Misfits matter

In his debut collection, Mumbai-based journalist and poet Suhit Kelkar has channelled Greek myths to indulge in a sort of personal mythopoeia

In the third poem of the volume under review, The Centaur Goes Beyond Binaries, the protagonist — half-horse, half-man — recalls being defeated in a wrestling bout. Even as he nurses his wounds and his ego, the Centaur has a realisation: “It was then that I knew / I would never fit in / and that this was alright.” To not fit in, to stand out, to be offensive, is not only an inalienable characteristic of individualism, but also an aesthetic and political standard. It is, as the poem claims, a rejection of the binaries in which an increasingly polarised