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India Booked | Isolation in the aftermath of COVID-19
88 Plays4 years ago
In this episode of India Booked, Ayushi Mona discusses with social activist, writer and editor Ishmeet Nagpal, an array of essential topics ranging from the upsurge in domestic violence during the lockdown to the plight of migrant workers stranded far away from their homes, the unfair burden of expectations on women during the quarantine and the uncertainty of living in cities.
The podcast explores ‘Isolocation Poems’, which is an anthology of shortlisted poems coedited by Ishmeet that reflects the shared reality of people coping with the shifted reality of life due to the Covid-19 Pandemic.
Listen now to discover how the anthology came to be, the beauty in the collaboration of different poets from different locations, brought together by verses of joy, pain, desire, acceptance, and catharsis, to voice out themes of mental health, feminism, love, family and the current socio-political climate
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Transcript
Introduction to 'India Booked' and Host
00:00:11
Speaker
I'm your host Ayushi Mona and you're listening to India Booked, a podcast where we lean into the idea of India through its literature and we speak to authors who bring this to life.
00:00:30
Speaker
Hi, everyone. I am Aayushi Mona, your host on India Booked, a podcast where we lean into the idea of India through the voice of its literature.
Meet Ishmaith Nagpal: Poet and Activist
00:00:40
Speaker
Today I have with me Ishmaith Nagpal. Ishmaith is somebody I have known personally for a while. He's a published poet and a social activist. He's the editor-in-chief at Ratio Orium Publishers, which is an indie publishing house.
00:00:56
Speaker
Her writing is focused on feminism, social justice, mental health, empathy, and building safe spaces. She's co-edited a poetry anthology called Isolocation Poems, which released a few months ago. And today we're going to talk about it well. Thank you, Ayeshi. Thank you for having me.
Birth of 'Isolocation Poems'
00:01:17
Speaker
So Ishmael, you know, the first question that I have for you is that how triggering was it for you to really be dissecting these stories around mental health and the COVID pandemic? As much as we were triggered, I guess by the entire happening of
00:01:40
Speaker
whatever was going on around us because it was not just the pandemic that was affecting everybody. It's also the social political climate in general and the economy of India, which has a lot of us worried, especially those of us who are living in cities or starting out their careers. So it was a time of great uncertainty, which bred a lot of anxiety. I think part of why we decided to
00:02:08
Speaker
write poems to process all of this was to get through the triggers basically and not fall into a deeper isolation within oneself because we were physically distanced from everybody. We felt like if we could have a way to connect virtually with people
00:02:28
Speaker
And what better way to do that than write poetry together. So that's how we decided that for National Poetry Writing Month in April, we will have a group of people write poems every single day. And out of that came out a beautiful book, which is Isolocation Poems. That's so wonderful. And I think
00:02:51
Speaker
The whole aspect of community really, right, which that effort sort of encapsulates is something that really
00:03:00
Speaker
is the sort of differentiating feature between how we view our lives pre and post pandemic, right? Because none of us ever realized that we needed people to the extent that we do when we were just forced to live by ourselves, right? What out of, you know, perhaps from the poems and from the discourses
00:03:22
Speaker
that you were privy to and the conversations in your April reviews. What really stood out as an experience where you said that, oh my God, I never thought of it like this.
Unchanged Social Issues During Pandemic
00:03:35
Speaker
But yeah, this is true and I wouldn't have realized it had it not been for this sea change in the way we live our lives.
00:03:43
Speaker
So this question has been asked many times to me and I have evolved in the way I answer it also because we are still going through the after effects of the shock which the pandemic was and now trying to adapt to a new way of living. So the answer does change but what I found was that
00:04:07
Speaker
A lot of things in the pre pandemic and the post pandemic world, which I thought would change, did not change at all. Now, for example, even when we were doing this writing exercise together with so many writers, I was thinking that, you know, now they would have issues like they have to stay home all day or they've lost out on their job.
