“I remember a time shortly after completing my college degree I was left with a deep calling inside me. To anyone who had gone through the route learning method, we would all understand that both in schools and colleges, there isn’t much scope for us to explore beyond our set syllabus. So I set out to discover my hidden talents, I found out that I was drawn to writing. Encouraged by a few close friends of mine, I started penning short poems and stories and they were received well from my closest cheerleaders.

With time, myself and my friend, we opened up a page for sharing our writings and this made me cross paths with Prakash who was also a writer like myself. As I explored more in this field, I discovered the exciting world of spoken word poetry. I remember days when I had binge watched so many episodes of spoken word poetry on an endless loop. But one thing stuck out for me – why wasn’t there a similar community for Tamil writers? Especially for writers from Tamil Nadu? It seemed like these platforms were majorly based out of North India and I felt drawn to do my part here.

Myself and Prakash put our heads together and decided that we would start a youtube channel that would specifically curate poetry pieces from Tamil writers. What followed was a tedious process of all that goes into the pre production launch of any brand. We were joined by another wonderful writer Loki and together, we three launched our brand ‘Deleted Drafts’. The idea was to encourage people to be send in their most vulnerable pieces of work which would have a otherwise been deleted.

We started recording episodes of spoken word poetry at a friend’s studio and started releasing episodes ever week. With time, we even launched our first open mic at Backyard and it was a grand success. However, when the lockdown rolled in, we couldn’t continue with our usual recordings so we started uploading the pieces that we recorded from the open mic.

Today, we are proud to announce that our brand is two years old and within this period, we have shared read and celebrated wonderful pieces of poetry and story telling from different artistes in Chennai. We have held virtual as well as many in person open mic events and it was all possible because we persevered. A lot of us set out to do something creative on our own but most of it don’t get to see the light of the day because, we become skeptical of our own work and don’t follow through with it. But am here to say that whatever is your idea, it’s uniqueness comes with the fact that you are the one working on it. So that coupled with a little perseverance, we can bring our ideas to real life.”