Kalki's New Poem Reflects Upon The Noises in Our Everyday Lives

No one has addressed this issue before. Well, maybe they would have, but nothing has been this mainstream. In Kalki Koechlin’s new spoken word poetry video called 'Noise' she talks about how noisy our country is. The piece, along with the video tells us about the different noises we hear on a daily basis. If you’ve watched the video, by the end of it, you’d probably want some silence for yourself.

Also Read: Women Can’t Be Sidelined Forever, Says Kalki Koechlin

What she says is hard-hitting but true, our country has so much chaos, so much colour, so much noise that sometimes we forget to listen to our own voices. The noise could be information that is fed into us every single day, too much of it, and too overwhelming. What do we believe? The noise could be the opinions of millions of people on social media - what’s wrong and what’s right? No one cares, we just want to fight over things online.

The noise could be the literal noise pollution that we have to incur on our way to work - the traffic, the honking, bosses screaming. All of it enough to give a person a migraine.

Kalki’s written word poetry has been received well. Especially, her last one with Unblushed called ‘Printing Machines’ which spoke about the hypocrisy of the media. Her new video, also a collaboration with Unblushed was released on World Music Day.

The world is so full of noise - especially this digital age, where anyone and everyone can talk about anything on any platform. That makes it an infinite number of permutations and combinations of opinions.

No one wants to sift through that, yet we go on and on, every day. She talks about how we don't make human contact anymore and have our noses in our smartphones. People have their headphones on, looking at their phones, hardly bothered about anyone around them.

Another topic she touches upon is how people troll her on the internet. The poem goes,

"Pick up my phone and scroll through my trolls. You have such big teeth, get lost ugly.
  How many blow jobs did it take to get your lips? I will rape you, bitch."

This is a reality, many women suffer from. In India, women suffer harassment not only in the streets but also online. This is the kind of noise NO ONE wants to hear.

At the end of the video, she talks about how we all have hopes, dreams, tragedies and stories to tell, but since there is so much noise around, we forget to listen to our own voices. You’re left with a resounding silence at the end of the video as the pandemonium comes to an end, and you quickly realise that silence has value. Silence is golden, as they say and it is hard to find it in a country like ours.

The aim of the video seems to be that people should stop making so much noise, but instead do something productive and useful for the society, instead of giving too many opinions. We hope that the video stirs some thought into the minds of the people watching it, and motivate them to embrace and remain grounded even when all there that is around is noise.

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Pic credits: YouTube

Also read: The Airplane Poetry Movement: Building A Platform For Spoken Word Poets In India
Read more stories by Nikhita Sanotra