What is perfection, if it doesn’t please few eyes or gathers few compliments?
This is not what we say, this is what the society says. In an ecosystem that is obsessed with defining and re-defining variations of beauty, perfect skin, perfect height, perfect weight and perfect blah never seems to have a dead end.
Women have majorly been at the receiving end of this tirade.
This hard hitting poem of Singapore-Bangalore based poet Nupur Saraswat walks us through a promenade of her life and the absurdities her surroundings gifted her with.
An ardent performance poet Nupur was one of the finalists of Singapore’s National Poetry Slam 2015, and engaged by TEDx 2016 and UN Women Singapore for creative assignments.
Her volatile words and performance method has been appraised by Javed Akhtar and Rahul Bose – both of whom she shared a stage with in 2016. An environmental engineer, a writer, a recruitment consultant, and a spoken word artist, she runs her own brand of artist collective called The Beasts of Bed and Battlefield.
Like Nupur, for many performance poets, this is a medium of turning their struggle with taboos and norms into their own personal revolutions. Young poets write and speak out about the unsettling traditions they see around them.
Brothers speak out about their privilege over their sisters; daughters talk about the kind of mothers they aim to become based on their own upbringing – things they would take with them, things they would like to leave behind.
Through the simple act of voicing her opinions, Nupur aims to turn her parents, relatives, and friends into her allies.
She believes that every word is a silent protest. In order to break free from tradition, our deprived institutions and misplaced stereotypes, this revolution is necessary. And, a long time coming.
She says that poetry is her weapon of choice against body shaming, patriarchy, and the complicity we so easy assume in gender roles and Twisted and Mine is one such powerful narration.