DUAL VOICES: INK AND CHALK

I am a tempest of words, aching to burst forth. (Years of structured lessons simmer beneath my skin.) The most important thing is that I'm drowning in metaphors. Being a poet shapes reality, and twists what you are and what you're destined to become. (When I hear myself, my meter-perfect cadence in casual speech, I think, Good Lord, You're scanning life in iambic pentameter.) No one ever whispered that verses might erupt from my soul. I was suffocated in convention, a pressure cooker of repressed creativity in a very normal sort of life with some very ordinary, unquestioning friends (Some still to this day, bless their uncomprehending hearts) And so they thought I'd die content as Dr. Padma Shree. R.P. I lived by the clock. The suffocating routine. Stable prison, till the dam broke. The first stanza shattered my world. So, that's how the revolution began. One thing that happens when words possess you is that you combust. I always knew I would I would ignite. (I don't know what to say... I don't know what's acceptable anymore.) My lesson plans became kindling and went from curriculum to conflagration. I bled ink onto rejection slips, and devoured acceptances, and therefore I found my primal scream. (As I see it now, it was a volcanic eruption that got increasingly violent where I was under the most excruciating metamorphosis without any sense of how to reconcile these warring selves.) It was pure rebellion that my verses found an audience, not my lectures. I was terrifyingly alive. After 25 years of intellectual imprisonment, That was the earthquake. I burned the podium. An earth-shattering rebirth. So, Academia wailed, "You're deserting us." I was 55. The ivory tower and I had had a strangling kind of relationship, not a nurturing one, But beside themselves with shock and awe, scandalised, thrilled, appalled, enthralled, my colleagues gasped,"Have you lost your mind to this... art?" I roared at them, "I would never be silenced again. I would never be silenced. Never. "I am going to set fire to every textbook. I am going to. I am. I am. "Just Try To Stop Me!" But they couldn't. They witnessed my metamorphosis. They sat stunned at poetry slams. They trembled at the raw power of unshackled words. We redefined what it means to educate. (We ceased pretending that knowledge fits in neat little boxes directly after I had tasted freedom and that illusion has never again enslaved us.) They're still teaching now. They quote my verses. They invite me as a living cautionary tale. We all wrestle with the meaning of true learning. We go to battlegrounds of intellect versus intuition. I refuse to be bifurcated, my educator self a fossil, my poet self a phoenix. I'm no longer interested in compromise. So, my words always have been grenades of truth. The academic world—curse them—the word "revolutionary" never crossed their lips until it was too late. (I do resent the years of conformity. Other educators might die never knowing the inferno within them.) So, it blazes through me that we are vital, dangerous, and necessary. No, our impact is earth-shaking. I own my truth. I breathe fire in perfectly ordinary rooms filled with extraordinary potential. So, that's how the worlds collided. My poems are battle cries. If they weren't going to have a classroom, I made sure they'd have a revolution, so to speak. We both fear and revere them. My readers say poetry saved their souls. OH, I do feel that nothing will ever be the same (Is this too much? Have I gone too far?) This is the most authentic time in my existence. I am an entirely reforged being. With no borders between thought and feeling there is only pure expression. And I'm not talking about modest changes here. Just a total rebirth. Everyone comes alive differently. I incinerated the old self a long time ago. I had no idea how I would survive it. So, that's the inferno that forged me. (I've unleashed so much that my very essence trembles.)