Emerging platforms for budding artists: Awaken Words

Open mics are an opportunity for all budding artists in the city. Upcoming small intimate places are full of artists with creative people and energetic vibes.

Awaken Words, a mumbai based platform started by Nisar Shaikh in 2019 is one of them. Founder of Awaken Words, Nisar Shaikh shares the agenda behind starting with their open mic by saying "we started open mic to  support new budding artists and encourage them to flourish their art and let people know what the real rooted literature is."

 Further, he mentioned, "I myself faced many issues after performing on different platforms I decided to start my own platform which would help new budding artists to overcome these kinds of hindrances and would serve them equally."

They have organised more than 40 events till now, including all the grand events, open mics, corporate shows. They have performed in Amity university Mumbai literature fest 2019 along with their featured artists including Ashfaq Shaikh, Hrishi Camble , Raza Abbas Khan , Nisar Shaikh who gave their splendid performances and stamped the very first corporate event for awake words. They have also performed at the inauguration ceremony of ANT academy, Andheri, Mumbai.

Awaken words organise their events on weekends so that corporate people can also express their creativity on weekends. Nisar extends his thanks to all the team members by saying, "we have our core team members who are the main support system of awaken words, without them it was not possible to grow this much."  Rageshwari Shukla, Delhi head of Awaken words mentioned "Starting from Mumbai we have expanded our roots to Delhi, Kolkata, Orissa, Pune and wish to expand all over india."

One of the specialities of Awaken words is they always provide 5 free slots for financially weaker artists so that they can perform freely without any awkwardness and hesitation. They never disclose the names so that they don't feel like they are different from others or weaker than others. Another thing is they have the friendliest environment they are providing to their performers. Nisar says " it helps the performers to gain confidence before even going on to the stage. They feel at home and they completely forget about their hesitation."

Rageshwari Shukla mentioned how they managed to spread art during the pandemic by saying "When we got stuck in a pandemic, we realised the necessity of art being around us, as "ART BRINGS PEACE". We  immediately decided to organise open mic events in online mode and many people flooded with their contents and registered themselves in our online open mic events."

 "Apart from this taking the conditions of our country into consideration, we thought of putting a helping hand in the financial aspects so we did a dedicated funding open mic event and collected an outstanding amount of 20k through all the awaken family and donated all of the amounts to the Khushiyaan foundation which further distributed the food(ration) to the families for one month."

When the Covid spread came under control,  they started once again with their Delhi events, firstly with all the necessary restrictions like sanitization, masks and with whole social distancing, following all the norms as per government guidelines.

For more details on Awaken words, you can contact Nisar Shaikh - 7738806889 and Rageshwari Shukla - 8076263199