Beyond the Spotlight: Roshan Abbas shares the struggles and triumphs of organizing 'Spoken Fest'

MUMBAI: Spoken Fest, Kommune’s annual celebration of storytelling, poetry, and music, is back for its 7th edition on February 1st and 2nd, 2025. This year’s festival promises to be bigger, bolder, and more immersive than ever before, with a stellar lineup of performers and interactive experiences that will leave attendees inspired.

One will be able to explore Poetry Apothecary, where words become medicine for the soul, or visit Art/Heart, an interactive space that maps life journeys through art. You can also swap books with fellow book lovers, discover hidden literary gems, listen to vinyl records, or even get a personalized poem or tarot reading.

Spoken Fest is committed to sustainability and inclusivity, partnering with Skrap to become India’s first zero-waste and carbon-positive event. The festival promotes reusable cups and ensures a welcoming space for all, with gender-neutral washrooms and designated areas for elders, pregnant women, and differently-abled individuals.

Roshan Abbas, Founder of Kommune India, shares his vision for Spoken Fest, providing a deeper look into what makes this event truly extraordinary.

How do you envision Spoken Fest impacting the cultural landscape of India and beyond?

To understand what poets and storytellers are covering as topics is very often for me a dipstick of how India is feeling. Spoken fest works as an inspiration through the year for people as we use the content to talk of various topics also, due to the rich diversity of voices and formats, we are able to appreciate both the classics and the modern voices along with find some beaks of inspiration from the arts, this is how Spoken is culturally relevant to the audience. It is an empathy boot camp and captures the mindset of Gen Z and millennials.

How do you curate the lineup for Spoken Fest, and what factors do you consider when selecting performers?

Joseph, who has been the chief curator of the festival earlier, had given us a guideline of how to do this . Essentially 30% of what we curate has to be a never before ever again. 40% used to be brave new voices, and the balance needs to be things that we are coming across, during the year that we feel our audience will like to get to know of, for example, Ankita Shah wrote a lovely post on Instagram about women and too much information, which is now a piece. Paresh Pahuja has suddenly burst on Instagram with show voice notes and we felt it would be lovely to have him. Actors and performers who have a unique voice that you have not heard like Raghubir Yadav doing folk songs. Are all examples of this.

In order to give voices from across India and the globe, we have a pitch Spoken fest as a place where only the best get to make it to our stage. This year, we have people from Guwahati, Pune, Dubai, and many other locations who have made it to Spoken.

What are some of the challenges you face while organizing a festival like Spoken Fest, and how do you overcome them?

The biggest challenge is that there is no shared calendar of events throughout the year and so when we book a date, we are all just taking a chance. This weekend. There are five wonderful events in Bombay and I would personally want to be at all of them, this is leading to a huge audience split , the other is that Spoken word is not something that finds great support. Although our audience grows here year after year and we are the only festival with a combined social media presence of more that a million people on YouTube and Instagram who we reach out to every day. Yet this is not cricket or Bollywood or even Comedy.

We definitely need to find long-term support . The heavy influx of concerts over the last few months has also wiped out both the money that sponsors had as well as what is available to consumers to spend. Yet our loyal audience returns year after year. Keeping the festival fresh in both design and content is another challenge, but I am really grateful to our team who has managed to do all this.