Chinmayi Tripathi, a Delhi-based singer-songwriter, has initiated “The Music & Poetry Project” to popularise Hindi poems through music.
The first one in the series is “Khushgappiyan”, written by contemporary writer and poet Anamika.
“I have decided to release songs as singles, so there is no particular date,” Tripathi, 27, told IANS.
As far as the response goes, the basic expectation is that “people will be drawn to Hindi Literature more, this is just a small effort towards that”.
The album has been funded by a crowd funding campaign on wishberry.com.
“My intention while developing it has not been to make it a commercially successful project, but to create music that is contemporary and still has the essence of the poetry as it is,” she said.
Most of the poems that she has picked are written by Chhayavaad poets — Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Mahadevi Verma, Shivmangal Singh Suman and Ramdhari Singh Dinkar.
“Self-expression, sense of freedom and relationship with nature… these are timeless themes and the poems are timeless too,” she said.
The process of getting the project together was a roller coaster ride for her.
“I found out the difficulties to get permission for poems. It is such a mammoth task to find out who owns the rights/permission for a piece of work, where is the person, how to contact them,” she said.
“It was so painstaking that I literally lost it a few times and wondered if I would ever be able to do this. But somehow things happened,” she added.
Some great things happened too.
“I spoke to Piyush sir (actor Piyush Mishra). I shared some of the songs and he agreed to recite a few poems. The way he has done it, only he could do so,” said Tripathi.
