HASTI IN ROME: Monthly Poems on Time, Culture, and the Everyday

Hasti in Rome is a collection of poems written while living in the city. Once a month, the author wrote to Rome, not to describe it, but to remain in conversation with it. Shaped by daily life, quiet struggles, and steady observation, these poems explore how a place reveals itself when one stays long enough to listen. Rather than capturing Rome as spectacle, the collection observes culture as it is lived. Art remains accessible, history stays visible, and public life quietly shapes behaviour. Rome emerges as a living classroom, where meaning accumulates through repetition and belonging forms without announcement. Through India and Italy, the poems show how cultures do not need to be traded or diluted to be learned from but can exist fully and beautifully alongside one another. They attend to presence, patience, and the slow education of seeing.