Stanzas of Stardust

I started writing poetry at fifteen, though "writing" is generous — I'm dyslexic, and my school didn't have much of a literature teacher, so I started by lifting lines from songs I liked and mixing them into new combinations, just to see what would stick. It wasn't a literature teacher who pushed me toward language in the end. It was the music teacher, the one person at that school who noticed what I was doing with those cut-and-paste lyrics and actually took it seriously.

 

Stanzas of Stardust is what that habit turned into, decades later — my debut collection, written in English, drawing as much from a corporate day job as from the streets of Bengaluru. The poems stay close to ordinary life: love, identity, the strange fact of existing at all, without much interest in sounding grand about it. I still write the way I always have — starting from something borrowed, ending up somewhere entirely my own.