Why I write and who I write about...

I am no celebrity tracker. Honestly, I am not interested in Page 3 personalities who live a charmed life quite unlike my own. I don’t want to know whose birthday bash was attended by how many wannabes, have been-s and continue-to-be’s. What clothes they wore or what fashion faux pas was committed. What food was served and what an ostentatious display of wealth it was. Neither do I have any interest in the affairs (literally and figuratively) of those in the limelight. I simply cannot enthuse myself to know more about people who are famous for being famous.

Au contraire, ordinary people, faces, events, incidents, news, observations, emotions, decisions, actions – there is enough in the world around that keeps me pondering all the time. The woman with ragged clothes who sweeps the streets clean, the man who comes home to repair a broken pipe or fix a light, a little child who tails me on a morning walk with colourful paper umbrellas or pins of the national flag, the old lady with every wrinkle telling stories of years gone by – these are the real people in my life. Their lives deserve to be told – ever more so than the celebrities and their offsprings with a warped sense of entitlement.

A decade and half ago when I started working, the branch manager at my office would often remind us, “What we say, do or create has to make sense for the common man.” Of course, he was merely setting the golden standard for achieving results in the holy trail of professional excellence. Yet, those words have been a compass guiding my actions overlapping both my professional and personal lives.

I love the Common Minimum Person (to be gender neutral). My vegetable vendor Shakuntala inspires me with her work ethic as much as the rickshaw puller in Delhi who drives through storms to feed his ever hungry brood. The waif on Mylapore’s North Mada Street who cups his hands into a camera and pretends to take a picture of me when I am trying to shoot him with my expensive Digital SLR has as much a story to tell as do the parents of a 5-year old child suffering from Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia who are determined to fight the disease to the finish. Ordinary lives, ordinary stories and everyday occurrences but each speaks of enormous fortitude, grit and courage in the face of extreme adversity. Some tales are poignant reminders of our own shortcomings and selfishness. Some speak to us of utter helplessness shaking our faith in ourselves and in the faiths that we profess to belong to. Yet, these are stories that touch our lives in way only kindred souls can feel. These are voices that are hard to ignore and stubbornly take up quarters in our own hearts.

“God must love the common man, he made so many of them,” said Abraham Lincoln. This no less from a man, whose humble beginnings as a shoemaker’s son betrayed his eventual rise to eminence as the President of the United States. And, this is my attempt to chronicle the lives of these many ordinary people because once we are stripped of our own exaggerated sense of self-importance, we are no more than a “Common Minimum Person.”