THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Writer and poet Shajil Anthru’s new English poem, “I Am the President,” has been released, offering a powerful and disturbing satire on political power, war and propaganda.
Written as a first-person dramatic monologue, the poem gives voice to an unnamed president who claims responsibility for war and destruction and ultimately awards himself the “Noble” Prize. Through this dark irony, Anthru examines the psychology of absolute power and the transformation of human suffering into political spectacle.
The poem’s short, direct lines reflect Anthru’s interest in Fishbone Poetry, while its philosophical concerns resonate with his broader literary exploration of power, humanity and Zeroism.
The release video is available on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1DtJNFM9sW/
Thiruvananthapuram | 3 September 2026
Litterateur TV has released a visualised reading of Shajil Anthru’s English poem “The Perfect Wound.” The film, titled Shajil Anthru’s poetry The Perfect Wound Visualization, runs just under four minutes and is now available on the Litterateur TV channel. The same video is being carried on the Litterateur Online News portal.
The lyric is spoken in the first person from the Netherworld on the returning day of Onam. Mahabali addresses an unnamed “you,” sets remembrance against justice, and ends with the question that gives the poem its title: whether the scheduled feast and the promise of memory are enough. The visualisation places that voice against images of feast, descent, and unanswered space rather than treating the festival only as celebration.
The poem has also been the subject of a published critical reading by the poet himself. The paper, “Mythic Descent and the Ethics of Remembrance: A Critical Reading of ‘The Perfect Wound,’” appears in the International Research Journal of Modernization in Engineering Technology and Science (IRJMETS), Volume 08, Issue 09, September 2026, paper ID IRJMETS80900003593, pages 50–53. The article is online at: https://www.irjmets.com/paperdetail.php?paperId=268e87932b8bd4b15d8200263a0780a9
A publication certificate was issued on 3 September 2026.The study states at the outset that the writer of the poem and the writer of the essay are the same person, and it tries to keep the two roles apart. It reads the lyric as an independent text: calendar time against cosmic time, the three-fold fall as a geological rewriting of Vamana’s three paces, and the last phrase—“the perfect wound”—as a wound that is complete rather than admirable. It also names a limit of the poem, the crowded “you” that may be god, people, or later reader. Comparison is used only to place the architecture of descent, not to claim rank.
Shajil Anthru, Chairman of the K. M. Anthru Foundation and Editor of Litterateur Redefining World, works in Malayalam and English. “The Perfect Wound” belongs to that bilingual line and to a Kerala myth that still returns each Chingam. The new video and the journal essay put the same short lyric in two rooms at once: a public screening and a formal close reading.
Readers may watch the visualisation on Litterateur TV and on this portal, and consult the IRJMETS paper at the link above.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Irv3c0wAjw
Paper: IRJMETS, Vol. 08, Issue 09, September 2026, ID IRJMETS80900003593