00:04:27
Speaker
but still I was seeing a lot of people come out with poetry which was about the discrimination they were facing in their homes or in general about feminism which I why I don't know but I thought maybe some of it might have reduced the you know the harassment and the discrimination because you're not going out on the street so at least that aspect of you know strangers groping you every day is gone but then
00:04:56
Speaker
A lot of things don't change at all. It doesn't matter whether you are in a pre-pandemic or a post-pandemic world. The things that affect us still stay the same. The things that affect us stay the same in terms of the discriminations we face, be it on the basis of our gender, be it on the basis of our caste, be it on the basis of religion.
00:05:21
Speaker
really could not have a delineation of what were the issues before the pandemic and what were the issues after this pandemic has hit us because those issues have stayed consistently the same even in their forms of their perpetration, they have remained the same. It has not meant that sexual harassment is not happening anymore. It has not meant that caste discrimination is not happening anymore. It has not put an end to anything.
00:05:51
Speaker
All it has done is make us feel closer in terms of how much we cherish each other, I guess, because skin hunger is a thing, which I have also started to discover how important it is to just shake hands with somebody or be able to pat your friend on the shoulder without thinking twice about it.
00:06:16
Speaker
or to hug someone you meet after a long time, but now they have to first go and sanitize themselves, isolate themselves for 14 days while you wait outside their door waiting to hug them. So it is a shifted reality, yes, but a lot of the issues and problems that we were facing before are still the same. So Ashweth, actually, you know, I'd like to bring, there is the public sphere, right?
Public vs. Private Spheres in Isolation
00:06:41
Speaker
And then there is the home sphere, right? So, and in terms of
00:06:46
Speaker
the public sphere, which is the external space, right? And very rightly so that much like the sort of layers of the external world, all the trappings and problems have sort of decreased, etc. And then there's this personal space which you speak of, right, which is, you know, you know, aching to say meet somebody or to shake hands with them or be with them.
00:07:08
Speaker
would you say that specific right to the public sphere you also have seen things emerging right which you never would probably see as consciously for instance we see a lot of movements or a lot of
00:07:24
Speaker
A lot of talks around say something as simple as a dhaba doing fundraising or a mango seller, people support them because they say lost.
00:07:40
Speaker
livelihoods during this time and then obviously there is a parallel universe which could be like a private sphere where a woman is say facing harassment or domestic violence at home which is further exaggerated because now she probably the sixth
00:07:58
Speaker
seven hours in a day when she was free to step out she doesn't have it so between this convergence between the public sphere and the private sphere and in people's lives and especially because so much of your own work right about safe spaces about empathy and people and how they deal with those spaces
00:08:17
Speaker
Is that something that sort of makes you wonder that, oh, this is the good that's come out of it? While everything else that we were grappling with as a society is just the same and maybe worse because there are added economic pressures.
Rise of Online Activism
00:08:34
Speaker
I wouldn't say anything good came out of the pandemic at all. I would never say that because every aspect of the pandemic, be it economic or be it in terms of our personal lives, it has been detrimental to everybody.
00:08:49
Speaker
A lot of people in the beginning were trying to find positivity and say that, oh, nature is healing. There's less pollution and all of those things. But I don't believe the pandemic did us any good in terms of that. Yes, it's nice to hear feel good stories. I do feel like.
00:09:08
Speaker
Online activism has gathered more force because I always used to think that just labeling people who do their activism primarily online labeling them as
00:09:21
Speaker
you know, keyboard warriors or saying things which are basically, you know, or saying things like these are not real activists who only practice their activism online. I always found this a very ableist concept because this is an ableist concept in terms of not everybody has the means or the will or the ability
00:09:45
Speaker
to be on ground in terms of doing any kind of activism that brings change, which doesn't mean that online activism is not valid. But because of the pandemic, because people are now not able to step outside, the activism has also shifted its sphere more in a focused way to the online spaces and social media, which I think is
00:10:11
Speaker
good in the long run for people to continue this because a lot of people don't understand that even coming out to a protest which seems like a very easy thing for some people is a very difficult thing for other people.
00:10:28
Speaker
It's a very difficult thing in terms of even physically accessing these spaces and going to them, going to crowded spaces because of their mental health issues. Also, a lot of people face social anxiety or anxiety in closed spaces, anxiety in crowds. So it doesn't mean that these people cannot be part of the movement.
