When does Malini get unmasked?
After having 30 of her poems published, Malini Srikrishna from Bengaluru put together many more poems in a book to publish. “I felt that this would be a great milestone before I left high school. It probably would not hurt my chances of getting into a good college,” says Malini, whose book is currently available on Amazon.
This poet in her teens sits back on her arm chair and proudly smiles. She says, “At first, I felt quite exposed since it was all of my poems put together. Soon, I realised that I had accomplished something really good for myself. I had shown the world parts of me that I couldn’t have shown any other way and that made me smile.”
Malini felt that her contemporaries in particular go through a phase where they want to hide behind a mask. “Being a teen is a time of many intense emotions. Friendships form, break and nothing seems to stay constant. Hence the title Beneath the Mask,” she says.
Each poem in this book represents a memory in her life, like the death of a relative or losing a friend. “Sharing these poems was like sharing my life with people, only they wouldn’t know this. It is a diary. Only if these people looked close enough, they would realise it,” she says. This young poet feels that she has matured as a writer in these few years. “For example, I wrote humor-based pieces initially. Over the past year my poems have become really deep and thoughtful,” she says, insisting that she owes her success to her parents, uncle and grandparents.
Like any other kid her age, Malini attends school, writes exams, does her homework and plays games. Ask her when she gets the time to write and she says, “Well, it’s not much to juggle as I do not have a specific time to write poems. The funny thing is, inspiration can strike at any time for me — in the middle of a basketball match, during a science lesson or even when I’m listening to music in the car. Sometimes, I wake up with a jolt in the night and grab a piece of paper and jot down a poem.” This Sri Sri Ravishankar Vidya Mandir student plays basketball, listens to music and is also learning to play tennis and the keyboard.
Malini doesn’t have her bucket list ready as she believes, “The future is better a mystery, otherwise we’ll have nothing to look forward to. I am currently working on two novels, one of which I have published in parts under the pseudonym on Wattpad. The other one has been sitting idle for the past three years, I will dust it off one of these days, perhaps after my class 10 exams.”
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