20-year-old Meghna Gulati has come a long way from “roses are red, violets are blue” and a basic rhyme scheme; now a published poet, with her collection of poetry A Little Bit of Grey, and founder of online venture The Zine, she is on her way to making big waves.
She started writing poetry at the age of six – “My mom got me into reading at the age of four. My entire childhood was just a series of Enid Blyton stories. At some point later on, we collected all my books and the collection was close to 1,000 books,” reveals Gulati excitedly. Her journey as a poet only continued form there. When in the 9th grade, she would write poems for her best friend and people that she didn’t like – “I would give my friend her poem and keep the other one private. These days, I’d do the opposite,” she says, laughing.
Of her expression through poetry, she says, “Anything can be poetry. It doesn’t have one particular form. I could write five arbitrary lines about a curtain and that could become a poem.” Meghna started performing her poetry at the end of the 12th grade and hasn’t stopped since. Poetry slams give her the opportunity to let her audience know what she really means. “I used to worry that people may not understand my poems, but the truth is, this is just for me. This is my catharsis.”
An active and outspoken advocate for mental health and its awareness, Meghna explores her passion through writing. “I was always taught that prose had to be fictional for the most part, but I cannot write unless it is out of experience, so I write poems. I can’t make things up,” she stresses. And that is exactly why she cannot stand the recent mental health trend. “People that have never suffered these problems go around writing pieces about what it must feel like to be depressed. It makes no sense because they have no clue. If someone has a friend that is suffering from depression and writes about an experience from that point of view, that is true and real,” she stresses.
In recent months, the spoken word lover, has been organising events to discuss poetry and working on restructuring her magazine. “The Zine was started in 2007, with the aim of being a magazine that had everything I liked to read in it. No categories, no themes,” she says. That lack of direction didn’t pan out so well and Gulati, along with her team have now decided on a theme – stories of change. And so, Zine will now present stories on everything, just like she had always wanted, but with the context of change. As said earlier, she’s on her way to making big waves... soon we’ll be able to feel the splash!
