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The Story of a Voice | Preeti Vangani | TEDxHRCollege

2,066 views · Published 17 June 2015 · 8:21 · Indexed 22 September 2026

Channel: TEDx Talks · 2015 · Nonprofits & Activism

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Preeti Vangani works as a brand manager and loves to experiment with theatre & poetry. She has been writing poetry in Hindi and English for 5 years. With a knack for storytelling, Preeti likes to build fictional worlds in verse. While her writing in Hindi brims with innocence, in English her pieces are more introspective. Her encounter with spoken word poetry started in 2012 by performing at various Open Mics. She recently won the Poetry Slam at Green Mill in Chicago and featured twice at ‘Vice Verse’, an event that showcases Bombay’s budding poets. She recently pubished a book of poems with three other women poets by the name 'A Converseation in four parts' so put your hands together for preeti vangani.

I started writing poetry in 2010 and used to carry a folder full of typed white sheets to various open mics in Mumbai, hoping that people would ask me to read one more poem if they were happy with the first one. In the beginning, most of my poems used to suffocate with 'being a poem' as I dressed them up to fit in rhyme and force them to end on a pensive note among other baggage tropes.

And then almost simultaneously I attended a workshop by a spoken word artist in Mumbai (Rochelle D'Silva) and started seeing videos from around the world where poets simply pen down their most vulnerable stories without many traditional constraints of writing. Thus began my journey of finding and penning stories, that lay inside of me, rather than those cooked in a classroom. And I travelled with these words to cities like New York and Chicago, only to stay reassured that world over, spoken word poets are bound by no rules of writing, except bringing to stage your heart in its exact condition.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

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