Poet & Artist Dipti Kulkarni Raises Awareness About Human Trafficking In Her Latest Work

Dipti Kulkarni is an acclaimed artist who is a technologist by profession but an artist by passion. She uses her artistic skills (be it paintings or writing) to create social awareness especially for women empowerment so that women can live with pride. She believes that art has a great power of expression and can influence people in numerous ways. So far, her exhibits and poetry recitals have had great response, recognition and support in the USA and India. We have previously featured some of her social justice-driven poems on our site, as part of a bigger collection she has titled ‘Women Rights and Empowerment’, which you can learn more about on her website. She does not sell the works from women empowerment series. They are meant to inspire and provoke meaningful conversations and change.

Dipti’s poems have won several awards in USA and in India. University students in India and USA have written several research papers on her art and poems. She does mentor them as well. Her art has been featured on cover pages of several magazines.

The ‘Women Rights and Empowerment’ series has 18 artworks and her poems are usually inspired from her artwork. She chooses one topic every year that has a global impact and starts from there. Dipti has had the opportunity to exhibit her work in her home state of New Jersey, recite the poems at various city council and community events, and in turn inspire women to speak up about their problems. Dipti was one of the 2019 Global Diversity and Inclusion Award winners honored by Bank of America.

“I consider myself a Global citizen and so the poetry is not meant for any specific country or culture or cast or creed or community.  Instead it is for humanity,” says Dipti.

Here’s what Dipti had to say about her poem “What a fate!”

“This past year, I decided to work on the topic of Human Trafficking – a global issue affecting millions every year. It was around end of March 2019 that I started focusing on my poem and started nailing it down. With so much news about human trafficking on a global scale, I started getting disturbed and it made me realize how important this is. I have to work on creating awareness about various social issues and help the betterment to whatever extent I can. I started working on my poem and studying more about human trafficking.

“To write anything impacting, you have to get to the weeds of the subject and put yourself in the situation to understand the trauma one has to go through. Very soon, I realized that this subject is very vast and needs to be expressed carefully.

“It took me around 2 months to create and come up with a poem on this subject. I went through several iterations of reading the poem to myself to check the impact and message it was conveying. I decided to use the artwork “What next?” from my ‘Women’s Rights and Empowerment’ series as a background for the poster. Once the poster was ready, I had the opportunity to launch this poem at a local Robbinsville, NJ Town Council event. Now that the poem has been released publicly, I am working on outreach to raise awareness for human trafficking.”

Important facts about human trafficking to consider:

The official website of the Department of Homeland Security states that “Every year, millions of men, women, and children are trafficked worldwide – including right here in the United States. It can happen in any community and victims can be any age, race, gender, or nationality. Traffickers might use violence, manipulation, or false promises of well-paying jobs or romantic relationships to lure victims into trafficking situations. Language barriers, fear of their traffickers, and/or fear of law enforcement frequently keep victims from seeking help, making human trafficking a hidden crime. Traffickers use force, fraud, or coercion to lure their victims and force them into labor or commercial sexual exploitation. They look for people who are susceptible for a variety of reasons, including psychological or emotional vulnerability, economic hardship, lack of a social safety net, natural disasters, or political instability. The trauma caused by the traffickers can be so great that many may not identify themselves as victims or ask for help, even in highly public settings.”