Delhi’s Bandaged Heart – Parth Sarathy Sharma’s Poetry Prints, Around Town
Poetry in the city.
[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]
Some say love looks like a pair of pyjamas, and some say it’s a bird… oh, see, here’s love! Stuck on a Lodhi Garden tree, having the size of an A4 sheet, with big-sized words demanding to know “what do we become when we are in love?”
The flyer is clipped lightly, loosely—easily detachable. Tiny sized words on the top left says: “Feel free to take it with yourself.”
A few days after instagramming this flyer’s click, the culprit is traced. Digital agency copywriter Parth Sarathy Sharma—pen name Vesmir— reads novels, writes poems, and maintains a diary of one-line musings on love, longing, loneliness. Sometimes, at the office in Ghitorni, he types a chosen line from his diary on the laptop, and clicks on ‘print.’ Later in the evening, he would head to a crowded place, gently tagging the printed A4 onto a wall, pole or tree, making sure it doesn’t scar the latter’s surface.
When Parth moved to Delhi in 2019 from hometown Gwalior, “I always had this idea of spreading flyers in the city with my words on them.“ He started a month back. “My goal is to re-introduce poetry into the lives of people.”
But our megapolis is already crammed with too much poetry. Its poignances lurk around us in most mundane habitats. There is poetry in the swaying overlapping multi-directional clouds of rush hour commuters at Rajiv Chowk metro station, in the shy hesitations of the village chachi stepping on the South Point mall escalator, in the breezy undulations of the Central Park’s tiranga, in the silhouette of ram laddu vendor Naresh Chandra walking at night on Lodhi Road, in the leaves falling from the sacred peepal tree at (Gurgaon’s) Guru Ravidas Temple, in the silent hawking of Jangpura balloon seller Udai, his little son asleep on his shoulders.
Parth is inserting the poetry more explicitly. This afternoon, as the copywriter puts up a flyer in Connaught Place (see photo), one wonders at the longevity of his enthusiasm. A few of us might even see it as a defacement of our walls. Whatever, in this difficult city, a citizen is attempting to do something with words that are not driven by a commercial agenda, nor are these words mocking or hateful (think social media!). And that’s something to ponder about.
This latest flyer though isn’t so kind— “You will never be this beautiful again.”
Flyer with a difference
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