Spotlight On Writers
Vaishnavi Pusapati
- Where do you originate from?
I am from the land of sensory overload and chaos, the land of paradoxes and spice: India. But we moved a lot, and still do. The places I grew up in have changed so much now, to the point of being unfamiliar in the face of rapid urbanisation. In hindsight, it makes my origin seem mysterious because the traces are lost. A part of me comes from the synthesis of all the books I read and the stories I consumed.
- What do you cherish most about the place you call home?
The idea of home is a safety net, a place of stability, to me. My family moved frequently while I grew up and the novelty of a new place and a new language and culture was fascinating to me and so was that point when a house became a home. I like how a home gets decorated for Christmas and has that one corner I like to inhabit most comfortably. Reading about Ukraine, South Sudan and Palestine, makes the idea of home such a privilege that I take for granted. I do my writing at home, making it a witness to my life. I cherish the fact that once I am in my neighborhood, I can drive home almost reflexively. It is the familiarity of a place that shouldn’t change, and hopefully stays like a landmark. In my imagination, I can picture a future home convergent with my sensibilities and that imaginary home, I cherish too.
- What ignites your creativity?
Anything I believe calls for documentation, whether it is an autumn leaf triggering a haiku or a news article that stays with me till I write a verse as a call to action. I write to express the joy of creativity and then the desire to work on it as a serious art and craft, takes over. It happens suddenly and I write down those words that come to me. There are waves of creativity that come and when they do, I might get some work done, and then there are times when I can’t think of anything. Basically, whenever I like a moment in my life that I translate to “More of this, please” I try to entwine it into my work. I also extend that to “No more of this, please” moments, as a pleading goodbye, hoping writing about evil will take away its power. Some of my work is not creative, it is a witness to projects I deeply believe in like: PoetryXHunger, Poets for Science and peace initiatives. Colorful places and whimsical trinkets wake my creativity too.
- Do you have a favorite word, and could you incorporate it into a poetic phrase?
My favorite word is arbitrary. It excuses my contradictions and forgives my revisions.
“What I call destiny today might just be the arbitrary seen through softer light.”
The word arbitrary frees me from the tyranny of outcomes. It lets me take creative risks, to treat life as a curious game where each choice is a quiet, Faustian gamble — deliberate yet surrendered.
“In the arbitrary turn of things,
I find both chance and choice disguised as one.”
- What is your pet peeve?
Well, my pet peeves are cliffhangers and ambiguous endings drive me up the wall — I keep hoping it’s a phase. I like closure, or at least the illusion of it. Dog-eared and scribbled library books used to bother me too, but ebooks have mercifully taken care of that particular irritation. Certain book adaptations too. Overlapping metaphors and unnatural dialogues in written form as well. And prose that tries for detailed description in the vein of Virginia Woolf but never quite reaches her depth — that frustrates me. Last but not the least, books that are overhyped and over marketed.
- How would you describe the essence of Vaishnavi Pusapati?
At my core, I am both a scientist and a poet — someone who studies the measurable and reaches for the immeasurable, so I am right between those two overlapping magesteria. I live with a sense of duality: the rigor of medicine and the fluidity of art. I am drawn to the emotional architecture of things — how fragility is structured, how loss organizes itself into memory.
If I had to name my essence, I’d call it precision in feeling. I try to understand life not through grand moments but through quiet calibrations — how someone hesitates before speaking, how light leaves a room. My work, in all its forms, is an attempt to translate that subtlety — to show that the smallest shift can hold an entire world. Haiku allows this essence to flourish and in longer forms, I revise till it feels like a complete set. I see myself as a seeker with a creative outlet to pursue persistently.
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