Back in 2011, Menka Shivdasani got an email from out of the blue. It was from a Michael Rothenberg, and asked if she would be interested in doing a Mumbai event, Hundred Thousand Poets for Change (100TPC).
Rothenberg had been thinking about how poets could change the world, and had cold-mailed poets around the globe, asking them to organise local events with the core tenets of peace and sustainability seen through a local lens. By events, he meant anything from people reading poetry to each other by candlelight or large programmes or flash mobs… whatever anyone wanted to do.
Shivdasani, who is a journalist, has also built a reputation as a poet (her most recent collection, Frazil , came out this year) who builds communities, going back to the Poetry Circle in Mumbai, which she co-founded in 1986. “I didn’t know if he was genuine,” she says, “But I was interested, because I think poetry deserves every platform that it can find, so I said okay.”
She collaborated with another city poet, Anju Makhija, for a small event at the Mumbai Press Club, as well as a workshop for children in a tribal community in Bandanwadi, a village in Raigad.
Threads of continuity
Worldwide, 100TPC took off quite spectacularly. “In the first year, 700 people organised programmes,” says Shivdasani. Since then, it has embraced other creative disciplines and has grown into an around-the-year activity. For the next year, Shivdasani asked the bookstore Kitab Khana if they would host, and got an enthusiastic response. “Before I knew it, it became a five-day event, all organised in the space of three weeks.” Kitab Khana has continued to host the Mumbai gathering, and Shivdasani has striven to have other threads of continuity: “It has to be multilingual, because Mumbai is not a city that speaks just English, it and has to have women’s writing because that is close to my heart, and one programme is always a children’s event.”
Since year two, the children’s section has been put together by Rati Dady Wadia, who was Shivdasani’s English teacher in school, and the writer Katie Bagli; Ms. Wadia had independently approached the bookshop to host an event, and the staff suggested the two collaborate, which they have since then. “She’s a 75-year-old and has the enthusiasm of a 25-year-old,” Shivdasani says. The time for kids is essential to the event, she says. “If you’re creating that sense of awareness, I’m hoping that tomorrow, at least one of them will say, when I was six years old, I wrote that poem about compassion [this year’s theme]. Maybe that will turn into an innate part of them as they grow up, because they have given it a little bit of thought when they were children.”
Given that poetry does not get too much public space, why expand to other disciplines? “Creative artists of any discipline would respond sensitively to any issues,” says Shivdasani. “Poetry finds its space against all odds. Today there are more spaces than they were when we started out in the 70s and 80s. Lounge bars and coffee shops offer you space; they’re not ideal because you have to make yourselves heard over the sound of cups clattering, but they’re there. I think poets will always find their audiences. I don’t think 100TPC is diminished in any way because other disciplines have gotten into it; it’s become a more powerful platform, and poetry is definitely the foundation on which it rests.”
But can poetry really be a change agent? She says, laughingly, “You can be an activist and you can be a poet, but you can’t necessarily write activist poetry that works; it could end up being very bad poetry. I would not be able to write a poem about a rape, or about drug addiction, or violence towards women, but it would come out in the poetry I write in other ways, because these are issues I would respond to as a poet. As a poet, you are responding to the world in a sensitive manner. If you feel strongly, it will spill over through the poetry. And if you could touch even one person, make that person think about things, I know it sounds cheesy, but make the world a better place… I don’t think you can overnight change the world because you are making a poem. But I do think that if you can make one germ of an idea somewhere in one person, if you can manage that, you have achieved something.”
The eighth Mumbai 100TPC will take place at Kitab Khana,, starting today at 5.30 p.m. onwards and on October 5 and 7; more details: facebook.com/ 100TPCMumbai
