Hyderabad has become home to a vibrant community of accomplished and aspiring poets. Bringing both of them on a single platform is InkscapeCo, started over a year ago by 21-year-old Drishti Nagda. “Inkscape was started for writers who find it difficult to maintain a blog. You can either be a guest writer or a full-time writer, so there is no pressure. Writers from Manipal, Mumbai, Pune and even Australia contribute regularly,” says Drishti, who is pursuing MSc in Applied Linguistics at the University of Hyderabad.
InkscapeCo’s popularity is on a steady rise and it has now become a go-to platform for many poets in the city. Explaining how the initiative came to be, Drishti says, “I wrote my first poem when I was 13 years old — it was for a friend’s birthday. The poem always stayed with me. Reading the Harry Potter series influenced me a lot too. While I was pursuing my degree, I was interning with a website. A lot of people there were interested in poetry and we began exchanging poems on WhatsApp. Thus, six months down the line, Inkscape was started. Recently, I have also started the Hyderabad Poetry Project to get poets together with my friend Akshay Tiwari. We create awareness about all the literary events happening in the city.”
Interestingly, this young, enterprising poetess even conducts open mic events and workshops across colleges in the city to increase awareness about spoken-word poetry. While she has already been to the Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT), Nalsar and Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, Drishti is planning to conduct events at St Francis College for Women and St Mary’s College in the near future.
“Right now, there are several poems up on the website. We have a presence on social media too. So writers can send in their poems anywhere. We review the poems and sometimes improve them too. Even at the workshops, we organise writing exercises to help aspiring writers,” she says. From heartbreaks and social causes to horror, the poems belong to different genres and have been contributed by people from all over the country. “People in Hyderabad are talented yet living a mechanical life. We want to change that. We want the city to be known for its poetry,” concludes Drishti.
