Aao, Baitho, Padho
On a picture that I love
I wrote this as a submission to a prompt which asked writers to bring a favourite picture to life with their words. The idea was to make the readers see the scene without necessarily having to look at the photo. I didn’t exactly adhere, because I chose a photo that needs to be seen, but it is one that struck something deep within me. I guess that works?
Cast your mind back one year. What is the first thing to strike you? A world before coronavirus, yes? People moving, milling about, socialising. Dinner plans, dates, parties. The pandemic has wreaked such havoc that any mention of 2019 or early 2020 evokes nostalgia for basic mobility and social freedom.
I submit to you that such nostalgia is a first world emotion. Around the same time, there were people from our neighbourhood fighting for their right to be counted as human beings. Hand on heart, when I asked that first question, did Shaheen Bagh occur to you? I get it. Me neither.
I wouldn’t go into the significance of the CAA-NRC protests. This essay is about pictures, so I picked one.
Getty Images, who are the owners of this picture, have galleries full of shots from the actual protests. Women braving the piercing Delhi cold, standing up for the idea of India, unfazed by the government and their khakhi-clad cronies. Days on end, as if comfort was a mere blanket that could be ditched in a snap. I remember seeing those pictures and asking myself - for all my strong opinions about the presiding government, am I capable of this scale of sacrifice?
I wish I had clicked some pictures myself. Sometime in December 2019, chickenpox reduced my body to jelly, and I was under too much medication after to be fit for flying to Delhi. I witnessed the incredible bravery of Shaheen Bagh’s women from afar, through pictures and the written word. The scene that struck the deepest, and has stayed with me the longest, came from a bus stop near the sit-in tents.
For all the fire, bullets, and barricades that wrecked our capital between December 2019 and March 2020, this picture fills me with hope for recourse. I am not proud of where my country is right now, but this frame acts on me like that one ray of sunlight entering a dark room, illuminating little but enough.
This picture is not going to win the Pulitzer. It might not even make the anniversary photo gallery of Hindustan Times. There is some symmetry in the stack of books lined up on the mat but little aesthetic glamour. Posters are jutting out at odd angles; the hair of the man sitting on the left edge is chopped. There is no focal point, no central story in this frame. Seemingly. Look at the Hindi poster above the guy in the centre. Aao, Baitho, Padho. Come, sit, read. That’s the story. Tucked away in the background, off-centre, visible only to those who look.
Knowledge and awareness can open the windows needed to fan away the smoke of intolerance that has engulfed our country. One of my biggest gripes with our culture, at least some part of our demographic, is the importance of subservience. Most of us have grown up or been around families where elders are treated like high priests and their words like gospel. Gospel becomes problematic because it discourages thinking for yourself. It drills in unconscious biases that become malignant before you know it.
Politicians will always do politician things. It is only natural that they use the easy tools of conflict available to them. The onus of filtering propaganda from policy is on us. The current scale of hatred comes from internalising an incomplete and myopic perspective towards what makes a country.
Awareness pushes back at such discrimination. Books make us inhabit different worlds, see things from multiple angles. Naive as it may sound, I strongly believe that we may find a way back to a humane and fair worldview if only we could step out of our echo chambers. It is near impossible to read JM Coetzee’s Waiting For The Barbarians, or Ghazala Wahab’s Born a Muslim, and still feel your skin colour or religion makes you superior.
Shaheen Bagh was significant beyond what this little essay can convey. It needed, and now has, a book dedicated to it. For me, its most important legacy was Jashn-e-Ekta. On 6th February 2020, the people of Shaheen Bagh celebrated unity in diversity; and urged everyone to educate themselves.
Aao, baitho, padho.
Very well articulated indeed ! The sheer harmony and silence comes out in the picture ! The very act of inviting someone to come, sit and read.... echoes our ancient Indian ethos of “come, sit, let us learn together” !