KOCHI: In school, she was asked to participate in a Hindi extempore competition impromptu. Neither did she know the language nor did she have the heart to say no. Yet, she went onstage, began the extempore with a ‘Namaste’, ended it with a ‘Dhanyavad’, and left gracefully. “Those two words were all that I said. It was embarrassing, to say the least, but I walked out with double the amount of confidence,” she quips. A nursery rhyme states that little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice, but one can be assured Parvathy Salil, the girl in question, is made of confidence and eloquence.
All of 21, Parvathy Salil is a poetess and boasts of more achievements than one can count on both hands. She, currently, is in high spirits over the release of her second book ‘The One that Got Away’, which contains a blurb by Shashi Tharoor, a mean feat.
“I was asked to speak to Tharoor sir if he could write the foreword for my book. I did and he took the time to read my book, regardless of his hectic schedule. He gave me lots of constructive criticism and wrote the blurb for my book,” Parvathy says. It all began when she was in Class VIII. An essay writing competition at school shed light on Parvathy’s innate ability to weave words.
She, nevertheless, credits all her successes to her teachers who’ve lit her path to poetry. “I was never a poetry person. But my teacher had asked me to read poems for recitations. That’s how the tryst began. I ended up memorising verses, I learnt to write poetry by reading poetry,” Parvathy says.
Her poems mostly revolve around nature. ‘Rhapsody’, her first book, is witness to it. “The One that Got Away is different. It contains 36 poems that speak about women, war and violence. I strongly feel that the two values the world lacks today are respect and acceptance. As a result, most poems of mine reflect the world’s intolerance,” she shares.
Parvathy has rather resolute views on the poetry market; she had to self-publish her first book as getting a publisher on board was quite a formidable task. “They told me that poetry didn’t have a market,” she says. In a world of Instagram poets, surely the online community is more accepting than actual publishers. “True,” she agrees. “But we do not have enough journals that publish poetry. My second book was easily accepted as I had a work prior published in newspapers and Kendra Sahitya Akademi’s ‘Indian Literature’” she says.
This native of Alappuzha completed her Bachelors in Communicative English at St Teresa’s College and is currently a student of liberal arts at the Ashoka University, Haryana, having acquired the Young India Scholarship. “I’ve three dreams. One, to study at Oxford University. Two, to be able to write as long as I live. And three, to become a professor of literature,” Parvathy says. One can debate, if Instagram poets like Rupi Kaur write three-lined poems, does one even have to conform to the rules of poetry? “If a poem communicates a thought, it doesn’t need anything more,” she adds.