This essay is about a brief stint I had in the slam poetry circles of Mumbai, exactly a decade ago.
I was 21 and this guy that I was casually seeing told me that he wrote poetry. Oh wow, I said. Show me! That’s the only correct response when someone tells you they do anything creative. Whether it’s poetry or singing or writing stories or burping the alphabet. Wow, show me.
And he did. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was actually really good. I hadn’t done much writing back then, but I’d always loved words. Since poetry felt completely out of reach to me, I stuck to safer things like pointlessly long Instagram captions.
When he invited me to a slam poetry event hosted by a Mumbai-based collective of artists and poets, I said yes. I walked into this room that had wooden flooring and no chairs. It was dimly lit with fairy lights that cast a warm glow on the people that were scattered in little cozy groups.
Everyone looked effortlessly artistic in a way that I’d always envied. Interesting haircuts, cool clothes, some outside smoking cigarettes. I felt both intimidated and fascinated. I sat in the back, trying to be invisible, and within minutes I was completely drawn in.
If you’ve never been to a slam poetry event, it’s nothing like the quiet, polite poetry readings you might imagine. There’s a raw theatricality to it–part confession, part performance art. Every person who went up had their own style, their own way of delivering words.
Some almost sang, others practically whispered. But the real magic was how the audience responded–instead of clapping, which would break the spell between pieces, people would snap their fingers.
Snap snap snap snap snap.
The first time everyone snapped after a particularly good line, I got chills.
The whole thing had its own unwritten rules, its own culture. People would share the most intense parts of themselves heartbreak, depression, family trauma, sexuality, politics. But especially heartbreak. So much heartbreak. And every brave baddie who got up there was met with those gentle snaps of appreciation, like rain on a tin roof.
I left that first night feeling like I’d discovered a hidden world right in my own city. I followed their Facebook page immediately, started showing up to every event I could find. I’d rush there straight from work in my office clothes, feeling like I was living a double life.
We’d gather in small venues in little gullies around the city, fairy lights mandatory, often with someone strumming a ukulele between performances. People would sit on the floor, leaning on each other both literally and metaphorically. Making friends there was surprisingly easy — the vulnerability of performance created instant connections. Despite looking like extras from an indie art film, these people were genuinely kind and openly supportive in a way that felt rare and precious.
After a few weeks of being a devoted audience member, a girl with perfect winged eyeliner suggested I try performing. “Just talk about your life,” she said, making it sound so easy. And because I was young and easily swayed by people with good makeup skills, I agreed.
Finding material wasn’t hard. I spent my days at a cancer hospital working on clinical trials with stage 4 breast cancer patients. Death and mortality were my constant companions, hovering over my Excel sheets and consent forms. I had plenty to say about all of it. So I found a concept and wrote my first spoken word piece.
As fate would have it, my first performance wasn’t at one of our cozy little gatherings. No fairy lights, no sitting on the floor. Instead, it was at Khar Social, a proper bar with a stage, stage lights, a sound system, and a photographer. I got up there with my phone, Google Keep open, hands shaking so badly I could barely read my own words. My face was doing this weird twitchy thing it does when I’m terrified.
Deep breaths between sentences. Trying not to get teary. At first I could barely hear the snaps over my pounding heart, but then they got louder.
Holy crap, they actually liked it. I walked off stage to genuine applause and collapsed next to Eyeliner Girl, who was all like YOU WERE AMAZING, and I believed her. I was hooked.
After that I wrote constantly, trying to turn every thought into potentially profound material. But there was a problem: I’d set myself up as this deep voice talking about deep things. How do you follow that up? And honestly, enough sad things hadn’t happened to me yet.
My life was pretty good. Loving parents. Financial stability. Great friends. Generally well-liked. The biggest challenge I’d had growing up was my moustache, and even that was no longer an issue thanks to Dulhan Beauty Parlor. So what now?
This was 2014, which was peak Sad Girl™ era. I wasn’t on Tumblr, but life was fairly Tumblr-fied. I knew the language of performed melancholy. So I tried to dig deeper, be sadder, find the darkness. I wrote new pieces dripping with manufactured angst.
They were so, so bad.
Every time I thought about performing them, something felt off. The words sat heavy in my mouth like lies waiting to be exposed. There’s something particularly cringe about pretending to be sad when your biggest problem is having too few problems.
Around my sixth or seventh event, I wrote a light-hearted piece called “I Wish I Could Speak Hindi,” about being the only monolingual person at work. It poked fun at how my colleagues would call me smart just because I spoke English well, while they casually switched between three languages. The poem had silly jokes and puns, and I made fun of myself a lot.
The performer before me shared a gut-wrenching poem about growing up in an abusive home. Before him, someone talked about losing their grandparent. And then there I was, up next, making jokes about my bad Hindi.
