‘Look at life through a sense of realism while being humorous’: Priya Malik

"We live in a world that is hell-bent on fitting us into boxes; 'you can't be this if you are that'," she said

"We live in a world that is hell-bent on fitting us into boxes or you can't be this if you are that", said by Priya Malik (Priya Malik in the video 2019 mein 1999)

Priya Malik, a TV personality, teacher, storyteller and a performer, talks about the process of being who you are and who you want to be.

Her work has been featured in some of India’s biggest spoken word platforms such as UnErase poetry, Spill poetry, Amazon Prime and tape a tale.

She started by saying that we live in a country that is “hell-bent on telling us that you have to be certain way in order to be certain thing”. “I think it is very important to raise a generation of kids, who are not obsessed with what they want to become but a generation of kids, who want to think about who they want to be when they grow up.”

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Through her life experience, she realised the only person who could move from one box to another one was she herself.

She went on to elaborate she worked in everything: “This professional fluidity is one thing, that I want to give myself a lifestyle that is also not boxed anyway, where I can move from one box to another.”

She shared the biggest dilemma that she faced in these boxes: “There is one box that feeds my stomach, and another one that feeds my soul”.

“I don’t let my success or my failure define me, I let it educate me.”

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“I don’t have to close one door in order to open the other, I didn’t have to give up on being a school teacher in order to be a spoken word artist, I didn’t have to give up on being a spoken word artist in order to fit that stereotype of a comedian, I didn’t have to give up on being a teacher, a spoken word artist and a comedian in order to be a column writer, I didn’t have to give up on all those four boxes in order to do a radio”.

“When somebody asks my 10-year-old self what do you want to be, my answer is everything,” she concluded.

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