Alumni Profile: Togesh Chawla '98
In pursuit of poetry

Chawla with his puppy friend, AJ.

Poet, publisher and sometime drummer Yogesh Chawla left behind a lucrative job on Wall Street to pursue the dream of a life immersed in poetry and art. "I was working at a really rigid corporate job where the only goal was to make money, for a company whose primary goal was to make rich people richer," said Chawla. "At the end of the day, I always came home with a kind of empty feeling, even though my bank account was looking good."

Chawla's desire to do something meaningful and important with his life became his guiding principle. His high school friends, Sachin Pandya and John Ejaife II, also poets and writers, had reached the same decision about their lives. Together, they published their first volume of poetry, Attack of the 50-foot Poets, in 1998. That done, the possibilities seemed endless. And so they founded Premiere Generation Ink (PGI) and made the commitment to publish a bi-annual literary journal.

"The name of our publishing company originates from the fact that we're all first-generation Americans," said Chawla. "Our first work had something of that injected into it. We felt our experiences as immigrants balancing two cultures gave us a unique perspective on the world, and that was something we wanted to share."

One of PGI's goals is to make the literary journal itself a piece of art as well as to publish art, including poems, essays, interviews of various artists, and photographs. Each of the slim volumes PGI has produced in press runs of 250-350 is unique, and has an intimate, hand-crafted quality. For example, the logo on the cover of the summer 2001 issue was printed, then hand-shaded. A more recent volume, PGI 5 (2002) was run through an old-fashioned letterpress twice -- once for the red graphic on the cover, and another time for the black text.

Since PGI's inception, Chawla has moved to Madison, Wis. -- the place Pandya already called home -- and, with the help of an enthusiastic volunteer staff, the publishing concern has expanded to maintain a multi-media website (www.premieregeneration.com) and sponsor open-mike poetry readings as well as free poetry workshops. The poetry readings are held on the third Thursday of every month at a local coffee shop, the Speed Jump Java Joint -- and aren't restricted to poetry. "We allow any kind of free speech, art, music," said Chawla. "It's really an open forum for people to express themselves." The audience -- which ranges from 20 to 50 people -- pays close attention, noted Chawla, and gives a lot of respect to people on stage; people are serious about listening and appreciating the work.

Why does Chawla put so much time and effort, not to mention his own cash, into this enterprise? For one thing, he feels driven to provide an alternative to what he views as the homogenization of the country's media. "Right now, because of media consolidation, there's not a diversity of voices out there in the cultural and political mainstream," he said. "The giant media conglomerates are profit-driven and pay no attention to art, to free speech or expression. They're really doing everything they can to have one mainstream voice in America. I feel we have enough of that, and instead of living in that kind of world, we're going to create our own world, where people are free to say what they want, people are free to be heard by everybody. That's one of the main objectives. That's why we're putting so much time into this. That's why we want to grow, get bigger and do it in a way that we feel comfortable with.

"If people get more in touch with the creative part of their brains, if they slow down and take a little bit more time to appreciate the outside world, they'll get more in touch with themselves," he continued. "And once they do that, they'll be more empathetic to the people around them, more understanding of what's happening in the world. Over the past year, there has been so much tension, conflict and hatred. There's definitely a place for art."

At Binghamton, Chawla double majored in computer science and creative writing. "It was a nice balance to have the more rigid, disciplined computer science program, then to have a more creative, free writing program to work in as well," he said. He sees many parallels between creative writing and computer science. "When you're crafting a poem, many elements of programming are there -- in terms of the way you structure the poem, how the different components of the poem work together to make a complete piece and how every piece kind of plays off each other to make a whole."

Chawla has high praise for Binghamton's creative writing department. "My two professors, Ruth Stone [who has contributed several poems to PGI] and Liz Rosenberg, are both excellent. Their classes were really interesting and wonderful."

In his day job, Chawla is a computer programmer. "I have a broad computer skill set," he said. "BU has a fabulous computer science department that does a wonderful job preparing you for real work in the real industry."