Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Discovering open mic poetry
About fifteen years ago, I read a short poem in public at an event hosted by Mahendra Kutare, founder of Kaavya Connections. He handed me a book, opened to a page with a short poem, and said, “You read this one.” The last time I read a poem in public was decades ago in Delhi, at a high-school competition. Since 1980, I had kept my love of poetry to myself, collecting many poetry books, and on rare occasions, sharing a poem with close family or friends. A tinge of guilt after hearing other poets read made me overcome my trepidation, and I agreed to read. Later, a poet I met at that recital house-sat for me while I went away for a year-long sabbatical to London.
In London, I discovered Paul McGrane of Poetry Cafe, who hosted open mics called Poems Not Bombs, at the Poet’s Church. I read a couple of poems translated from Hindi at these sessions. Paul told me he had two poets who translate poems from Ukrainian and Portuguese, and asked if I would be the third. “I’d like to host a session with three translators reading,” he said.
I had translated several Hindi poems over my lifetime, as Hindi speakers were rare in Silicon Valley in the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was still a new immigrant. I had to translate them to share the ideas with my English-speaking friends. So I agreed to Paul’s request.
Poetry in the community
Over the easter break in 2017, as I was deciding which poems to read, I realized for the first time that I had translated over 200 small poems over the years. While in London, I also attended the launch of a poetry anthology titled “Home Thoughts: Poetry of British Indian Diaspora” at the Nehru Center. Poets Shanta Acharya, Usha Kishore, and Mona Dash invited me to join them for dinner afterwards, where they shared stories of how they started. They encouraged me to pursue my joy of poetry in the community.
On my return, I began hosting monthly gatherings for community poets at my home in the South Bay. We would read out loud to each other. Poets brought poems in all languages, so we heard Korean, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Bengali, Sanskrit, Gujarati, Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil, Farsi, and whatever languages poetry lovers shared in the space. A few became regulars, and we grew to hear each other’s poetic voices in our diversity of tastes. We shared poems of revolution, romance, courage, hope, love, beauty, tragedy, love of nature, and peace. We had conversations in verse.
When COVID shut us down in March 2020, we went online. That weekly poetry meeting of two hours or more continued unbroken for over two years as a Facebook group called Poetry of Diaspora in Silicon Valley.
The Memory Book of Poetry
A year into our weekly readings, I felt the need to make something ‘real’ so that our poetry community did not just disappear into cyberspace. I asked our regulars to send me poems to compile a memory album of our time together, which I self-published as a volume called “The Memory Book of Poetry of Diaspora in Silicon Valley.”
In the fall, a few of us poets gathered to read together in public at the masked and socially distanced outdoor stage of the Cupertino Diwali Mela, followed by a picnic at Memorial Park. Meeting for the first time in person felt intimate because we already knew each other from our Poetry Circles on Zoom.
The following summer, in 2021, we were having so much fun with poems, and having kept our weekly sessions going on for so long, we wanted to share the joy with the world, just as Amanda Gorman’s poetry reading at Biden’s inauguration brought so much hope after the despair of COVID times.
One of our poets, Sundeep Kohli, volunteered to create our first online public offering. His family of artists helped create Irshaad, an hour-long summer program of poems. In Urdu, Irshaad is a poetic tradition where listeners permit poets to read. One of our listeners, a poet herself, Aarti Johri, who heard us online, wrote a review in India Currents.
Listening is important
Listeners have an important role as rasiks in Indian arts traditions, for every poet needs a poetry-lover. By reading poems out loud, we breathe life into words off a page, to keep alive and animate the ideas that poets buried as puzzles in pages of poetry books. Listeners can be moved to tears, joy, or find courage and hope as poets give breath to poems. Even languages we do not understand convey the rasa by the tone, rhythm, cadence, speed, and nuance of how a poet reads them. It is an open invitation that surprises participants with the intimate dialogue that discussing poetry can lead to.
The rest, as they say, is history. We have performed at the Diwali mela in Cupertino every year since. We have offered a summer online poetry reading for the public every year. After Irshaad, the next year we called the reading Mukarrar (encore in Urdu), requesting poets to re-read their poems.
In 2023, India Currents Foundation helped sponsor Navarasa, where poets from Silicon Valley read from their work in Hindi, Urdu, English, and Sanskrit. The next year, we organized Mangalam, named after my favorite chant, as a wish for the world’s well-being through poetry. This year, we are calling the program Awaaz (voice), literally and metaphorically, to solidify that we have a collective voice, and diverse in the many languages and rasas that we each embody.
Awaaz
Our annual anthologies are available on Pierian Springs Press, which produces multi-lingual anthologies for our poets every year – Starry Nights in 2022, The Circle in 2023, Being, Becoming, and Belonging in 2024, and one that will be ready in time for the Cupertino Diwali mela. We invite poets to contribute to our new anthology by July 17th.
On Thursday, July 17th 2025, at 8:30 pm PST, an eclectic group of poetry lovers will read some poems in English, Hindi, Urdu, Sanskri and Telegu for anyone who needs the comfort, joy, hope, self-reflections, true mysteries and stores that poetry offers, in the fifth (and final) annual summer offering by the Poetry of Diaspora in Silicon Valley. As the organizer of Awaaz and the founder of Poetry of Diaspora in Silicon Valley, I can promise one thing for certain: the poems read will be excellent because these poetry lovers have exceptionally good taste.
We hope to see and hear you; after the first hour, the room opens for any readers who want to share poems.
For details and registration, click on the QR code on the Awaaz poster.
