The benefits of reading poetry in a world of muddled meanings

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. By the time you are reading this, most of us would have entered into a death struggle with our new year resolutions. The hard numbers from our blood tests would have softened around the edges.

The airy bounce acquired during a few days of vacation would have dissipated. What remains is our familiar selves and our tanhai (loneliness). The tanhai may even seem worse given how even last week our selves seemed nicer, cooler, more relaxed.

And about now a portion of you would be transferring your annoyance with life to this foolish Malayali columnist who has borrowed this Hindi/Urdu word fecklessly. Here is the thing though. As soon as I used this word from a language I may have learnt in school (and from TV) in that sentence, I was immediately cheered up.

The word actually came to me, a child of the 1980s, via the movies with its light modern irony. With it I am dressed appropriately for the modern condition, any modern condition. If you love fashion YouTube like I do, you already know the advice to wear your good clothes now.

Using the good words from the same language I had to mug essays to pass makes me feel like I am in a party frock on a Monday afternoon (slightly dressed down of course). We live in a time when the muddling of meaning is a global weapon of destruction. The Russian-American writer Masha Gessen has written about the leaching of meaning from language over decades of political tyranny in Russia.

Living in the US, Gessen has had plenty of opportunity to discuss the damage to political language closer home. Or as Gessen wrote in their book Surviving Autocracy (2020), “when something cannot be described, it does not become a fact of shared reality". This brings me to my very