The room felt like a vacuum.
A few polite snaps echoed in the silence. That’s when it hit me––what had been bothering me all along wasn’t the poetry itself, or even the constant exposure to heavy emotions. It was the unspoken expectation that vulnerability could only look one way: serious, profound, and usually sad.
A decade later, slam poetry has become something of a punchline. There are Instagram comedians who make hilarious reels mocking spoken word poets and their quirks. And I get it. The scene prided itself on authenticity and finding your voice, but somehow we all ended up sounding the same––like we were doing impressions of what we thought poets should sound like.
After about ten failed attempts at writing new poems, I quit. Both the scene and the writing. I lasted about two months or so. It took me nearly a decade to start creative writing again (hello, unfinished conversations).
I realized I needed something messier and more true to my lived experience. I needed a format that matched how my mind works and how I like to communicate. I needed to jump between serious thoughts and stupid jokes.
I think in the last few years, I’ve developed my own voice and writing style, and more significantly perhaps, my own preferences. I’ve realized, I really don’t like being told what or how to feel.
It’s one thing when art makes you feel something. It’s another when it stands behind you and tickles your back and tells you to get goosebumps. I hate when something tries too hard to be profound or moving, I feel like it ends up achieving the opposite.
Like those stupid Instagram quotes that end with “Read that again.” or “Let that sink in.”
I don’t need to read it again. I read it once and understood it. It wasn’t that deep. And why should I need a moment of self reflection every time I read something? Do I really need this direction? Are you calling me stupid?
The whole thing annoys me. Not the feelings themselves, but this weird process where the performance of feelings becomes more important than the actual feelings.
I think that’s where I started to feel less enthusiastic about the poetry scene. The moment we gathered, I felt like I was handed a script. Here’s your cue to feel deeply. Here’s where you bare your soul. Here’s where you snap in solidarity.
It’s not that the poetry wasn’t good, or that the poets weren’t genuine. Many of them were brilliant, and their experiences were real. But the form itself started feeling like a cage. This was especially true when I was writing poetry.
I’m not great at it, and when you’re trying to fit your feelings into perfect syllables and rhyme schemes, you stop looking for true words and start looking for rhyming ones.
It wasn’t until years later that I found a name for this whole thing. A French philosopher named Jean Baudrillard (JB for ease) had this idea about how we sometimes create versions of reality that become more “real” than reality itself. Side note: his ideas inspired The Matrix.
He called it hyperreality.
You know when you eat strawberry-flavored candy and realize it doesn’t taste anything like actual strawberries but somehow we’ve all agreed that this artificial flavor is what strawberry should taste like? JB was fascinated by how we create these perfect simulations of real things, mainly because of what happens next: the simulations start calling the shots.
The artificial begins to define what real ought to be.
When I came across this, I immediately thought of the slam poetry phase. The curated atmosphere of vulnerability, the prescribed emotional peaks and valleys. There we all were, taking turns to crack open our hearts on command, searching for the most vulnerable parts of ourselves to offer up. We were creating a hyperreal version of emotional authenticity.
I used to think my problem was that I hadn’t been through enough. That my life was too ordinary to make “real” art. But the actual issue was that I was trying to reshape my ordinary experiences to fit a hyperreal version of what meaningful expression should look like.
When I wrote the Hindi poem, I was probably being more authentic than in any of my serious pieces. But it didn’t fit the simulation we’d all agreed on.
There we all were, taking turns to crack open our hearts on command, searching for the most vulnerable parts of ourselves to share. We were creating a hyperreal version of emotional authenticity.
The weird thing is how natural it felt at the time. Of course poetry meant mining your deepest traumas. Of course authenticity meant serious faces and metaphors about fixing broken things with gold or whatever.
Even now I catch myself being performative when I write. I re-read older essays and spot places where I’m clearly waiting to hear snap snap snap for sounding clever.
I’ve been thinking of that whole phase a lot these days. I have so much more to write about, so many more seriously-snap-snap-snap-worthy experiences. And while I never went back, I think a part of it never really left me.
What I remember most vividly from that time isn’t the poems or the performances but the way those rooms felt alive. The flicker of the lights that sometimes hung a little too low, the way the air felt. Heavy but in a good way.
The way people looked when they walked up to the mic and the subtle transformation in their faces as they walked back, lighter somehow.
There was an unspoken agreement in those rooms that your inner life was worth the time and trouble of a room of listeners. That whatever was going on inside you deserved to be spoken out loud and listened to.
I’d never quite encountered that before, and I think some part of me had been looking for it. I still am, through this blog. There’s no warm light, no one leaning on anyone. But I think I finally found the right material to bring.
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