As part of Teach for India’s annual retreat, I visited Ahmedabad for three days recently. Much of this time was split between the Gandhi Ashram and visiting communities that Manav Sadhana worked closely with.
The community I visited had been relocated to a bare ground because their houses were demolished by the government without notice. They had been living in make-shift houses, braving the freezing nights of Ahmedabad with bare minimum clothing, and struggling daily with their gnawing thirst and hunger. For me, it was a very unsettling experience, mainly because I was unable to understand my purpose over there. Despite that, as I walked around boiling with suppressed emotions, I realized something:
My eyes involuntarily took in every detail
The colour of the tarp,
The tatters in their clothes,
The remaining brambles that were indicative of the dangerous land they had initially been dumped in, The vastness of the garbage dump next to their camp,
The few utensils they had managed to save
And my mouth hesitantly asked questions
How did they end up here?
How long would they have to stay?
Did they have access to water?
Why couldn’t they find work nearby?
What did they eat daily?
I groped for details, as far as I would allow myself. I wish I could say it was because I cared. Yes I did care, but that was not the main reason why I want to know.
I wanted to know so that I would have something to blog about.
Even as I collected the information, I was sorting it in my head: “this would be good to write about; this is irrelevant; oooh this would make for an interesting topic!”
Because that’s what writers do.
We gather information, sort through it, choose the ‘juiciest bits’ and write those down.
We don’t go into the field to solve a problem or to alleviate pain – we go out to gather details.
We ask, we probe, we observe – hoping every second that the next bit of information will take our article from mundane to brilliant.
We become unfeeling, uncaring bastards who care more about the style of our writing than the subject of it.
We worry more about how a word sounds on paper than how a probing question sounds to the person receiving it.
We ensure that we have the proper pictures that will help tell the story, because that’s our only job.
We don’t intend to hurt feelings, but if they come in the way of telling the truth, then so be it.
We don’t consciously aim towards poverty porn, but sub-consciously, we know that’s what readers want.
We don’t experience for the sake of experiencing, we experience so that we can pick up every single detail.
During my three days at Ahmedabad, that’s exactly what I did.
My professors at York would have been proud.
Ditto.
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