Lockdown boredom inspires 13-year-old Bengaluru girl to pen soulful poems

Bengaluru: A 13-year-old schoolgirl has become the toast of her school in Bengaluru for penning "beautiful and powerful" poems as a tool of success. Amana, the class VII girl at Bishop Cotton Girls School, has completed writing 115 poems in English, which she started during the coronavirus-induced lockdown.

It's her hobby and passion to reach greater success in poetry. As the first feather in her cap, her first book 'Echoes of Soulful Poems" with 64 verses, was published recently. The book has received positive responses from readers.

Speaking to The Hans India, Amana said: "I am a bibliophile and I read a lot of books. I have a collection of 400 plus books. In April 2020, during the lockdown, I was terribly bored and used to ask my mom for a source of entertainment. She told me, "since you read so many books, why can't you write poems or stories". This was a wonderful wake-up call for me and I just thought that I can't just sit here all day and I at least must do something to help make a change as well. The mother's word and world's situation inspired me, and I penned my first poem "Corona the New Outbreak". So, my mom is my true inspiration."

Amana style of writing usually includes a lot of rhyming words and she spends at least half an hour writing these short and soulful poems. Amana credits her school for improving her writing skills. Her school does not stress much on exams and marks. This freedom gives her room to improve her skills. Amana's approach to writing poetry comes not just from intuition but careful planning and research. The young writer started her reading habit at the age of 5.

"My dream is to be an astrophysicist or an astronomer, I am just obsessed with cosmology, astronomy and even literature, but those are my future aspirations. For now, I just want to study well," Amana further added.

While Amana wrote the poems, her mother would carefully check the spellings to see that there were no mistakes. In the past eight months, she had carefully collected all the poems that Amana had written in the hope of getting it published one day. The parents are also planning to come up with a new edition in a few days.

This talented Bengaluru girl stays with her father Jaiwanth Swamy, a businessman, and mother Dr Latha T.S, a government official.

Her proud mother, Latha says, "Amana started to read when she was in nursery at the age of four. Though she was just introduced to phonetics, we gave her books with full sentences and she managed to read them well. We always wanted her to treat books as her best friend. So today we are happy to see my daughter in this position. For every birthday she asks for a new set of books as a gift."