by Valmik Kumar

What’s the point in painting if you’re not painting
a painting of a painter painting a painting? Isn’t
art about art the only art?
Otherwise it’s just noise, or colours, or ones and zeros
on a motherboard between layers of aesthetically
pleasing plastic and metal, which isn’t art, but close,
because not in dusty libraries or dusky bars could
prescient minds have fathomed Coleridge’s I
in the palms of our hands. We are now, on demand,
leading ladies, with varying degrees of appropriate
make-up, but how can Hollywood (and its
spawn) possibly cast us all? It can’t. So
we turn as one to the parlour tricks of Rich
Uncle Zucc’s Quick Pick-Me-Up Vive Circus
shit. You can make the case for an end to
the intuitive interface downward scroll, but
at this stage, it’s hypothetical, and there’s
nothing worse than “what if”s in the midst of
a full-blown bed-to-barricades crisis. Vemula
may yet become a t-shirt tycoon; what cruel
comfort we have to offer
to a mother bereft of blood too soon.

Poem by Valmik Kumar, Art by Shaunak Phadnis

Valmik is a 24 year old human and the only millennial he knows who’s okay being called a millennial. He likes words and people and coffee, not necessarily in that order. He can generally be found behind a laptop, having an identity crisis.