Kalam n. 1. pen or pencil [in Arabic, Farsi, Bangla, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu]

Kalam: Margins Write is a rights-based creative writing program for marginalized youth.  It empowers youth to discover themselves as creative writers and cultural thinkers, and promotes critical consciousness and engaged imaginations in the margins.  It is a movement for young people to claim their right over their lives by rewriting their selves, their communities, and their worlds according to themselves.

Kalam works with Calcutta-based youth groups and organizations to build a creative writing culture among the social margins through the following programs and activities:

• Creative Writing Workshop

twenty-week creative writing workshop on identity, community, and the world

• Footpath Poetry

a poetry campaign exhibiting  youth poems along Calcutta city tea-stalls.

• Peer Poetry Addas

youth led creative writing workshops

• Youth Magazine

a platform for the youth, by the youth

• Poetry Readings

neighborhoods, coffee-houses, bookstores, marketplaces, street-corners

Where?

Calcutta (Kolkata), India

Redlight-Areas, Streets, Shelter-homes, Railway Platforms, Drop-in-Centers, Schools.

How?

Margin-centered. Youth-driven. Participatory. Ethnographic. Anti-ism. Critically conscious. Process-oriented. Anti-sensational. Issue-transcendent. Poetic.

Why?

Kalam believes the process of scripting one’s own story –-- writing oneself out --- is the most powerful and authentic way of claiming and creating yourself and your place in the world. The stories of the margins have too often been written and spoken about from the outside. Kalam stands for margins writing for themselves.