Godawful Poetry Fortnight - writing cue - day 7

It's the weekend. Yay! You can teach yourself stuff about how to format things online. Write a shape poem.

Godawful Poetry Fortnight - writing cue - day 6

Your poem must be an ode to a public figure. Preferably a film star or a cricketer. Or Anna Hazare.

Godawful Poetry Fortnight - writing cue - day 5

In this poem you must write about The Grave Social Issues That Plague Our Country.

Godawful Poetry Fortnight - writing cue - day 4

Today's poem must be in SMSese. And it must be at least 20 lines long.

Godawful Poetry Fortnight - writing cue - day 3

Today, Godawful Poets, you will write either a ghazal in English or a sonnet in Hinglish.

Godawful Poetry Fortnight - writing cue - day 2

Today's poem must be about love again. But at any age.
And it
• must be in rhyming couplets
• should, preferably, be in terrible meter
• should, preferably, use the rhyming pairs love/dove and moon/june

Godawful Poetry Fortnight - writing cue - day 1

Dang. Wrote this and forgot to publish it!

Today's poem must be about unrequited teenage love

What Godawful Poetry Fortnight did next: call for exits

As you already know, Godawful Poetry Fortnight starts on the 19th August and runs up to the 31st August. This blog is its literal and spiritual home. All previous posts on the subject here are tagged thus.

Our Patron Saint is William Wordsworth.

And he gets this signal honour for saying that poetry "is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Way too many aspiring poets have rallied behind that banner, too few going so far as recollecting those emotions in tranquillity, let alone reading the rest of the preface to Lyrical Ballads (which can be found on Bartleby, for those interested).

This is its fifth year.

Godawful Poetry Fortnight isn't a competition such, so we don't invite entries. We instead invite all poets, of whatever degree of cringing self-image, to use its licence to put down their very worst work. Let it all out, we say, like you would acidity or, erm, other body wastes. So this is our call for exits.

Post godawful poems as often as you like during the Fortnight. (The True Believers Challenge: post thirteen godawful poems, one on each day of the Fortnight.)

If I can think of 13 prompts in time, I'll post them all here, and you can use them, if you need them. No promised though.

Use a Godawful Poetry Fortnight tag or label on your post, and/or maybe a #GodawfulPoetryFortnight hashtag on Twitter and/or Google+. You can link to this post or this blog if you want to, and/or you can alert me on Twitter) and/or Facebook and/or Google+. None of that is required if you'd rather not. The important thing is the evacuation. I mean exit. I mean poetry.

Right then. Onward! Upward!

The Olympics: still sexist after all these years

This Olympic Games made history by making it mandatory for every participating country to have women athletes in their teams. So we saw even staunch bastions of male chauvinism send in at least a few women. Hurrah for that.

But there is still sexism evident in various individual sports.

• Until just a few months before the games, there were still attempts being made to insist that women badminton players and boxers compete wearing skirts, and that women beach-volleyballers wear bikinis (while not insisting on abbreviated costumes for the men). Thankfully wiser counsel prevailed and left it to the players to decide. (A few years ago, indoor volleyball had suffered similar conniptions, with fusty old administrators insisting that women players wear really short shorts, while not mandating any length for men.)

• In artistic gymnastics, events for men and women differ. And in events that are similar, like the floor exercises, you'll see that women have music playing, while men don't, seemingly implying that the men require just strength while the women must have grace and artistic interpretation.

• Full-contact sports like boxing and wrestling, which used to be men-only, now have women's events. So at least there's recognition that women can fight too. But these sports have far fewer categories than the men's events. Boxing has has only three weight categories for women against ten for men. (Which is why Mary Kom had to box in a heavier weight category than she had thus far). Free style wrestling has seven weight categories for men and four for women. Greco-Roman wrestling has seven categories for men and none for women. The other 'combat' sports—judo, taekwondo and fencing—have an even balance of weight categories.

• Even athletics has a wee level of discrimination against women. There is no 50km walk for women, though women compete regularly in far longer, arguably more gruelling events like triathlons and ultra-marathons. And the men's decathlon (as the name indicates, 10 events) is matched by the women's heptathlon (7 events).

• Shooting allowed women in for the first time in Los Angeles, 1984. There was mixed gender competition—which seems logical, considering that gender does not augment or detract from accuracy with the use of a piece of technology—until Barcelona in 1992, but separate events after that. And there are fewer events for women (six for women, nine for men) and fewer slots (each country is limited to 28 athletes, 20 men and eight women).

• Then there is sexism of a different nature: synchronised swimming and rhythmic gymnastics do not have men's events. (Synchronised diving, however, does.) Grace of movement is surely not an exclusively feminine trait?

• This must be said. The shining beacon for gender equality is the otherwise elitist-by-its-very-nature equestrian section, where men and women compete as equals.

IOC, you've come a long way, baby, but you still have ground to cover.

President Me

Dear politicians,

The Presidential succession seems to be causing much strife. Political equations are breaking down, threatening the stability of a delicate coalition, perhaps hurrying us along to an early election we can’t really afford.

While Mr Pranab Mukherjee is, no doubt, well deserving of a quiet start to his retirement, his selection as a candidate is finding vociferous objection from many quarters. And, truth be told, he is well-nigh indispensable as the Mr Fix-It of the current coalition.

May I propose an excellent alternative candidate?

Me.

Yes, I know. This is a bit sudden, and unexpected. But hear me out.

I’m not political. Broadly, you could say I’m from the arts (I once won a poetry contest), so as much as I don’t represent any political party, I also won’t antagonise any of them either.

My name may appear to disqualify me, but really, if you look at it, it’s a plus. I’m a member of one of the smallest minorities in the country. Technically, I’m Anglo-Indian, but actually the European part of my ancestry isn’t British; it’s part-irish (and you know how the Irish feel about the Brits), part Scottish (they want to split from the United Kingdom too). The rest of my ancestry includes some East Indian, some South Indian and who knows what else. I was born in Vizag, my mother in Khurdha Road, my father in Ludhiana, one grandmother in what was Burma, the other grandparents in various parts of what is now India. While my name is Christian, I’m more of an atheist / tree-hugger. So you can’t place me in any real slot. Ergo: no regional, caste or community equations to balance. I am, sirs and madams, national integration in the flesh.

Then, I’m media-friendly. Heck, I work in the media. I’ve also spent many years in advertising, so I can be hands-on with the creation of our next tourism/FDI-attracting campaign. I also have a pleasant, microphone-trained voice, with a small portfolio of voice-over and radio work behind me. (While on the media, I will quickly concede that a glance at my profile picture will tell you I’m not prime-time’s dream face. But then, none of our presidents have exactly launched a thousand ships.)

Add this: I love to travel. And I’ve actually worked as a travel writer. And I’m reasonably tech-friendly: I blog, and I dabble in social media. So, hey, I promise to live-blog and live-Tweet and Pin and Facebook all the Presidential tours. How’s that for distracting the people from all the real issues?

Oh yes, I also have long hair, in keeping with the trends set by our current President and the one she succeeded. Granted, it’s not silver, but then, we could turn that into an advantage: I could be India’s youngest President! (Here’s an idea: how about I dye my hair in the colours of our national flag?)

But, most of all, I really, really need a house. The price of real estate in Bombay and its neighbourhood is just unreal, and I can’t even think about buying a place of my own. So, a five-year stint in Rashtrapati Bhavan followed by a retirement in a wee mansion on some re-purposed army land would be wonderful.

Thank you for your consideration. Please indicate you support by tweeting with the hashtag #ZigzacklyForPresident. Long live the Republic!

Your future President.