Close your eyes and imagine holding a ripe, juicy lemon in your hand. It’s smooth, yellow skin feels cool to touch and the fresh, citrusy flavour fills your nostrils. Imagine yourself slicing the lemon into two halves with a sharp knife and squeezing the juice into your mouth…*
If by now your mouth has started to water, you have just experienced the power of words: words not spoken or enacted, but just conventional alphabets written on your screen!
Around 3400 BC, the Mesopotamians developed the cuneiform system of writing on clay tablets, sowing the seed to what was soon to become an all important tool of articulation for humankind – The written word. The human race has evolved immensely over the last 5500 years and yet, writing continues to be a powerful medium for communication, a channel for expressing one’s imagination and as illustrated above, for shaping one’s reality. The fact that tiny squiggles on paper (or screen) have the power to transport the reader through time to new worlds is itself a delightful piece of magic.
Through our lives we think, feel, breathe, interact and house innumerable thoughts in our minds. We ponder over life’s mysteries and wonder at its immense beauty. We engage with people and things and live through various emotions. We record all these experiences within us, making our minds an intense, pulsating database of our journey of life.
Writing provides a natural extension to one’s mind, to build connections between these thoughts and to pour out into words the endless patterns that emerge. These patterns take the form of prose or poetry, recording of facts or shaping of fiction. They record moments in time and leave behind imprints of the thoughts of ordinary people on an ordinary day in a particular age in time.
Paani Party is one such attempt to chronicle a moment in the pandemic when time slowed down, people were locked in and amidst the tragedy that erupted worldwide, the human mind began to focus on gratitude towards things often taken for granted. This simple story around a little boy and his grandpa emerged as a response to this need to find wonder in ordinary things and to celebrate with great joy the small moments in our lives, like those spent having a sip of clean water.
We often write to build a conversation with humankind. With Paani Party we hope to build ripples of conservations with children and grown-ups around the magic of water, where every drop is sacred and worthy of a celebration.
*read more about this in THE SILVA MIND CONTROL METHOD by JOSE SILVA