Vyom Mahamunkar

My Voice of Ideas...

I have found that grumpy people have the cutest of smiles. The summer of 2007 had heated up to 45 degrees Celsius in India. My skin pricked from the harsh light and I was drenched in sweat. The seething wind was burning me as I sat in my car. The traffic was annoying as usual and fumes polluted the air. At the centre of this raging concoction of smoke and heat was a solitary cop standing astute at the crossroads, marshalling the incoming traffic. A tanned skin, bullish physique, hard eyes and a fixed frown informing wrongdoers that he was not to be messed with. I watched him as he took a short break in the shade. Then a girl of no more than ten hopped over to him and offered him a cup of ice-cream. The image of the cop smiling graciously and thanking the child was etched in my memory forever. The lines on his face softened and a gentleness took over. It incited a question in my mind- is everyone different in different contexts?

It was not a question I was unknown to. My teachers in school always had the same opinion of me. “He is a quiet child,” they would tell my parents. I would sit there with my eyes wide and an image in my mind that contrasted to that of theirs. Because there was always a chaos brewing within me. A string of uncontrollable thought and unexplored idea begging for attention.

A similar incident happened during the theatre workshop I attended. I was always silent. I suppose one could say that, but do we really need to speak everything that goes on in our minds? This created a judgement of me being aloof. During the scriptwriting section of the workshop, we were to form groups and come up with ideas. Well, I went a bit too far and brought an entire script, baffling everyone who had dismissed me as being uninterested just because I refused to engage in small talk. Though the glint of admiration in the eyes of my peers soon echoed throughout the group. My perfectionistic tendencies make me too serious with responsibilities and I go above and beyond what is expected.

I guess my silence has something to do with the fact that I was raised differently from the others. My father served in the army and my mom, a dentist, was always working. It gave me a time to be with myself and I started to analyse and understand the world around me, trying to connect the dots of the physical world to the ideals. The interconnectedness of the universe has always fascinated me and I found myself scribbling different observations and quotes at the back pages of notebooks. Through constant pondering and reflecting, I developed a keen sense of observation and insight from a very young age.

I found a deep connection to the community as my grandparents have always been tireless social workers. Their stories about thalassemia patients incited raw emotions within me. I felt compassion, no, a need to do good in this world. It was when I first saw a thalassemia major patient thanking me for donating blood. Thalassemia patients don’t survive beyond the age of 25, but the hope that I saw within the eyes of a boy who was about my age quivered my heart. I found myself powerless. That is when I realised the need to write about the human condition, about the importance of compassion in this fast and loud world of ours.

All my life I have been drawn into a whirlpool, with each event bringing me to the centre, to the purpose of my life- to write. To show. To incite just a tad bit of compassion in people. I like characters who question reality. I like bringing together contradicting characters who are fixed in their ideals and see the conflict between their belief systems. Characters who inspire hope. Because giving advice is easy, inspiring hope is far more difficult a task. And out of all the mediums of expression, a film is one that best inspires feelings. People take in visual information rather readily. And so, I instantly fell in love with the process of film- making. I have always been silent, but it is through the medium of art that I want people to hear, see and feel my vision, my ideals and my desire to inspire hope.