About Rashmita A Kamat
Rashmita A Kamat aka RashKam hails from the city of Pearls, Hyderabad. From a very tender age, she has dreamt of being an author. However, the poem Road Not Taken by Robert Frost inspired her and the Pandemic allowed her time to discover her hidden poet and thus her journey into poetry began. Alongside, she is also putting in great efforts to live her childhood dream, to be an author.
LiFT: Tell us about your book, the journey of writing it and its content?
Rashmita A Kamat: This book, “Lifography”, mainly is about my view of life, how I symbolize certain objects with something related to life or society and a few narrative poems which kind of show my interest in writing as well. The journey, well, I initially had never thought I’d venture into poetry, I just wrote down a few of my poems on a word document and somewhere around June- July 2020, I kind of felt that maybe I should, consider publishing these poems. However at that point I was unable to come up with ideas to write more poems. It was reading more poems and exploring different styles of poems and different themes that kind of helped me explore my style better and then I started working on poetry again. After this phase, my style, I feel, had drastically changed. This caused me to become very doubtful of my previous poems, but with a little encouragement from a few cousins, I decided to keep those poems as it is and instead to show the years when they were written to depict the journey and the growth of me as a Poet.
LiFT: Why you chose this title?
Rashmita A Kamat: So, there is this word called, “Lifeology” which basically studies lifestyle. So I kind of created a my version for it, “Lifology” minus the “e” after “f”, meaning a journey of life. Later on I just randomly came up with “Lifography” as a synonym for that. Not very deeply thought of, but yeah. I chose that mainly because all my poems are kind of revolving around life or something related to life.
LiFT: When did you realize that you want to be a poet and what’s your inspiration behind it?
Rashmita A Kamat: I was always interested in writing stories since childhood and sometimes dreamt of being an author. However, as a child I used to think poetry was for highly genius people and not for people like us. Heavily disappointed in my younger self because in my 9th, I had this poem, “Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost in my curriculum and that changed my view on poetry completely. I realised that poetry was a medium for anyone to express their viewpoint and you don’t need any kind of qualifications for it and you needn’t be a genius or extremely well versed with linguistics to understand poetry. You just need feel what is written in the poem to understand it. That’s when I started writing poems and understanding other poems. Today I absolutely love and appreciate poetry. Some poems even make me cry. I am not the type who usually cries very easily, unless I feel overwhelmed, but somehow poetry really hits me now that I appreciate it. So I have a lot of grattitude to Sir Robert Frost for helping me discover this Hidden Poet in me, who was so good at hide and seek that I would have probably never found her if it wasn’t for his poem.
LiFT: Where do you see yourself ten years down the line in the world of literature?
Rashmita A Kamat: That’s a question that I have not very deeply thought of. However I have planned a book for around 2026-27 and also am planning to work on a Hindi Poetry collection. My aim is to mainly see people relate or take away something from my works. If I can see that happening, I would be elated.
LiFT: How much do you think marketing or quality of a book is necessary to promote a particular book and increase its readers?
Rashmita A Kamat: I think it is very necessary to market a book in various ways because in a world with so much of competition in Literature, no matter how great your work is, unless people have heard of it, you cannot reach out to many readers. And yes, definetly the quality, or how well written the book is, matters a lot, because that is the whole essence of your style that readers can expect from all your works, so unless your style is captivating and unqiue or something that can be understood as that of yours, it is difficult to grab the attention of many readers.
LiFT: What is the message you want to spread among folks with your writings?
Rashmita A Kamat: I would like to people to take away 2 things from my writings so far;
1. Something that would change your life for the better. Some idea from any of my poems that can help you to bring a good change in your life.
2. The journey of growth throughout my writing style, I want that to inspire other aspiring poets that in the beginning, most of us poets do not have any clue about our style, or our ideas that we want to express, but overtime you will get clear about it and then your work will start showing that. I want them to know that they will become better at the art of poetry with more experience and should just keep going and never give up.
LiFT: What do you do apart from writing?
Rashmita A Kamat: I am currently pursuing a Bachelors of Arts in Psychology, Literature and Political Science at St. Francis Women’s College, Begumpeg, Hyderabad. My main subject being Psychology. I am interested to take up Psychology as my profession. I also do post parodies on Youtube and I am working on a music album, but because I haven’t found a guitarist yet, that is kind of on a hold.
LiFT: What are the activities you resort to when you face a writer’s block?
Rashmita A Kamat: Initially I give myself some time to get over it. If that doesn’t work, then I try to recreate something I have read to reactivate my creativity. And if that also doesn’t help then I try to repeat what I was working on to myself multiple times until I am able to come up with a continuation for that, this applies mainly to my book that I am currently work on. For poetry, I usually just search up random words on the dictionary and try to write a poem on it and keep doing that until something triggers an idea.
LiFT: Are you working on your next book? If yes, please tell us something about it.
Rashmita A Kamat: I am currently working on a book. It is, mainly, mystery genre, maybe tiny sci-fi involved. Though it’s basically fiction, I am trying to make the characters very relatable and also of various mindsets and various experiences to make it explore many emotions. I am trying to apply some psychology approaches to make it easier for me to work on that. It’s a single book, but it will be divided into 5 segments, which will interconnect eventually. Since I am still in the beginning segments, I have to see where it goes and how it covers all the elements that I want it to.
LiFT: What are your suggestions to the budding writers/poets so that they could improve their writing skills?
Rashmita A Kamat: Firstly, never give up when you have a writer’s block. A few handful of my friends were working on their own books but they gave up when they faced a very long writer’s block. Don’t let that happen because once you lose that touch, that interest, it is difficult to bring yourself back into writing.
As for improving your writing skills, well there can be many ways for this, but for me, personally I was able to improve myself by reading various books/poems. I also did this one thing, not sure if it will be very helpful for everyone, but it did help me. This was mainly to improve the way my description of emotions or a particular background was framed. I would pick out a certian paragraph which I felt was very rich in how it described a feeling or a background in a particular book, and then try to write it in my way keeping in mind certain elements that had been specified in the original lines. This helped me build a structure as to how I should go about descriptions. I would suggest you to give it a try. Maybe it can help you as well.
Click here to order Rashmita A Kamat’s Book – Lifography
