The COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown from 01 April 2020 to 31 July 2022 my dates for the purpose of this book] was for me in a somewhat selfish sense of the word a period of an incredibly enhanced versatile creativity. I produced an enormous amount of reflective writing in both prose and poetry. Although all the thoughts that occurred to me during the quarantine forced on Humankind by Mother Nature were recorded both in prose and poetry, I have put them into two separate books to avoid confusion-and to preserve the two independent forms of the Literary Arts in their pristine glory.

This publication is a compilation of COVID-19 POETRY under the title of Wayward Verses. The sister publication is exclusively devoted to COVID-19 PROSE that has been compiled under the title of Stray Musings.

Despite the lingering presence of COVID-19, because I am still alive, and in good health, I have every reason to believe and hope that whatever else Corona-forced quarantine worldwide might have done to Humankind, it surely has corroborated my curious credo. Unless every individual human person sits alone at home to reflect at leisure on the Mystery of Existence vis- -vis their idiosyncratic encounters with it, there never can be any eternal ecstasy in the Mortal World.

With this small dose of my homespun metaphysics, I warmly invite you to my World of COVID-19 Creativity. You will readily figure out that as I had recorded my thoughts as they sprang up within my mind, they follow neither any rational order nor a deliberate plan. However, they have found their mode of expression in prose or poetry as instinctively suited to their bubbly merrymaking spirit as if in the gay-abandon celebration of mortal existence to assert jubilantly that Death never can kill Life-whether it is COVID-19 or any other mass-killer pandemic.

About the Author: Founder-Teacher and former Principal, Chandigarh College of Architecture, Dr SS Bhatti is India's most versatile professional-architect, artist, art & literature critic, poet, singer, musicologist, writer, philosopher, and mystic. He has developed and works in 55 disciplines as an abiding tribute to the great all-inclusiove Indian tradition which, according to him, is grounded in "Holistic Humanism". He applies the tools of Theory, Practice, Research, and Pedagogy to the study of four major fields of human endeavour: the Humanities, Art, Science, and Technology besides Culture and Comparative Religion. As the inventor of this novel approach to the study and understanding of human creativity vis- -vis human predicament he has discovered Spiritual Realities that illuminate the purpose, path, and salvation of human life. He insists that the discovery of one's native creativity and its development lead to God-realisation. This is his Nirman Marg, the Creative Way.

Wayward Verses - Covid-19 Creativity in Poetry - pocket, Engelska, 2023