One of the most baffling moments in my life was when I was 6 years old. Unfamiliar with the word pilot, I proudly proclaimed I wanted to be a sky driver, standing in front of my favourite toy aeroplane . My mother shot me a quizzical look as she looked up from the camera that had not stopped shooting videos of me since I was born and said ‘But you just said you want to be a dog doctor’. Her statement was crushingly profound for my young mind. It implied that I couldn’t be everything. I will have to pick something to be. The awareness of this choice led me to turn to writing, perhaps as a method of self-preservation. On the contrary, some years later came another realisation that some roles in life will just be assigned to me, without my consent. The awareness of this imposition led me to turn to writing, perhaps as a form of examination.
I am a daughter, a heterosexual woman living in a deeply patriarchal society in India, a friend that’s the goofy one in the group, an elder sister torn between being a role model and a friend, a product of the post-colonial world, a recovering school goer, a consumer in a ruthlessly capitalistic world, a conflicted student, a concerned citizen, a hopeless romantic, a voracious reader, an inflicted writer (happily so), a person who wears her heart on her sleeve, an array of labels. The only way I can make sense of these everyday roles and feelings is to carve out the magical out of the ordinary. To see things beyond what they seem to be. It is a humbling experience to write with the knowledge that it's just 26 letters that you string together that can ignite something beautiful within you and in others. It renews my belief in the simplicity of nature, as we walk further away from it. My diary entry for 2016 talks of my deepest fears that I will never see anything for what it is, only what I am. I began writing as a defense mechanism. It allowed me to look a little deeper.
At different points in our lives, we all must pick the tools we have to fight the fights we pick. What we deem important is malleable. I've struggled trying to juggle identities, ones ascribed to me and the other that I’d formed for myself
Right now, great disparity infects my country. The top tier in the class hierarchy possesses abysmally more than the bottom. For me, writing is a way of acknowledging these astonishing details and beginning to start a dialogue of change. Me, being trapped in the lukewarm middle am a disconcerted spender, negotiating my place, my boundaries every day.
Writing is the way I deal with great beauty and great pain. It affects the way I interact, the way I see the world is as if I were narrating it to someone else. It makes me want to look at the best bits and be angry about the right things in this world.
Writing makes me vulnerable, it expresses my deepest fears and most intense desires. Writing is like a magic portal that connects me to several others who yield the pen with as much passion. It’s an entry point into a world of stories different than mine. It’s a commitment, to make my voice be heard, to listening and above all to recognize the plurality of narratives.
More than writing affecting my identities, I suspect it has been the other way round for me.
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