Champak Chatterji

Champak Chatterji served the Government of India as a member of the Indian Administrative Service, retiring as Union Education Secretary. Across decades of policy, administration, and public life, he carried a private habit: observing the world closely enough to write it down.

His poems are not the work of a professional poet but of someone who has learned to see — a drop of rain agitating a single leaf, a black butterfly alighting on areca leaves, the light leaving a room and staying only in the windows, kind and gentle, like the eyes of a grandmother.

There is precision in these poems, the kind that comes from a career spent weighing words carefully. There is also wonder — unhurried, unshowy, attentive to the small exchanges between rain and leaf, butterfly and tree, dusk and tea.

This site collects his published verses — a record of a mind that never stopped noticing, even after the files were closed and the office emptied.