DU student Nandita Kochar turns ‘abusive boyfriend’ into winning poetry
Delhi University student Nandita Kochar’s spoken word performance has found quite a few admirers on social media websites. She says that an abusive boyfriend came to her imagination when she took to writing a poem on depression.
An abusive relationship is one of those things that can often turn into inspiration for something wonderfully creative. And so it did for Delhi University student Nandita Kochar, but with a strange twist. Kochar, 21, has been making waves with her poetry performance on depression.
The video, in which she compares depression to an abusive boyfriend, has received over 11,000 views and shares on Facebook, since it was posted on November 29. The Miranda House girl says, “I wanted to personify my depression, and when I thought about it, I pictured it as a black silhouette looking at me from the corner of the room and it became an abusive boyfriend.”
In the poem, Kochar writes, “Dear Depression, some days I wish you were a delicious gentle man I’d met at the bar on a Sunday night.” Another line goes, “Maybe then I’d show someone the razor-sharp scars you left on my thighs or the jute chain you had tried tying around my neck one night.”
Kochar says the idea was to get people to notice depression rather than asking her to ‘get her act together’.
“The response has been overwhelming. My inbox is full and people from different parts of the world are messaging me and sharing their own experiences with depression.”
As is the case with Internet, though, not all response are positive. “A lot of guys have commented ‘every b***h suffers from depression’ or ‘man up’. Just because I’ve personified my depression as an abusive boyfriend, they think I’m depressed because of a man. It’s sad,” says Kochar.
She says, “My parents’ separation had a huge impact on me. There aren’t enough conversations around depression in DU. People don’t talk about it at all. So I didn’t know how to go about it. Through this video, I wanted to share my experience with people, and contribute to the conversation in whatever way I can.”
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