Artistically 'Verse' Atile!

It has been a good year for local artiste Akarsha Kamala, who recently bagged a meaty role as a cop in popular Kannada telly-serial Magalu Janaki. And now, there’s another reason for the engineer turned short-filmmaker and actor to be stoked. This time, as he plays a host for Drishyakavya - a visual extravaganza, a poetry session, at the Bangalore poetry festival. He shares the inside track with us...

“This is the first time I will be facilitating a poetry session, and it was offered to me by renowned poet Prathibha Nandakumar and Subodh Sarkar. It came along the right time, as I’ve been collating my own collection of poems off late. The themes for this poetry session are bold. Poets will be touching upon topics like sex, accepting unconventional sexual orientations, abuse and other topics too, which were rugged under the carpet for a long time,” begins Akarsha.

He goes on to add, “This is a huge platform to meet poets and like minded people, who believe in celebrating their scribbled verses.  Also, renowned film maker Vishal Bharadwaj will be facilitating a session after mine, so I am excited.”

It is clearly a case of good timing.   “My short film Mareechi is also getting screened. People can look forward to great poets, great short films and an opportunity to meet Andrea Jeremiah and other seasoned creative professionals.” 

A big venue like this will ensure such short films will find their reach to many audience, believes  Akarsha.  His short film Mareechi, was the only Kannada short film to be screened in the short film section of the South Asian short film festival. 

With a surge in the number of people sharing their poetic offerings online, Akarsha believes the market for fledgling poets have only broadened. “The concept of closet artistes/poets is slowly fading away. Off late, people are openly sharing their poetic musings and recital videos online, not worrying too much about judgements, which is great.” 

Akarsha has his hands full with another projects too. “My next short film will be women -centric and talks about an issue that people often don’t discuss about and I am working on the script. That aside, I will also be publishing my debut Kannada poetry collection this year,” he signs off.