Nakuul Mehta on his #PoemsForHumanity initiative: We have raised about 4 lakh rupees in 2 weeks

Actor Nakuul Mehta talks about using poetry as a tool to help people deal with their losses in this pandemic.

For weeks now, Nakuul Mehta has been busy round the clock. Besides juggling daddy duties with his three-month-old son, Sufi, the actor wrote and performed poems under the initiative #PoemsForHumanity. In exchange for people donating to select charities, Mehta would also write original poems on any theme of their choice.

Actor Nakuul Mehta has been a aprt of shows such as Ishqbaaz. (Ayush Das Stills & Motion Picture Photography)

He tells us the past 45 days have been “very tough” in this pandemic. “It started with just seeing so much suffering around, so much pain, anguish and anger. But personally, I’ve been able to turn it around a great deal because of Poems on Democracy last year, which is now being turned into a book. There was no other plan, we’re not poets, we’re writers, actors, filmmakers, storytellers,” he says.

Adding that the quest was to utilise their social media not just to amplify, but add value, the actor continues, “I said to myself, ‘Can I raise money as lots of good people or soldiers are on ground and need ammunition?’. I can’t go on streets and probably volunteer right now, with a very young family.”

Something that started on an impulse has led to a change and the actor reveals that it has become bigger than just being personal poets for people. “We’ve raised about four lakh rupees in the last two weeks, and we’ve been writing, narrating poems like never before,” he says.

The initiative took off, and an overwhelmed Mehta admits he wasn’t expecting so many requests at all.

“The thought was to use our art to make it therapy for some people. But, what we didn’t expect was the amount of people who write to us and share intimate details of loss and suffering — someone wrote about losing both parents, someone lost their best friend, someone lost someone due to lung cancer,” the actor shares, confessing that he never thought he’d be able to respond to mails with a “sense of compassion and understanding”.

Mehta explains, “As important writing and narrating poems has been for us, equally important has been all the mails which people sent to us in great confidence. If words could even do justice to what these people have gone through was also the drive behind this initiative.”