Indo-Pak poetry to celebrate 70 years of Independence

NEW DELHI: A cross-border poetry project has Indians and Pakistanis writing three-line poems together to mark 70 years of the Independence. This is happening on an app called “Haiku Jam” which works on a relay-writing rule, where one user writes a line, and a three-line poem is subsequently completed by others.

The app has created an in-app group of millennials from India and Pakistan, who will collaboratively write poems until August 16. Until the evening of August 14, Haiku

Jam

claims it had clocked nearly 6500 lines as part of this project which started August 10.

The app currently has 1,70,000 users, of which 65% are based in India, says co-founder and CEO

Dhrupad Karwa

. “We curate topics on the platform which serve as writing prompts. For the India-Pakistan group or ‘circle’ as it is called on the app, we have curated topics around Independence and freedom,” says

Karwa

.

Some of the poems that have come in so far address the differences and similarities between the two countries, and even the British Raj. “Whether it is

Manto

’s stories/or

Naidu

’s poetry/ink flowed the same way,” reads one. “United we stand/Divided we fall/ Alone we crawl,” reads another.

Karwa says that at the end of the exercise, he is looking to publish the collection as an ebook or at least a post on blogging platform Medium.

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