Bengaluru Poetry Festival kicks off; Kishore Kumar and Gaza among highlights of day 1

The Bengaluru Poetry Festival 2025, in Bengaluru.
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement

The Bengaluru Poetry Festival 2025, in Bengaluru.
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement

Music, lyrics, language, and of course, verse came alive at the 9th edition of the Bengaluru Poetry Festival, which kicked off on Saturday, August 2 at the Indiranagar Sangeetha Sabha. 

From a session dedicated to remembering Kishore Kumar on his 94th anniversary to those that lingered on some of the most pertinent issues of our time, including Gaza, the festival reiterated this: poetry and humanity are deeply intertwined, and have been since the very beginning of civilisation.

“It is appropriate to have a poem about Gaza today,” said award-winning poet and novelist Jeet Thayil in response to Sri Lankan poet and short story writer Shirani Rajapakse’s poem about it at a session titled ‘You Are the World’, which had six poets from across the world read from their work. Thayil, who shared the stage with Ali Al Maazmi, Amal Al Sahlawi, Claudia Keelan, Daryl Lim Wei Jie, as well as Rajapakse, himself, read two poems about the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, a brutal reminder of the starvation and mass killing of over 60,000 people since October 2023.

Some other highlights of the festival included ‘Love Liberates, It Doesn’t Bind’, which had actress and singer Ramya Nambessan talk about her creative process with media professional Archana Vasudev; ‘City Songs’, a discussion of a new anthology, The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City; ‘Serenading in 70 mm’, which explored how poetry supports narrative in cinema; ‘Pada Sanchara’, with Kannada poet Mamta Sagar talking and performing from her latest work, and ‘Remembering Kishore Kumar’, which paid homage to the versatile artist two days before his 94th birth anniversary. 

“Kishore Kumar was a multifaceted personality,” said writer, TEDx speaker and Bollywood commentator Balaji Vittal, who was in conversation with Anirudha Bhattacharjee, the author of Kishore Kumar: The Ultimate Biography (2022) and R.D. Burman: The Man the Music (2011). Over a music-punctuated conversation, the two discussed Kumar’s life, music, song origins and relationships with other well-known people. The discussion also veered towards Karnataka’s tenuous connection with Bollywood, “somehow Karnataka has never worked that closely with Bombay,” said Vittal, pointing out, however, that the movie Sholay was shot here in Ramanagar. 

The Bengaluru Poetry Festival continues till August 3, starting at 10 a.m. To know more, log in to https://bengalurupoetryfestival.org/schedule