2020 was chaotic. Losing all my previous work in a mishap rendered me with a crippling writer’s block. I was struggling to find motivation to write again. Between a loss of meaning in my own words and questions revolving around the worth of expression, I could only look for my roots.
So what motivates me to write?
People. People do. And to be specific, the extreme poor, the grassroots society, I learn the most from that place.
This little video is miraculous,why?
It could generate nostalgia, introspection, awe, and strength , all at the same time.
How? let me first explain what’s going on.
The video simply is of an elder sister oiling her brothers in a sun-kissed winter morning. Nothing out of the ordinary, only, that it is taking place in the middle of a road, under a flyover, and as my video taking suggests, with no privacy. When you have to live with 7 people in a makeshift room the size of kitchen in an average 2 bhk apartment, the concepts of “personal space” look too premium to even be considered.
The trivial act of oiling young ones on winter mornings is a universal binder in human terms, tells us how human life,in all its expressions has similarities.
I could not deny how warm it made me feel to watch it, for all I could remember was my mother doing the same for me when I was young. The connection and warmth of being touched simultaneously by a relative and the sun itself is a strong thought, a happy thought.Even though I wasn’t butt naked under a flyover, that single thought has the capacity to bind me to that kid on a level deeper than just “understanding”.
I’ve been led to believe that we don’t discuss enough, our happy places, or dark corners, our memories, the ones we cherish and the ones we want to forget. In the society that we have today, we’re always too insecure, insecurity of being not understood and ridiculed for feeling the way we do. That feeling,when it manifests itself on a macro level, becomes a huge barrier hindering the greatest connection we all have, the connection of emotion.
Maybe, it is a responsibility, to strip humanity naked to show the subtle strings of similarity. That we’re too similar to be hurtful to others.
That’s why I write.