00:10:48
Speaker
which I think due to the pandemic and due to all of us staying home, all of us are able to bond a little bit better online and consolidate better in our activism online. And that I think has been the only positive shift that I have seen. Otherwise, I would say everything is just going downhill. But I'm a pessimist, but
00:11:11
Speaker
Even things like writing poetry during the pandemic, it gave me some hope, even a person like me who thinks every day about the existential crisis and how everything is not good. Even for a person like me, if I open the book and I just read one of the poems and I remember how it felt to try to hold on to each other and to hope. So only that I think has given me some sort of comfort.
Curating 'Isolocation Poems'
00:11:41
Speaker
No, I think a pessimist or optimist, right? It's, you know, completely. And of course, everyone's opinion is valid, their perspectives. For you, Ashmit, right? Because you hand picked the poems that went into Isodocations, right? How did you decide what the structure is going to be like?
00:12:02
Speaker
How did you decide what goes into what parts? What are the thematic shifts that you want to bring out? And then how did you decide that you want to do that? And of course, one other thing that I wanted to say right after you finished speaking,
00:12:18
Speaker
is that I'm so glad that you bought out that point of, you know, this whole keyword or keyboard warriors or armchair activist, right? We think of digital enabling a lot of things, right? Like education, right? Everyone, say, always talks about how the pandemic made children shift to very burdensome online education or working from home, right? But a lot of people don't, or even businesses selling online, of course, but a lot of people never really look at how
00:12:48
Speaker
The basic premise of activism or to be dissenting online or speaking up or speaking for anything, right, changed due to this intervention. I'm actually super, super glad that you brought that up because it's effective. We don't tend to think of often. And that's actually a great point.
00:13:10
Speaker
So that's something I forgot to mention, which I really think I should have said up front. But yes, coming back to my question, since you were cherry picking these poems, Ishmael, how did you go about it thematically? So what happened in terms of processing?
00:13:26
Speaker
all the points that came into us for putting them together into this collection. It was never a very planned thing to start with. It was never like, oh, these are our deadlines and this is the excel sheet and this is how it's going to happen. Because when the pandemic started, I started saying this one thing to people. I said, we are in a global pandemic. It's a deadly disease. Deadlines are dead. Do not talk to me about deadlines now.
00:13:56
Speaker
So for all these months I have never given anyone a deadline, neither have I accepted a deadline because the life around us is changing so rapidly and is so uncertain that it's unrealistic to put that kind of pressure on anybody. And when we started out while doing National Poetry Writing Month,
00:14:18
Speaker
We never knew how many poems we were going to get out of it. We thought maybe five writers will participate. Maybe we'll have like 15 good poems at the end of the month and maybe we'll put them in a chapbook and put it on Kindle. So it was very organic.
00:14:33
Speaker
the way that the group picked up because people referred each other to the group and said oh if you like to write there's this group that I'm doing a challenge with so why don't you also join so like that people just kept adding on to the group and in the end we had hundreds of poems at the end of April but the selection process for us was
00:14:57
Speaker
very, you know, very separated from or the selection process I would say was very organic in terms of just looking at what the poem makes us feel and which poem is good.
00:15:13
Speaker
Okay so we never even looked at who is the author of this poem or who has submitted this poem. It was a very blind process in that sense where only the poems were in front of us and we could look at them and just feel that is this poem saying something to us and should we pick this poem up. There was also another difference in terms of what other books or anthologies that I've submitted to before what they do. They ask for your submissions and
00:15:40
Speaker
they rarely come back to you with any edits or anything. What we did was that even throughout the month we were workshopping these poems with the authors and after the selections also there were certain poems where we felt, oh this poem
00:15:56
Speaker
could be better we could elevate it to another level by doing this or that or adding a metaphor or maybe changing the title to something else and maybe you know giving one kind of twist to one kind of poem and make it an even better poem and our authors were I would say the best people because they never let any ego or anything come in between everybody wanted to have the best
00:16:24
Speaker
their best performance and their best product to come forward. So that's how we selected the poems by just organically seeing the poems themselves, not who wrote them. And which is why in the book, if someone reads the book, Isolocation Poems, they'll be puzzled to see that some poets have like two or three poems and other poets have six or seven poems.
