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Poet/Creative Writer
Commenting on Sigdel's poem, a noted critic and poet Padma Devkota has said: Keshab Sigdel, with his special concerns for society and human rights, finds life a nightmare in the poem titled “The Change.” We come to this conclusion because he says that mornings are scarier than nights and confesses: “I fear the Broad Day Light.” To him, enlightenment has taken an about turn in the cities (“My buddha-in-becoming”). “To myself” probably explains this by expressing the poet’s fear of degenerated political practice in the nation. He seeks his own true identity amidst a multiplicity of identities and finds out that the twelve letters of his name “only exhibit[s] my non-existence.” He is a mere nobody, a mere piece on the chess board, a pawn moved and manipulated by the players who determine the course of his life (“The chess game”). This is probably what makes his life a nightmare.

Similarly, Mahesh Poudyal writes in one of his newspaper review: Kesha[b] Sigdel’s verses are more about identity in an apparently unreal world. In him, a powerful urge for change becomes conspicuous, though an inevitable frustration at the lack of change is more or less explicit. To Myself at best represents both these evaluations: “That election/ I voted my own will. This election / I am not sure / because / everybody speaks with threat / to vote for ‘the people’”. Deeply satirical, the poetry is a sublimation of a commoner’s frustration with political impunity. The ‘tag’ nature of one’s name—that often acquires a consubstantial connotation—is exposed in Identity. Metamorphosis presents a grotesque picture of the real, characterised by our strategic suspension of the matter-of-fact realities to retire to an imaginary Byzantium. His Will Power is one the best poems in the anthology wherein the fallacy of the mere rhetoric of change is exposed, especially at a time when the spokesmen of change are themselves undecided about changing.