New Delhi: Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee today (March 5, 2004) said that politics came in the way of his either becoming a poet or a journalist which he wanted to be in his earlier days.

"I had never thought that I will be known as a poet, though I wanted to become a journalist. Politics came in between. Neither I became a poet nor a journalist," he said releasing the translation of his poems.

Planning Commission member K Venkatasubramanian had edited the translation of Vajpayee's poems in Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada editions. The poems in Hindi were earlier translated in Tamil.