00:16:47
Speaker
because we never had that category in mind that, oh, we are going to have five authors with three poems each. We never thought about it in those terms. So organically, 44 poems came out of the short listing and were worked upon further and then became the final product. And then all nine poets got together on a WhatsApp group and all nine of them wrote a poem together, which is the title poem of Isolocation, which is also an interesting experiment, I think, for people to see
00:17:15
Speaker
how nine voices can become one. You know I'm so glad that you've shared this. I remember right and this is one of my experiences for college. I had a class on communication and storytelling right and me and a couple of other classmates together worked on a poem and you know we presented that as our final submission.
00:17:37
Speaker
Of course, the submission could be like a graphic novel, a poem, a novel, a short story. It could be anything, right? It could be a poster. However, you know, my professor wrote back to me saying that how is it possible for three people to write a poem? A poem was always written by one person. And, you know, I had to really explain it to her.
00:17:59
Speaker
and she didn't buy it. So I am thrilled that you did this experiment and it's bought out such a beautiful work and if you don't tell someone or somebody doesn't read it right, they wouldn't even be able to make it. Yeah, by the time even we finished writing that poem, so when we started we were like trying to be very methodical that okay, all the poets in alphabetical order
00:18:24
Speaker
first poet you start with two lines and the next poet will take it forward and the next poet will take it forward. It did not happen this way. Everybody wrote very different kinds of things in different kinds of words and different kinds of moods and they sent it to me and I said okay just let me sit with it for tonight and see what happens and overnight I think I just added them all together. So there is a
00:18:53
Speaker
part in the poem where half a sentence is from one poet and the other half of the sentence has been completed by another poet. So you can't even demarcate that these three lines are for this one poet or these four lines are from this one poet. It all got merged so beautifully together because when a lot of people are
00:19:13
Speaker
going through the same thing and you spend some amount of time together, even if it's not physically. We were virtually spending time with each other. You do get a little bit of idea about how the other person thinks and where their mind is going. So if one poet is going too much into melancholy, the other poet will try to lift them up. And that, I think, was the beauty of this collaboration because they were lifting each other up.
00:19:41
Speaker
And it's so interesting especially because a book about isolation, a book about solitude in a pandemic is a kind of poetic collaboration we've never heard of in the scheme of Indian literature before.
00:19:58
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, even the title, which was beautifully given to us by Meetha Sengupta, the title ISO location is so apt because it's almost an oxymoron. It's almost like saying that, oh, we are
00:20:13
Speaker
all together but we are in different locations and that is the duality of our times that we can say that we are very connected to each other very close to each other yet some of them have not met each other so it did feel like
00:20:29
Speaker
a little ironic also to be writing about isolation while having this group of people start to bond with each other so much. But I think a life's beauty is in these dualities and in these oxymorons and that's what makes it exciting, I guess. And we could all do with some kind of excitement and inspiration during these times.
00:20:53
Speaker
That is true. And also, I think a bunch of the other poems in the book, right, in this whole gamut of dealing with oxymorons have managed to bring out such beautiful descriptions of solitude, right? Like, you know, like, for instance, in the poem, which is a small, scary list, right, where this person is talking about that they're scared to be alone, because what if there's a gas leak while they're sleeping, or they fall down and there's nobody to find them, right? And these are such
00:21:21
Speaker
Common fears, right? And they're so central to our being, right? I mean, people are terrified of loneliness, not because of being away from people, but what it could mean for their own physical safety and psychological safety.
00:21:37
Speaker
Yeah, and it is, I think, increasingly important to voice out these fears and anxieties because all of us have them. If I didn't have the people that I live with, if I didn't have my dog with me, which did happen for a few days when I was living alone, those few days took the life out of me. I just became so despondent and I was like, nothing is worth, you know,
00:22:07
Speaker
going further and getting up every day, cooking for yourself, going to sleep alone. A whole day would go by without me saying a single word because there's no one around. And these are legitimate concerns that people have. I think this also makes me think of some of the apathy that was shown to migrant workers who wanted to go back home.
