unites ethics, Vedic spirituality, social critique, and the philosophy of meaning.
Anand, from his lectures at Delhi University to symposia held between 2022 and 2024 in Europe (Rome, Vienna, Warsaw),
presents an articulated perspective on poetry as an instrument of planetary consciousness.
The Cosmic Voice is one of the texts that most clearly embodies this poetic programme: concise, concentrated, resonant.
CRITICAL PRESENTATION OF THE POEM “THE COSMIC VOICE”
The poem is a transformative progression between the microcosm to the macrocosm.
The poet begins with a common image: the voices of passengers in a bus passing along the street. What appears confused, intense, quarrelsome from within becomes, from the outside, a single continuous sound: shooooooooon.
This dynamic is the key to interpretation:
Inside human life — conflicts, misunderstandings, desires, chaos.
Outside, in cosmic order — a single unified vibration.
Anand suggests that the universe functions like a great resonant chamber: individual sounds are not lost but merge into an ancestral vibration, similar to the Nada Brahma of Indian traditions — “the universe is sound”.
The poem unfolds with a graded rhythm, a crescendo that culminates in the great final mantra:
Óoooooooooooooooooooooo
a prolonged OM, the breath of the cosmos that dissolves all particular voices.
COMMENTS ON SOME PASSAGES
1. “Suppose you are travelling in a bus…”
The image of the bus is a key element that shifts the narrative toward the Calvino-like: in Cosmicomics, the everyday becomes cosmological.
Anand performs the same gesture: a means of transport becomes a metaphor for existence.
2. “People are talking, and some are fighting too…”
The internal confusion recalls the anthropological noise described by Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power.
The bus is a microcosm of tensions, like human societies.
3. “Now, suppose you are standing on the road…”
From this external position—almost Heideggerian—man perceives another level of reality.
Point of view changes everything: as in Proust, perception is a function of distance.
4. “You do not hear anything except the sound of the bus… shooooooooon”
The poet introduces the key acoustic symbol.
The single sound absorbs everything, like the “fundamental tone” Nietzsche evokes in The Gay Science: a sonic unity that imposes order upon the inner movement of life’s thousand notes.
5. “Planets… move like packed buses”
A bold, powerful analogy.
It recalls Walt Whitman, who in Song of Myself sees the stars as a “traveling company of the eternal”.
The planets become cosmic buses, full of lives, energies, silences.
6. “Giving out a unified sound… Óoooooooooooooooooooooo”
Here the text enters the sacred realm of Nada Yoga.
The cosmic sound is the signature of universal existence, like the breath in the Egyptian Book of the Dead or the “thundering Logos” of Heraclitus.
7. “This is the voice of the void… where all voices are finally sunk.”
The “Void” is not a nihilistic emptiness: it is the Buddhist Śūnyatā, the generative matrix.
It also echoes T. S. Eliot in the Four Quartets:
“In my end is my beginning.”
Individual voices, like concentric waves, return to their source.
FREE-FORM HAIKU
Within the uproar
a single breath
ignites the sky.
FAMOUS APHORISM (with attribution)
“The universe is a symphony played upon a single note.”
— Hazrat Inayat Khan
PARALIPOMENON
The interpretative lens by means of the process whereby cosmic sound, in the cultural history of the Punjab, is recurrent: from Sikh chants at Harmandir Sahib (Amritsar) to the morning recitations of the Japji Sahib in the 16th century.
Anand inserts himself into this continuum, but with an almost cinematic, modern language, in which the dynamic image of the bus takes on a conceptual role shared between spiritual tradition and contemporary urban life.
DIALLAGE
The Cosmic Voice articulates three levels:
Phenomenological — how we perceive the world from within and from without.
Ethical — the need to refine listening and to recognise the finiteness of our individual voices.
Cosmological — the fusion of every sound into the primordial vibration.
Synthesis: man speaks, the earth murmurs, the cosmos resounds.
POSTFACE
Anand offers us a poetics of detachment: he invites man to step onto the “roadside”, to assume an external, broader, more cosmic perspective.
It is an act of awareness. It is not an escape.
Understanding that human noise is only a small ripple upon the great sound of the universe frees the soul from egocentric centrality.
FINAL DIDACTIC NOTE
This review follows the Montacchiesi Paradigm, integrating:
multilayered structure
historical, philosophical, and mythopoetic references
real places and dates
semiotic and acoustic-metaphysical interpretations
a highly narrative and humanised critical-poetic style
A text suitable for publication, anthology, reading, critical essay, or academic commentary.
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