Sahitya Akademi on Saturday started a two-day commemorative seminar in the city to celebrate the birth centenary of poet and author Nirendranath Chakravarti.

Scholars and poets who were in attendance remembered Chakravarti as someone who spoke the language of the common man lucidly and classically.

Author Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay said that though they are celebrating the birth centenary of Chakravarti, who died in December 25, 2018, the poet seems to be very much alive.

“I have never felt that he is not among us. It seems as if he is still roaming the streets of Calcutta. He is still penning poems. What an extraordinary command of rhyme, and spelling consciousness. The more you know about Nirendranath Chakravarti, the more enriched you will feel,” Mukhopadhyay said.

K. Sreenivasarao, secretary, Sahitya Akademi, said Chakravarti was a complete poet, in full command of metaphor and expressions.

“His poetry was full of life, filled with worlds of diverse life forms on the streets of Calcutta with all its vibrance, ugliness and dynamism. Probably he is one of the rare poets who engaged with the world as it is without trying to fit it into his preconceived notions that all of us normally do,” Sreenivasarao said.

Education minister Bratya Basu said Nirendranath Chakravarti’s writings reflected the time and people around him. “Be it the food movement, the Naxalbari movement or the Nandigram movement, he remained truthful to the time.”

At the seminar, a monograph on Nirendranath Chakravarti by Alapan Bandyopadhyay, former Bengal chief secretary, was released by Madhav Kaushik, the president of Sahitya Akademi.

“Nirendranath Chakravarti was one of the greatest poets of post-colonial Bengali literature. He was probably the most acclaimed and popular Bardic chronicler because it was in the Bardic poetic chronicling of contemporary history that lay the abiding significance of the poet. He lived long. He wrote till the last and offered incisive critiques of the contemporary upheavals and became the representative minstrel of the New Indian Republic. He was the wandering minstrel of the increasingly evolving, strengthening republic that India became,” Bandyopadhyay, the keynote speaker, said on Nirendranath Chakravarti, also his father-in-law.