After the first lockdown last year, Delhi-based interdisciplinary artiste Amitesh Grover started musing about how he could respond to the times we were living in. Not just to the biological virus, but also the other kinds of viruses plaguing us, such as the fear of the truth-speaker. “I started thinking about what kind of society we’re becoming — where our truth-tellers are languishing in jails, being publicly attacked, and whose books are being banned or burned,” he points out. Around this time, Grover also chanced upon a quote by one of his favourite poets, Jonas Mekas: “In the very end, civilisations perish because they listen to their politicians and not their poets.” It set off a chain of thoughts in his head, leading him to imagine a fictional world where a people’s poet goes missing, which forms the premise of his upcoming cyber theatre production, The Last Poet.