A profile of Akhil Katyal, bilingual poet and rising star on Delhi's literary horizon

By now, he had published his first poem in the school magazine. It was written in Hindi, during his “Casio phase”. He had been taking private music lessons for a few years, tabla in Dehradun and Casio (the keyboard) in Lucknow. A man came to their Ganga Sinchai Puram home and taught him and his brother to play simple Bollywood tunes. “It was songs like “Roop Suhana Lagta Hai”, and “Didi Tera Devar Deewana”. I played these tunes at public events, especially at the colony’s officer’s club, where children would perform at dinners.”

It was the 150th-year celebration of their school, and both his brother and he took ill. He was still keen on participating somehow, so he wrote a poem for the school magazine. It was called “Ghar”, and he admits he had help with it. “I wrote the first six lines and my keyboard teacher wrote the second half.”

Over the years, his language skills were getting sharper but so was the pressure to focus on science. “My mother is a double graduate. My father went to IIT before he joined the state irrigation department. Most of the men on either side of the family were in engineering or the air force.”

Katyal ended up studying science for another two years, but it was a miserable time. After school, he was sent to a private coaching centre, full of young men preparing to crack the big entrance exams – medicine and engineering. He began to cut classes. “I would take my moped and wander around Lucknow. I’d go to the imambara, or to the riverside. I rode far out, waiting until it was time to go home.”

He fared badly in his 12th board exams and failed the IIT prelims. His parents finally took him to a career counsellor who tested his aptitude and told them that the boy’s interest and talent clearly lay in English literature. “She said, ‘Take him to Delhi University and let him study literature’.” By now, his older brother had been put through the grind and ultimately allowed to go his way, into hotel management. “So I was a little freer to do this non-serious thing, literature.”

Read the whole thing in GQ India: https://www.gqindia.com/magazine-story/delhi-based-bilingual-poet-akhil-katyals-fresh-new-voice-literary-landscape-deserves-attention/