Earlier this month, on 2nd December 2025 to be precise, I had the honour (and pleasure) of hosting literary events at the Ghum Festival in Kurseong. Honestly, it was the best homecoming present for me as I arrived in India after spending a year in the United Kingdom.
1) What is the Ghum Festival?
Ghum is the highest railway station situated in the northeastern mountains of India. The Ghum Festival celebrates the Darjeeling Himalayan Railways (DHR) or the Mountain Railways of India. It became operational in 1881 and received the UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 1999. It was recognised for its extraordinary engineering, building a narrow-gauge train track connecting the cities in the north-eastern mountains that have very sharp curves.
This year, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railways (DHR) took the initiative to include a Literary Festival and collaborated with Poets of Community (POC) to engage poets locally in Kurseong and its surrounding areas.
2) Where is Kurseong?
Kurseong is a quaint little town in the district of Darjeeling in West Bengal. It is also known as the ‘Land of the White Orchids’, believed to originate from the Lepcha language. This is because the area was once rich with the blooms of the small white orchid, Coelogyne cristata, which local Lepcha people called kurson–rip. The town is famous for its “haunted” roads and ghost stories. Well-known Indian writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Sister Nivedita, Ruskin Bond and Subhash Chandra Bose found inspiration in parts of Kurseong and the pine forest and hills around it. Many movies in Indian cinema have also been filmed around these parts, some popular ones include Barfi, Main Hoon Naa and many old classics.
3) Who are the Poets of Community?
Poets of Community (POC) is a well-established poetry platform in India with local poets’ communities spread across 10+ cities as of 2025. One of the co-founders and organisers, Ravi V., took me under his wing back in 2021, and I have found a home there ever since. Back then, I had no idea that Ravi welcoming me into this community, when I had just moved to a new city (again), would have such a huge impact on my life. I have had some amazing milestone moments being a part of their core group!
As an experimental performing poet, I found both encouragement and freedom at the Poets of Bangalore community. This visit back home has allowed me to express my love tenfold to everyone who has supported me in my journey as an expressive artist. Destiny made it so that I was fortunate to also facilitate a book launch for Poets of Bangalore, at my home ground, where my journey began.
4) Book launch in Bangalore mid-December
It has been a while since I stopped believing in coincidences. Now, I believe in aligned paths. It so happened that the author, Devika Das, launched her latest book titled ‘Kaleidoscope’ at our poetry platform on 14th December. She is the winner of Dr. Sarojini Naidu International Award for Working Women and was also nominated for the South India Women Achievers Award (SIWAA) 2025. Her book captures candid interviews of various artists in everyday life. It explores the question ‘How does art transform lives through creativity and expression?’.
Creativity and expression, especially in educational spaces, are my professional and personal keywords. As I revisited old spaces and met new people, the many introductions in response to “who I am” and “what do I do” while I was hosting at community spaces and cultural events, I reflected on the path that I have been walking on so far.
5) Shredding my impostor
Introducing myself to strangers made me come face to face with some big feelings, which shredded my impostor to pieces, and helped me decide the path ahead. This delay in my decision-making was not because I don’t appreciate or respect or love myself enough, but mainly due to a certain illusory self-doubt I had in my abilities.
I find it quite funny that everyone else has always had more faith in me than I have shown to myself over the years. My teachers back in school had this consistent feedback in every grade, saying “she has a lot of potential” with no other detail added to it. It has taken me years to decipher it (and I still don’t know if I’ve got it right), that maybe they weren’t talking about my educational or academic side. Maybe it was the “extra”, the “outside of academia” that no one can really teach you and only you can choose to develop in yourself.
A telling moment was when I received the offer letter from Cambridge, when many of my friends responded (and I summarise here in paraphrase): “It’s not a surprise you got in because you’ve always been determined enough to persevere”. I was surprised to find out that out of everyone in my life, I probably held the lowest opinion of myself. But to add a meta-thought here, that is also not surprising for me in hindsight because the writer’s side of me was born out of a thousand insecurities in the first place. It is another matter that creative writing and journaling ended up guiding me through my catharsis and blossoming them into poetry.
6) Where education, creativity and community met
The theme of creativity in education is something I had explored in my first Master’s thesis in English Studies at IIT Madras, where I looked at how communication works in learning spaces of children with Autism. It was in the context of “special education” and the use of the Augmented & Alternative Communication (AAC) app by Avaz. It moved me closer to exploring multimodal, arts-based, English-mediated, technology-integrated education in Indian classrooms. I know there’s still not a big enough job market for this in India yet, I know. But I love doing interdisciplinary work, so I pursued it anyway.
I extensively use storytelling as a tool of education and a medium of learning in my professional work.
Being in the position of an applied linguistics researcher, I became curious about adapting creative strategies in the context of non-native English speakers teaching and learning in English, to expand on linguistic inclusion. That is what further brought me to Cambridge to work on my second Master’s in Education, Globalisation and International Development. Since language and identity go hand in hand, and now the globalisation of English directly impacts teaching and learning, I focused on understanding non-native English-speaking teacher identity more closely. This is my primary research interest. The journey I have undertaken at this moment attempts to merge my nerd with my creative and poetic passion that I have developed since Poets of Bangalore adopted me.
7) Creativity x Education
This fateful experience, which took place in my poetry community and brought forth my applied researcher in the process, is not a standalone event in my life. My two sides— one of a poet/writer and the other of an applied linguist/educationist — have often crossed each other in my life before. The difference this time? I have started listening deeply to the feedback I have always subtly received from the people around me. I have started owning up to the many things that I am capable of and hold the potential for.
I have always known who I am, but now I have finally started to practice becoming her. I am ready to take that leap of faith, merge my passion and profession and give myself a fair chance to actualise my vision. If not for success, I want to do it for the satisfaction of my heart and being content with my life choices.
Well, I might be able to set myself up for success and create a path for generational wealth instead of generational survival in my family, I guess? I will only know once I do it, with the support of my family and friends and my unique set of skills.
8) Beginning with my poetry podcast
Many things, events and people have brought new revelations with them during my revisits— the love that enveloped me this December— I am determined to at least try doing what I have always wanted to do. Being a multipassionate person, there are many things in the pipeline. The first of them is my podcast, which I have shared below. It is available on the following platforms.
Apple Podcasts:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/heart-on-my-sleeve-poetry-mix/id1858612342
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/6NNwQ64wftlL9fmjtcbgyq?si=mUoErn5NT2WezR922JVi-Q
YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/@srishtikaaa
Hope you can find some time to explore it, maybe listen to some poetry when taking a break!
Not everybody has the privilege to do so, and if I don’t use this privilege, then I will feel like I wasted my family’s hard-earned privilege. It took me a while to realise that I am the first-born, first-generation in my family to be in a position to choose this for myself. Yes, it is for a limited time— a couple of years maximum maybe. However, just having this privilege to use is a lot of progress, relatively. From not having a choice to do your own thing to finally having a choice to try doing your own thing once (if not twice). From what I have observed and understood, that was the case more or less with the generation before me. That is why I use the term ‘hard-earned privilege’— hard-earned by them, and the (limited, time-bound) privilege inherited by me.
9) Subscribe for updates!
For those of you who have read through my post patiently and made it to the end, thank you very much for showing your interest and support.
I will be back (hopefully soon) with more launches and events to share. Please subscribe to my WordPress blog if you wish to stay updated and explore what’s to come!
You can also subscribe to my Substack here: https://substack.com/@srishtika
Or parts of my content that you’re interested in, like just my podcast. Whatever works for you!
Lots of love,
Srishtika x
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