2018 August was a month which many Keralites( State of Kerala, India) won’t forget. The fall of flooding across the state took the life of almost 400+ people and made a devastation of more than 10,000 crore. These are some of the photographs I took during the month, even though I myself was a victim of the disaster.
Once in a while we had to welcome some unknown guests from our past who may be a distant cousin or a long lost friend. Such meetings generally end up as an unscripted drama wherein you tumble over the words as in most cases eventuality turned out be melodramatic in nature. You may be placed in an awkward situation that actually juxtaposes your likes and interests and often compels one to have disheartened chitchats. In such cases you may often started thinking about your lack of ability to deal with people. But it is not so.
Human beings are thus bound to cross boundaries in certain uncanny occasion that brings us into the boundaries of our life. Here the boundaries are not of the physical nature but are of the ones that are being nurtured out of education, society, social situations, interests, profession and so on. For example if you are a hardcore fan of football and in an instance when you are placed opposite to somebody who generally dislikes such sports it is quite common for you to not accept the actualities he/she lays in front of you and often silence prevails such talks. Here your beliefs are questioned which is the most basic aspect of human consciousness and any form of contradictory beliefs always creates strife’s whatsoever.
It is actually quite confusing and questionable in a way on how we drew boundaries in our life. It is not something that personally we writes,dictates and recites. When you consider oneself then your opinions and beliefs are shaped out of your interactions with the society you am dealing with. It will be different to somebody else and thereby the off springs of these actualities can be denoted as the basic identity that defines our life. For example if you are born post second world war then you may have a different opinion about the war. But to the ones who had experienced the brutalities and bloodshed war offers the opinions would be different. Thus you create a world consciously in and around you thereby filtering all those ideas, ideals,thoughts, people and so on. In such a case you have a predetermined stand on most of the issues and thereupon you just hate all ideas that alter those beliefs. This is where the difficulty to adapt to a new system arises.
A system is a mixture of multiple realities that coincide at certain situations like one of the basic human emotions, fear. The fear that emanate from various occurrences in life happen to create similarities among us.People with fear of heights, fear of insects ,fear of darkness are bound to hold these similarities. So sometimes boundaries do coincide in certain aspects of life in everybody’s life. So don’t worry about the next time that you may feel you are out of the bounds.
It is substantially enough for a writer to sustain his livelihood in India, home to more than 130 crore people thereby allowing a writer enough target audience. But due to the unique demography of linguistic and cultural diversity the readership differ considerably in proportion with offline and online audiences. While even in today’s context where people are addicted to social media culture a large proportion of readership still have the urge for printed materials like newspapers to get hold of news. Today it is more of a daily routine as teens are compelled to read newspaper daily as it is as important as breakfast.
The newspaper is more than a century old in its performance but is comparatively way better than that of its successor television which is finding it hard to attract the attention of its viewers who had lost themselves in social media. While it looks a lot complicated for a writer especially for a newbie to find a platform to start it is even hard for a established writer to sustain in his/her role due to changes in the system. Back in the day when blogging went crazy worldwide it was considered the best platform for people who love to share ideas,articles,stories,poetry and so on and was the best possible job one could do sitting back home. Even my old lady back home used to check for cooking remedies all over the internet as it was less complicated to handle. But after a decade we all saw the boom in the culture which lead to what that is called information overload as you get too much of information in social media that you ain’t bother about scavenging books to do your assignments. But at this point it all look pretty much of a good news for a freelance writer in India as more people fled more viewers and more traffic. But what happened in this evolution was that in next couple of years audience with the public forums in hands were given golden opportunity which allowed them to write and publish whatever they want. This lead to rise in false information’s without any sensible background. This lead to the losing of credibility of many established writers. The widespread plagiarism all over internet created a large vacuum of pure lies and truths . This lead to significant lose in traffics and thereby income for many bloggers and freelancers. Today it is thereby hard to distinguish between what is a true and what is false.
There were shadows everywhere and dimly lit source of light appeared out of nowhere .Being in the presence of utter silence and shadows was unbearable. Somewhere in distance I could here somebody weeping shortly breaking the silence and I was not sure who it was. Soaring pain in the eyelids coupled with an overall numbness was quite puzzling to me.
Where am I?
I shredded my pain and tried to get up but I couldn’t and soaring pain in the head increased drastically. I moved my hand over my head and there it was swollen as i was being hit by something. The only thing I could remember was that of sound of walking boots. I can’t recall how I end up in this place . I almost got up despite the pain. Suddenly my thoughts were broken by small wailing that echoed around me. Few feets away from me there lies a girl lying half naked socked in blood and the deep scars on her body left within me a terror that I can’t feel the pain anymore in my severed head. I was not able to see her though as the darkness had shown it’s pity in hiding her face. I slowly and causiously moved towards her in vain as I listened to the echoing sound of the boots which overlapped her wailing which were dying down as each second passed. As I was about to see her face a hand suddenly fall on my shoulder terrorising me in horror . I turned myself to see the familiar face of my wife looking at me. I was dreaming.
I was there seated in my desk sleeping and dreaming as I was completing the work last night and have some how fallen asleep half through. As I was leaving the room I looked back once again to the unfinished FIR( first investigation report) that lay on the table. In between the papers and his own familiar handwriting there lies the photograph of her with her face unmistakably covered in a deep dark shadow.
Somewhere inside me someone keep on asking…
What happened to her?
What do they gain?
The World Of Anand 