Verse and stroke

Not many 17-year-olds can boast of putting together their creative talent into a book. It’s not just school that keeps Sai Priya Tucker busy, she also engages her time in writing poems and painting. A compilation of her poems and paintings was recently launched in the book titled And The Journey Begins.

Like any other teenager Sai Priya expressed her thoughts and expressions in a personal journal until it was discovered by her mother. “Imagine my mother reading my journal,” she says. However, she adds that it was her mother who first came up with the idea of a book.

“My mother read my poems and encouraged me to come out with a book,” she says.

For this student of Indus International School, paintings and art were a part of the curriculum. For two years she learnt painting which were later incorporated in the book. “I wanted to relate each poem with a painting,” says the young author. Inspired from personal experiences shared with friends and family, her poems are on friendship, family, love and illusions and heartbreaks.

However, she says, “This book is not to show my talent; I want to share what I feel and what every teenager experiences.” It was her understanding of music that led her to write poems. “I learnt Hindustani and Western classical music. I love rhymes, that’s why I chose poems as a medium of expression,” she explains. As an extension of the good work, the money collected from the sale of the book will be donated for a charitable cause. “In our school, we have a Community Action Service program wherein students visit schools in the nearby villages and help the under-privileged. We meet students who don’t even have the money to get proper uniforms and sell their crafts to make money. The money will be used for this purpose,” she says.

An admirer of the works of Rabindranath Tagore, she has not made up her mind on whether she wants to take writing seriously in future or not. However, she says, “I want to keep pursuing my hobbies.”