Radioactive Tushar

Our team has been following your work since long, we have witnessed your growth as a poet and we though its time to get to talk to you on our page. How did this journey start and how has it been so far?

The start of the journey has been talked about in my interviews with Yahoo!, Buzzfeed, TEDX and The Statesman, not to mention the numerous InstaLive sessions I did with various poetry forums. I think each one of us has humble a beginning unless ofcourse if we come from a family of means. My little radio shack I fondly call Radioactive Tushar was by all means accidental (TEDX calls me the Accidental Poet). It was about 5 months back when I bumped into this idea on someone's wall and decided to experiment with it. The first episode I recorded may have turned out quite well, so it seems because I was approached by an ad-film maker to convert the voice file into a video. And nevertheless it was an instant hit accumulating about 200k views. But that's not the best part, what's even more rewarding is that the same poem was adapted by a production house a month later and made into a video, only this time the voice was Mr. Bachchan's. Ofcourse their team tweaked and pruned lines to get away with infringement issues but then the stark similarity speaks for itself.

Since then I never looked back, I went on producing content after content and my audience loved every piece I delivered and that kept me going. An artist is always hungry for appreciation and encouragement, for me it kept coming from my listeners. The local radio shack I started is now being heard in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Indonesia and Morocco.

What is it that you do that makes your poetry stand out? Is there a secret sauce?

Master Shifu says there's no secret ingredient and I concur with him. I do get a lot of messages asking me about my strategy, and I tell them there's no strategy, the content has to speak for itself. Building content is the hard part, and that's where the reward is hidden; the deeper one digs for content the greater is his reward. Building content is a layered process I believe, we need to be aware of our audience, their taste, their attention span, and their flair. Its easier said than done though, corporates spend millions on such dipstick research to get this kind of information about their target audience. But on a smaller scale like mine I got some basics right, like confining my content to 1 minute (Yahoo! named me the "One-Minute-Poet") given the attention span of the users I am catering to on Insta. Apart from this, what is important is the poem itself, I spend 4-5days writing a single piece, though a lot of my listeners who send me their poems tell me it took them 6-8 minutes to pen theirs. Spending time with your creation is like romancing with it, you will only spend more time with her if you are truly and madly in love with her, the more you spend time with her the more she'll blossom. Your creation has to love you back, if it doesn't then you've failed as a creator. Creation demands attention, she won't give-in till she has all of it from you, and trust me if you are able to get her to love you back she'll be your Monalisa the world would remember you for. Incidentally, Leonardo Da Vinci spent 20 years perfecting his Monalisa.

Your creativity is not confined to poetry alone, why don't you take us through the other aspects of creative writing that you are involved and how is that sphere shaping up.

The other aspects would include painting, photography and screenwriting. What's paying dividends currently is my screenwriting. My first venture as a screenwriter – Zulfi; a short film based on my book Pandora's Box is now doing its rounds in the film festivals and has already won 16 awards at the festivals for Best Short Script, some reputed ones are Tagore International Short Film Festival, Euro Film Festival, Independent Short Award (L.A.), Romania Film Festival, London Film Festival, Venice Film Awards, and Indie Short Fest. The most interesting bit about this film is that it's in Urdu and is still enjoyed and appreciated by the international audiences. My second short film, Jasaarat is in pre-production now, and we are all very excited about it too, the screenplay has already won 2 international screenwriting awards.

You have created 52 episodes, that's quite a few, what motivates you to keep going, to keep uploading content regularly? Also, what made you to upgrade to duets with other narrators? How successful was this move, and how easy or difficult is it to involve a partner?

Its like the roulette, you keep winning you keep betting, when you start to lose you look at winding up. I kept winning the love and appreciation of my and that kept me going from one episode to the other. I never thought of a duet (jugalbandi) until an RJ requested for a collaboration and I decided to give it a shot. My listeners were pleasantly surprised to see another voice on my radio and it seemed like they liked the idea so I created three pieces in a row with 3 different artists. One of them was in fact a theatre producer from Pakistan. I collaborated with a well-known female actor to complete my trilogy of jugalbandi. The interesting bit was that all of them faced the same challenge – to deliver their lines in 30 seconds flat. The collaboration worked really well and was well received by my listeners.

The use of similes in your poems are skillfully well placed, some of the striking ones are "jiski jahan tak ticket hai wo wahin tak jayega", "dariya hai tu, patthar khaa kar uncha tera ufaan rahe", "khuda maangne walo ki sune ya unki sune jo haqdaar hain", "tasveeron ka ik shaaistaa sa jaal bunkar intezaar shikaar ka hota hai" and "nazmo ne calendar wale kono mein dum todd dia tha". Poetry comes naturally they say, but any form of art needs honing, how did you hone your skills we would definitely want to know.

I'm more of a visual person, I imagine my poem as images that are projected on the empty space I keep staring at while I write my poems. Poetry I believe is more like an animated 3D movie where you get to see toys speaking among themselves or a panda fighting a tiger or non-living things coming to life. It's a puppet show without the strings, each one of us is free to imagine the puppet as she/he may wish. Poetry gives the power of speech to everything around us, poems make them all speak, I have made books speak to my listeners. And what moves the audience then is how well they connect with these objects and how well they understand the story behind these inanimate objects. A good poem is when it speaks to you, a mind-blowing poem is the one you speak back to.

And speaking of honing skills, it can only be done by doing, no one's ever become a swimmer sitting on the shore and watching, one has to dive and gasp and fail and fall and drown and float and win.

Who has been your inspiration, any known poet or a literary figure? Or all of this quintessentially comes to a poet from his aching heart, wrenching about an unrequited love?

This is another question that scares me, people start labelling you the moment you take names, it happens with the best of the artists. An ideal therefore is to be worshipped in the depths of one's heart, and not to be disclosed. An inspiration is who we learn from, who guides us in the right direction, we follow her/him just so that we enter a similar tunnel looking for light at the end, may not be the light of the same intensity, wavelength or colour, but then rewards have no flavor they act just like water; quenches the thirst of a thirsty soul of an artist. Nothing that I write states anything about my current personal situation, my writings smell of my experiences I have had so far. There's no heart left in the world that's not hurt, but that's no excuse to turn to writing. I write because writing is my muse, my love and my path to salvation.

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