00:22:28
Speaker
because a lot of corporations and governments and a lot of powerful people they do not want the migrant workers to leave their cities and go back to their hometowns because for them they are just human resources but they are human beings first they also have a need for safety they also have a need to be around their family they also have a need to go where they will at least have
00:22:54
Speaker
food and if not food and shelter, they will at least be close to their families. So if we can understand that NRIs or people who had gone abroad need to be rescued and brought back and so that they can be with their families, why couldn't people understand why the migrant workers were walking back home?
Safe Spaces for Marginalized Communities
00:23:13
Speaker
Why was no empathy or sympathy shown to them because
00:23:20
Speaker
It is easy to visualize an NRI crying for his mother abroad somewhere, but it's not easy for you to see why these people also want to go home. They are the same human beings. So this need for being in a safe space, which also brings me back to what you were saying about domestic violence, because
00:23:40
Speaker
For a lot of people, when you said stay home, stay safe, the home is not safe for them, especially for people who are undergoing any kind of violence from their partners, from their families or any kind of violence because of their identities or because of their sexual orientation, because of their gender identity. A lot of queer and trans people got the worst end of the deal. A lot of people who are facing mental health issues are also
00:24:09
Speaker
still trying to access the spaces which were earlier a safe haven for them. People don't understand how important certain collectives are when women's collectives or queer collectives are physically taken away from you. Those spaces are taken away from you where you could finally be yourself, how hard that hits you. People don't realize that.
00:24:37
Speaker
true Ashmi then you know this whole and I think the pandemic really bought into focus right on how we treat groups within the country and the the level of othering right that we do because when say all of these policies and you know these last-minute ideas were being made or when you know there was this entire issue that's being dealt with
00:25:01
Speaker
Millions and millions of people their identity was forgotten very much like you forget, anonymous watchman at IT's gate or an anonymous person who delivers your vegetables, right? You never notice them, you become so blind to them. The level of othering when there was a pandemic and when all of these things broke out from a social
00:25:26
Speaker
cultural lens, people just forgot, right? Your house, and you're lucky to have a house. You just rock yourself in it again. Your policies and plans were for people who had a house that they could stand and sit in. Yeah, and have balconies, have balconies in their house to light theas and bang the thalis, have balconies. I was so irritated by the assumption
00:25:53
Speaker
that the populace has a roof over their head and they have balconies. And also that they live in Bombay where everything is like a matchstick.
00:26:07
Speaker
What you said about othering is right in so many ways because all of us, when we were collaborating on the book also, we were forced to check where our marginalization or our structural oppression was located for each one of us.
00:26:27
Speaker
If for, say, Nadeem, his religious identity becomes something that is vilified every single day in the media because at that time the Tablighi Jamaat incident was still going on, or someone like Manini who
00:26:48
Speaker
feels deeply how much, you know, there is a disbalance between women and men who are in the professional environment. Because, see, when you say work from home, it's very easy to say, okay, now you were working in the office for eight hours, you don't have to commute also, so you put in nine hours of work from home. Now, these people are not taking into account that the children who were going to school earlier are not going to school.
00:27:13
Speaker
Okay, so they are at home. Their mothers are expected to be with them while their online classes happen, or they are expected to be around and take care of them. The childcare burden is on them the entire time. And still the companies are expecting the mothers to put in the same amount of work from home as their male colleagues. And no one is expecting the men of the house to contribute in any way to the household chores or the child rearing.
00:27:40
Speaker
So everything disproportionately fell on a certain type of people. Everything disproportionately affected women. Everything disproportionately affected a religion. Everything disproportionately affected Dalit Bhajan people.
00:27:56
Speaker
So everything came down to where is your marginalization? Where is your structural oppression located? Because that is who you are now. Because that's the level of othering that has been placed upon everybody.
Upcoming Anthology: Cityscapes
00:28:13
Speaker
Ishmi, just to sort of continue on this thread of conversation, right? Your next anthology, right, is on cityscapes.
00:28:21
Speaker
Do you want to tell us a little bit about it and would you explore similar themes in the upcoming piece as well? Because our cities are also sources of our conflicts and all of these class, gender, economic, social, everything, themes from how we are situated within our cities as well.
