I started writing Tamil poetry when I was very young. The language captivated me. Tamil language lessons at school were most often taught by folks that loved the language. This culmination of my interest and a nourishing environment helped me blossom into someone that wrote fairly good poetry by the time I was 15. The “fairly good” certificate is derived from a few prize winning moments, and more importantly, accolades from fans of the language and the social subject matters that my poetry usually addressed.

I lost touch with Tamil poetry as I moved abroad and other interests took over my life. After a long time, when I had to add a voice to the streams of thoughts that came sometimes from raging anger and other times from humbling beauty, I resorted to writing poetry again.

Unfortunately, my audiences were now accustomed to listening to poetry only in the form of movie songs with accompanying dance numbers and poetry reading became a hard to find if not lost art. To engage my audience, I added photographs or digital graphic to capture their attention. Sometimes, when the poetry was long, I added music and made it into a short video.

The format of such graphics was similar to the above video.

The above poem is filled with innumerable plays on words, timing and patterns. But in our reel driven short-form world (more on this soon), the challenge becomes one of getting and retaining attention. The poetry in this case also tells a story.

The Story

Once there lived a bunch of happy ants. They lived inside a wall of an old Indian house. A big happy family. The queen led the ants from inside and the workers led them from outside. There was ample food to eat.

One fine day, when the workers were out, a loud noise shook their nest. A nail entered their nest, just its tip at first. Slow to begin. But the nail showed a good portion of itself soon and fast. Dust filled their nest. It was no longer a place to survive, build or rest. At least, not right away. They moved out. In search of a new place. Another humble abode.

Days became months, and months became years. On a fateful day, the Queen called out. “More sugar. More sugar. Chop Chop. Chop Chop.”. The leader cried out to assemble the workers. They gathered and marched ahead. They sought out the sweet smell of saccharine and streamed ahead. They entered a small hole just outside the lone house in the street corner.

They came out of a hole on the wall just underneath an obscenely crooked nail that had cracked the wall when it mercilessly plowed through. The nail now was their compass as the smell oozed under the nail, through the hole, across the gap in the wall.

They sought out the source of the smell. The lone leg of tired young man. They gathered around the sweet spot and as if on a beat they all came down with the swords of their mouths to suck the sweetness and isolate the sugars.

The man shrieked in pain and let out a wail. “What have I ever done to you, you spiteful ants?” He screamed as he fell down from his bed. He was barely holding onto his life through his sickness and the ants’ bite spelt doom. His life escaped his body like the sweet smell of sugar from his blood. It went in search of another body, one among tens of millions that could host such a life.

The ants, shocked by the turmoil decided to retreat. “Enough sugar. Enough sugar”. The leader belted out more instructions: “Let’s head back”. The ants assembled to venture back. They entered the hole beneath the nail. What a great place to build a nest. The hung around to decide. Far away, another family was planning to seek a new house. The man of the house had just bought an electric hammer. Time marched on.

The next iteration

With the current generation hooked on short form videos, my gimmicks to add interesting graphics fall flat due to the slightly traditional form of my poetry and some difficult words that I use as well as my relatively sub-par artistic skills.

However, we now have artists on demand and with AI video generation slowly rearing its head, I wanted to give it a fair shot. I managed to generate the following video with fairly low effort and some cash for the GPU load.

I don’t have fine-grained control per scene yet and the usual quirks of AI image generation do show up here as well. All that said, I managed to generate a somewhat coherent animated video that was thematically close to my verses. I believe it is a significant step forward. As the industry matures, I am hoping to revive the love for Tamil poetry and storytelling by pairing with better quality AI generated movies.

Artists may frown or figuratively throw up at the use of AI (we have one at home) both from the quality and the ethical implications around its usage. I’m strictly experimenting and I’m hopeful that it does increase creative output and resultant engagement by being a less expensive complement without replacing real artists and studios. I have created another one with a different focus if you find this interesting. What are your thoughts?