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A hard-hitting poem which enumerates a number of reasons which prods one to write poetry.
As if you haven’t asked yourself umpteenth time already, they keep asking over and over why poetry, of all things? After all, poetry is what just a signature on winds, a possible legacy, but mostly love’s labour lost ’cause’ money is still crap.
You want to take their hand and put it on the belly of heaving monster, so they might feel what is invisible to the eye so vast that it can’t be touched all at once but, you invite them for a walk instead till the end of the road to see, what lies beyond the bent.
Every time you step off the edge, to wander into the underbrush, you get to choose a different reason pure hedonism for one thing it’s a licence to get high on love and other stories tipsy enough to speak the unspeakable be provocative or maudlin, blame it on muse later and all is forgiven the next morning.
You write poetry to get away with shenanigans, or so you thought until Kalburgi. You know better now, no ink can get away as well as Karni Sena did, terrorizing school kids to defend the honour of Padmavati, no more a stray group of ignominious right wingers, fringe is mainstream now, growing out of sundry cracks on pavement, until it disappears under the thicket. Liberty is now conditional, catering to the whims of jingoists.
You write poetry to construct a new plot for your story, unsullied by the values of patriarchy, where the honour of an entire clan rests between thighs of nubile girls to be owned and controlled by men who believe that worth of women lies in their vaginas. You refuse to play goddess of convenience, invoked at will only to be sunk in wet dreams after days of revelry.
You write poetry to birth new gods comminglings of yearning and hope, in dystopia where secular is the dirty word, Washiqur Rahman couldn’t get away with and Gauri Lankesh paid for it with her life.
No land with a thousand flowers is pure enough for those who addled by complexity take refuge in false piety. You refuse to be part of ritualistic cleansing of chaotic, multifaceted composite you actually are and embrace your mongrelizing, even if it is the last thing you do.
You write poetry as unofficial civil disobedience because you do not count if silent and your personal freedom does not mean a thing, until all men and women are free, to live and die with dignity, something Mohammed Ikhlaq, Pehlu Khan and Junaid were denied in Republic of ‘Lyncherdom’. You write every time the monster heaves within, threatening to rip you apart, if you do nothing you write to save yourself, it’s as basic as that.
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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