Satire
Satirist Statement
Dr. Sonia Tiwari’s creative writing offers a satirical take on tech culture, motherhood, womanhood, immigration, and academia. These takes take the form of free verse poetry, one liners, fictional character backstories, and short stories.
Her aim with this writing is to bring light-hearted attention to serious societal flaws and other unfair phenomena that sometimes can only be dealt with a chuckle.
These are sample works, a satirical poetry book will be available in 2027.
Silly Con Valley
Why are you in the Bay if you don’t already have a startup?
Innovative product. Modern and minimalist design.
Get your pitch deck in order!
Make a pretty prototype.
Hype your valuation.
Be a founder!
- even when you never find anything.
Be fresh like a teabag
and confident like a d-bag.
That’s who VCs fund.
The person who will jump off a plane and sew a parachute on the way down!
Everything is intuitive and award-winning in this godforsaken bubble.
Everyone and their mother has a podcast about innovation,
a black laptop bag,
and a useless NFT that was just a bad investment.
You are not a founder, you're a brand, you see!
What’s your signature color? What font captures your vibe?
Should I scan your double-sided business card to reveal a lame AR logo?
Whatever you’re thinking - there’s an app for that!
And an AI tool to put that app on steroids,
And an institute of ethics to remind you that app is evil,
And a news platform to call the ethics institute useless,
And rich pricks in their Teslas calling the news a joke,
And everyone else calling out the rich pricks for hoarding free t-shirts at tech conferences.
Now take your half-baked, unoriginal idea and get some moolah!
There’s an incubator for HealthTech, FinTech, EdTech, BitchTech.
There’s a VC who only invests in intergalactic biracial goats, and occasionally otters.
There’s a seed grant for insects of color who’ve been under-represented in trilling.
And if all fails, launch a kickstarter campaign
to guilt your cringe family into helping you
And invent an abstract job title for Linkedin
that will confuse the hell out of everyone:
Professional screwer-upper.
Doom-scroll curator.
Agony dispenser.
Wildcard.
And years later when you, the UX-obsessive-founder-types, will end up six feet under
One skeleton will rise from the ground and say,
“The UX of this coffin is so bad!
Introducing – DEATH PODS!!
Minimal and intuitive burials for affluent carcasses”
“Noice. I’ll invest!”,
the skeleton one grave over would say.
Everything Poetic goes Sideways
I put a note in a glass bottle and threw it in the ocean because it felt cathartic,
but I got fined for loitering.
I plucked petals from a rose and said “he loves me, he loves me not”,
but a hummingbird gave me the stink eye and poked my pinky.
I released doves into the sky,
but the animal rights folks questioned why I held doves captive in the first place.
I sat down on the bare ground to connect with mother earth blooming in the Spring,
but I coughed from the pollen and hoped the black dot on my leg wasn’t a tick.
I went to the beach early in the morning to see the orange-pink gradients of the sunrise,
but I turned around and found a perv who followed my footprints in the sand.
I helped a stranger find directions because it feels good to be selfless and kind,
but the description of his car was on an amber alert minutes later.
I made a quill out of a goose-feather I found on a hike,
but I read about a virus spreading through dander trapped in birds’ wings.
I played my little ukulele atop a mountain,
but the echoes caused an avalanche over a tiny village.
I helped an old lady cross the road,
but I fell into a pothole that turned out to be a portal to another dimension.
Help me?
Julien Mencher
Julian Mencher does not miss an opportunity to remind people that he’s a Doctor, and should be addressed as such. He even goes by Dr Mencher at Starbucks as he waits for his decaf skinny latte with a hint of hazelnut sprayed with Peruvian air. He enjoys the respect that comes with the Dr title, but the average person doesn’t know that he obtained his PhD from an unaccredited school in La Jolla, and specialized in Urban pole vaulting with a minor in dynamic dry heaving. His other degree is an MBA (Mansplaining BS Aggressively).
He gave a TET talk on being a feminist ally while insisting that his talk be scheduled over a feminist literature scholar (a woman), due to his scheduling conflict involving a manscaping appointment. He was recently promoted as the Director of Center for Intellectual Debilitation at Harvart University.
When he is not doing his usual scholarly work, loves writing fortunes for a gourmet fortune cookie company in San Francisco.
One Liners - PhD
Like holiday dinners with a dysfunctional family, getting a PhD only feels warm and memorable in hindsight
The first draft of my thesis proposal was redundant and pointless. Like superhero undies.
I titled my data analysis section, "I spy with my pie-charts"
I wrote a note to myself to be opened after my PhD defense. Over the course of 4 years, I forgot what it said. When I finally opened it, there was just one word. “UNCLENCH”
One Liners - Family
My childhood room still reeks of hormonal rage and misplaced potential.
If my Indian grandma could rewrite Beyoncé’s song, it would be “if you like a thing you should’ve put turmeric on it”
I’m the family’s inspiration or cautionary tale, depending on whom you ask.
Realistic coffee mug for Mother’s Day “world’s number 1 mom* based on subjective and unverifiable data”
My son, at age 4, pointed to some rotting grapes under the couch as my birthday present. He was trying to make wine.
My son referred to the stain of a chocolate-chip cookie on his Diary of a Wimpy Kid book as Diarrhea of a wimpy kid
Funny Academic Research Titles
While most of academia feels like it’s genetically modified to avoid humor, I do give credit to the few academic researchers who find a way to use their humor while naming journal articles:
(NOTE: All of these are actual journal article titles and not an outcome of a nerdy improv workshop, click on the links to read more if you're interested!)
Fantastic yeasts and where to find them: the hidden diversity of dimorphic fungal pathogens
miR miR on the wall, who's the most malignant medulloblastoma miR of them all?
Leaf me alone: visual constraints on the ecology of social group formation
