Finding Myself In My Body: Reclaiming Pain
A house that is a warzone. A courtroom for custody battles. Dumping ground for other people’s pain. My body.
Performance
The Bureacracy Of Time Travel
In 2019, I matched with someone on a dating app. We were having a great conversation, which in itself was surprising. Trying to find anything (companionship, laughter, connection, fun, attraction) via the interwebs designed to turn human response into capitalist touchpoints – is counterintuitive. What made it extra surprising was,…
Where’s The Flirty Party?
Flirting feels like a massive party I haven’t been invited to. A concert that’s playing all around me & everyone’s vibing to it, except me. I can’t hear it, I can’t see it. I can pick up when people are attracted to me but that’s from years of being the…
All The World’s A Stage
…said the Bard but what else would you expect from a playright? You can just like looking at a person, even watching them do things, without wanting to do anything with them. I think we’re attached to some stories. Some people just look really good in those stories. Like running…
Getting Used To Standing Alone
Your words brush over me like a breeze that makes me aware of the sharpness of my cheekbones. Cutting the air, making it drift across my hair, in streamers of blood salted sea air. You hold me up as I cough..well, this is awkward. And you say, so let’s be…
The Dating Thing
Let’s do the dating thing. I say Coffee? You say YUP. I spend the next hour wondering what Yup meansbefore deciding it’s a version of Yes. On time, wondering if it’s desperate, we meet. We talk of things slight acquaintances say-Mumbai weather. Andheri traffic. The waiter interrupts to take our…
Language No Bar
(This was written for an Independence Day celebration) The words that issue forth from meI taste them on my tongueFlavours of ideas shaped by thosewho came before me, far from meSeparating me from kinI am an English speaking Indian The language that shapes my identityborn differently from meIts birth land,…
Patchwork Relationship
——————————————————————————————————————–For all of you homesick for the sickness of love, hating yourself for thinking of your exes and wondering if healing will ever happen. It won’t. It can still be beautiful.——————————————————————————————————————- When my heart is an emotional wastelandI find you standing at the brinkYour back to your own poisonous past We exchange…
Dirty Talk
We are so many feelings and experiences and memories and conversations. We refine what fits into a label called an identity, the way our travels fit into a little cardboard book called a passport. Just like a passport, that identity only contains the details of things the world deems most…
Meeting My Feminism
I grew up feeling like my life would follow the same path as other people – work and you shall achieve, be and you shall receive. It baffled me when I was attacked or called entitled for this, when the boys I knew, weren’t. I wrote about this often. I…
Paper Plane Pilot
I was a diarist through my teens. When I was 24, I discovered blogs which I learnt was short for ‘web logs’. And my diarying transitioned online. Because I wrote under the then anonymous identity of IdeaSmith, I could pour my unvarnished feelings into writing, things I didn’t feel at…
Capacity For Joy
I crossed a birthday last month. Being born near a decade switch, my every ten years seem to align in personally with the defining traits of the decade. At 20, I was a newly minted adult in a newly minted millenium, a forerunner of the generation that would come to…
Meeting My Feminism
I grew up feeling like my life would follow the same path as other people – work and you shall achieve, be and you shall receive. It baffled me when I was attacked or called entitled for this, when the boys I knew, weren’t. I wrote about this often. I…
HOME – An International Poetry Day Performance
I’ve written reams and reams about home – going away from it, running in search of it, how it defines me, how I define it. I am a Cancerian, after all. We make this world feel like home. Maybe not entirely coincidentally, my contribution to International Poetry Day 2019 was…
A Pink Bird Flies Through The Ruins
Mid 2000s: I was fresh off the press, newly minted professional and facing a reality that I was not prepared for because the generation before mine had never seen it — RECESSION. I was the forerunner of a generation that would only be named a few years later but would come…
SXonomics On The Reproductive Justice Happy Hour Podcast
I’ve been quiet on the blog, haven’t I? It’s been a very busy first half of the year. I’m not complaining because it keeps me from worrying about other things that I can do nothing about. And the work has been good and fulfilling. Ishmeet and I got invited to…
Stage Fright And A Lily
I found gratitude in February. Here are all things that were life last month. A conversation on safe spaces – One of Mumbai’s performance/art spaces and Shamir’s former employer hosted a discussion on safety in performing spaces. We shared experiences, fears, ideas and some hopes for this landscape that we are…
The Show Goes On But Can It Be Better?
In the last week, a young woman accused Shamir Reuben, a popular male poet, of trying to elicit nude pictures from her. The case has hit news headlines, caused a lot of shock, outrage, accusations, defensive statements and more in the poetry community in Mumbai. Since then, there have been…
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LA-based GirlTalkHQ covers SXonomics: ‘Indian Band SXonomics Using Spoken Word Poetry To Talk Feminism & Fight The Patriarchy’
Late last month, LA-based GirlTalkHQ spotted SXonomics and carried our story: “Indian Band SXonomics Using Spoken Word Poetry To Talk Feminism & Fight The Patriarchy” They say of us, “While SXonomics touch on topics that are universally understood, such as shaming other women for their choices, there are issues that…
SXonomics in DNA AfterHours: ‘ These Bands Are Giving Out A Strong Message In Music/’
I’ve been relatively quiet this month, on the blog. But the words have been hard at work. My collaboration with Dr.Ishmeet Nagpal, SXonomics, has gone on to the next level. We decided to take January to take stock, figure out where we wanted to go next. And maybe as a…