22 Hindi Poems In A Day? Bring It On!
This is the standard case of when your penchant for a language makes your pen chant out loud.
I studied in a CBSE school. CBSE stands for Central Board of Secondary Education. Till tenth grade, we had to choose a second language. My school had Tamil, Hindi and Sanskrit as options. Since Tamil was my mother tongue, and not many people speak Sanskrit these days, I decided to pick Hindi, which is a majorly spoken language in the country. I studied Hindi as a subject from first grade, and over the years, I became better at it. I even topped my school in Hindi in the board exams, and I’ve won proficiency awards multiple times. I can now not only read and write Hindi as a subject, but I can speak Hindi quite well, and also dabble with the creative side of me in another language. Which brings me to why I’m writing this piece.
If the title didn’t make it obvious enough, I’m going to tell you about the time I wrote 22 poems in a span of 5 hours, voluntarily. We were in ninth grade, and we had an assignment. One set of grades were based on activities and assignments that we did. No written tests. We had to write a poem in Hindi on any one of the five elements of nature. Most people in my class of 33, and by most I mean 24 of my classmates, picked up stuff from the internet.
When submission time arrived, our teacher took one look at the titles and returned all those pieces which weren’t original. One of my friends used to write stuff in English and ask me to translate in the hope of learning to communicate in Hindi. She was one of the 7 original pieces because she had brought me her half-translated poem, and asked me to correct the Hindi, and translate the English. She learnt the hard way that Google Translate wasn’t very reliable, about three years before that, and ever since, asked me for help. I’d translated her poem and she submitted it. The thing was, she gloated to everyone about her intelligence in asking me to help, and it lit a bulb in literally everyone’s minds. My then crush, who knew how I felt about him, and another girl asked my other classmate, who had also written an original poem, for help. That left 22 desperate people who still hadn’t got poems. Little did I know that I was going to be their great provider and supplier.
It started with a few of my close friends, who asked me to write poems. It was like they were waiting for me, like members of the ARMY waiting on the road for BTS to come to SNL. They pounced on me as soon as I arrived and asked, no, scratch that, demanded and begged (a mixture of both) me to write poems for them. Some of them didn’t have a preference, as long as they got a poem, whereas some suggested specific elements. I remember not choosing the element ‘sky’ voluntarily, because my poem was about it. I didn’t choose ‘fire’ much too, because it was the hardest to rhyme. It was a long time before I found myself eligible enough to write poems of depth and no rhyme scheme. But rhyming is more fun and harder. I mostly wrote about water. Air got the second place, and sky came in third.
Anyway, before long, people realised that if one set of girls could make use of Vaishnavi, so could the rest. Requests started pouring in and I accepted every one of them. It was like I was this overnight sensation on Instagram and people suddenly wanted to be my friend. I thought that this was a good chance to improve my Hindi poetry. I was right. But I had to think of different words and things to write about. It improved my Hindi, and my thinking.
Each of those poems was special to me. They were like my children. I had to write down each person’s request because I couldn’t remember all of them. And when i counted, I found that I had written 22 of them. Oh, the things one does for the sake of art. Everyone said that they owed me. It wouldn’t be the first time though. Except, this time, I had to apply my brains a lot more because the poems couldn’t be repetitive. If it was my math homework, it would just be passed around the class and copied. I studied the original few poems for ideas too. By the Hindi period, I was done with all of them.
Needless to say, my teacher praised me. I think she must have figured out, because some people didn’t copy the poems onto a new sheet. At least she didn’t complain as long as she got 33 original pieces. Some people just submitted it with my handwriting. Most of them didn’t even take the time to understand my words. They said that all they cared about was passing. I appreciated a few of them who took time to sit with me when I wrote so that they could ask me meanings of words or phrases. It was hard work, but I truly cared about learning the language.
Even when people told my mother to change my second language preference, because it would affect my rank in the board exams, as Hindi was the hardest out of the three languages, I refused to shift. I felt that learning something which is new and useful is good. I’m now good at the language. And I came third in school, which is good enough. So I wasn’t first, but I’m satisfied. And that’s what matters. But the day I realised what I was capable of was the day I wrote 22 Hindi poems at school when I was 14.
