JOIN USCelebs reading poetry online
In the spirit of Karnataka Rajyotsava month, an online poetry campaign is taking social media by storm. Many big names including actors, journalists and other influencers have taken to Twitter and Facebook to read out popular Kannada poems.“The president of Sahitya Akademi, Vasanth Kumar challenged individuals from different fields to read poetry and post them online,” says actor Ramesh Aravind. The actor posted a video of his reading of D S Karki’s work ‘Hacchevu Kannadada Deepa’, a poem about Kannada and Karnataka.“There are several challenges like the Bottlecap challenge, which are purely for entertainment, but this, I thought was a very sensible one,” says Ramesh.This is a way to encourage people to read and listen to great Kannada poems, he feels.“Instead of choosing five people for the challenge, I put out the challenge to five crore people through social media,” he adds.Several journalists like Vishweshwar Bhat also took up the challenge with the hashtag #PoetryReadingChallenge. Actors Ganesh and Yash followed suit and encouraged others to do the same.Ganesh read out lines from Da Ra Bendre’s ‘Nee hinga nodabyada’, which is a poem of love and regret, and posted it on Twitter.He said in the video that he likes the lines of the poem, and passed on the challenge to Anil Kumble, and Mantralaya Sri Sri Subudhendra Teertha Swamji.A few days ago, KGF-starrer Yash narrated the poem ‘O nanna chetana’ by Kuvempu.The poem talks about ‘Vishwamanava’ (global citizen) and transcending boundaries and Yash says it is his favourite for that reason.Yash has passed thechallenge on to film personalities like T S Nagabharana, Ghouse Peer, Ravishankar Gowda and Nagendra Prasad.Several people outside the film industry are also taking up the challenge, the actors hope that the campaign spreads far and wide.