00:28:44
Speaker
That is where the idea of doing an anthology of not just poems but also short stories, the submissions are now open by the way till 31st December 2020 for the Cityscapes Anthology. We are soliciting poems as well as short stories because we do want to delve deeper
00:29:06
Speaker
into what cities mean to us, especially in the context of what the pandemic has made us see. Now, for example, I moved from Mumbai to Bangalore in the middle of the pandemic because for me, Mumbai was becoming unaffordable.
00:29:24
Speaker
And for a lot of people, this has happened. Even in Bangalore, there is an entire commercial street which is completely shut down and empty. And all the people who used to live there as paying guests or in rented apartments have left and gone to their hometowns and villages.
00:29:42
Speaker
When the concept of work from home comes in or the concept of keeping yourself alive in a city when you are losing your sources of income, when the economy is suffering so badly, what does it mean now to view a city or to live in a city or to think about a city or even fantasize about a city? There are a lot of people who might still
00:30:05
Speaker
be thinking about that the minute this pandemic is over I'll go to Mumbai and try my luck in such and such sector or the minute this pandemic ends I'll go to Bangalore and try for such and such job. What does it mean really to live in a city when whatever the city could offer you
00:30:24
Speaker
is no longer available. For me, the foremost reason of me moving to Mumbai was because I wanted to be part of the spoken word poetry community. And at that time, the community wasn't viral or big, which it became later. But at least it existed. And for a person like me who had worked in Haryana for four years, it was an entirely different world to go to Mumbai. You are a medical professional. I know I didn't say it in your bio.
00:30:55
Speaker
Yeah, so for me, for a person like me who wanted to come to Mumbai with this only one requirement in my mind that all I want is to be part of a community that, you know, discusses or reads or writes poetry or recites poetry, for a person like me, when Mumbai went into lockdown, it stopped serving its purpose for me.
00:31:21
Speaker
And since the economy was going down, our job prospects also suffered and all of that, it became difficult to live there. It became unnecessary to live there. I have no regrets about leaving Mumbai because I have left nothing behind. There's nothing happening that I'm missing out on.
00:31:39
Speaker
So what does it mean to people to think about living in a city, to think about how they're going to survive in a city? What stories come out of visits to different cities? Because I have so many stories about my adventures in Jaipur. I have stories about being left alone in Vishakhapatnam for three days and not knowing what to do stranded over there.
00:32:05
Speaker
So we do want to hear about nostalgia, yes, but also about the new shifting perspective of how we view city living and cities in general. That sounds absolutely delightful. And now that you've mentioned it right, I'm myself thinking of this relationship that I have with cities that I've lived in, a city where I was born, a city where I studied,
00:32:31
Speaker
a city where I studied in school versus a city where I studied in college versus a city where I did a post-grad versus one where I worked versus one where I traveled and you have such a unique relation to each of these cities right and it comes out all the time right you will have
00:32:48
Speaker
People from bengaluru doing a hashtag bengaluru on twitter and you will have mumbai people for home going to marine drive is the biggest liberation during the pandemic that hey this is our normal so if you can return back to walking on marine drive a lot a lot is back to normal right
00:33:07
Speaker
and we never think of these symbolic assertions. I'm so thrilled that you're doing this submission and I'm also glad it's open till the 31st of September. I hope you get a ton of entries which means all the very best with the new book.
Supporting Indie Publishers and Poets
00:33:23
Speaker
For everyone listening in guys,
00:33:25
Speaker
Isolocation is available on Amazon. Do check the book out. It's an amazing array of incredible poems about our relationships, about solitude, about ambition, dejection, paranoia, the disenchantment with dissent and everything that's happened during this pandemic. I hope you will enjoy the poem. Try out the book as well as send your submissions.
00:33:55
Speaker
Thank you Aayushi, thank you for having me and I hope people get to read the book and it's also available on Kindle. So do check it out and support your fellow poets and indie publishing houses if you want to have more such work come out. Thank you Aayushi. Thanks Aayushi.
00:34:21
Speaker
Do not forget to tune in to us on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Ghana, and HT Smartcuts.