Day 1 - Why write and The Unreserved (movie)

18 Feb 2017 Tweet 100daysofwriting · writing

The 100 day project. This is what it says on the website:

It’s a celebration of process that encourages everyone to participate in 100 days of making. The great surrender is the process; showing up day after day is the goal. For the 100-Day Project, it’s not about fetishizing finished products—it’s about the process.

Um, okay. What should I do, though?

Choose your action

Oh, that’s easy. I will write. (Actually, I will blog.) What is a blog?

A blog (a truncation of the expression weblog)[1] is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (“posts”). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page.

(From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog )

(Write what is a totally legit question and I don’t have an answer to it. Hopefully, I will find it in the first few days)

Select a unique hashtag for your project so all your instances of 100 can be viewed in one place.

Hashtag: 100DaysOfWriting

As I search for that on Instagram, I find a lot of photos that show computer screens and that old parchment thing with text photoshopped onto it. This is not going to be easy, but I can try atleast.

– – – – Now, today’s post:

I have always wanted to write a lot. Not literature, because I tried that and I couldn’t do it. I decided that I could settle on reading books and writing some other stuff. eg: about the books I read, about things that I did on my computer that day, about some new experience or product that I built or used. That seemed like a good bargain.

But I could never stick to it. This blog has had a dismal year last year. There was only one post. ONLY ONE. That’s absolutely horrible. Today, when I finally came here after a long time, I realised that this is unacceptable. I need to write more. After all, last year I read atleast 5 Medium articles that can be paraphrased as Reading is great, but eventually, we all must write. I don’t know if those authors had this kind of a pointless rambling in their mind or not, but I guess this is as good a place to start as any.

So, I am making this commitment. A half hour each day for writing stuff about the day. Mainly because the experiences that you have change character over time. What enraged you when it happened, will eventually become an admission of your own mistakes that lead to it happening (I have a specific incident in mind, that I haven’t really shared anywhere. So, just assume that something bad happened to you and then read that sentence again.)

Or, something good happened in your life, but soon your brain will fuzz out the details and it will become one big pink (pumpkin?) event that happened in your life, instead of being a sum of the struggle that lead you there.

Yeah, right. My brain tends to make everything story telling worthy if I don’t have an account of it that will nudge it.

I just searched online (DuckDuckGo) to find out how I can find the number of words that I have written inside Vim. Oh, okay found it. It’s :!wc after highlighting the text. I have written 330 words till now. I am at my wit’s end.

Oh, or maybe not. I could talk about this movie that I saw today. It’s called The Unreserved, and it’s made by a few people belonging to a media production house in Bombay. It’s a chronicle of stories of the people travelling in the General compartment in Indian trains.

So, all Indian trains have many classes. There’s the General compartment, also know as the Unreserved compartment that’s the cheapest and there isn’t a cap on the number of people who can enter this compartment (except for shear lack of space). Then there are the reserved compartments in which you need to book tickets (upto 120 days in Advance at this point in time, but might change in the future): Sleeper, 3rd AC, 2nd AC and 1st AC. There are also some trains that have 2nd Sitting and AC Chair car coaches. The following should give a good idea of the relative fares:

This movie has a few very touching stories about the people travelling in the Unreserved compartments across India. (Have I said that already? I feel like I have said that once already. :/ )

The list is, um, startling. But there is one line in the movie that was especially touching. On a train to Kashmir, there is this guy (from the credits at the end of the movie, I am pretty sure his name is Mohammad Ashraf), and he says that his village doesn’t have electricity, and hasn’t had electricity for almost 3 months, because the transformer was faulty and needed to be replaced and hasn’t been replaced even now. But then, when he’s asked if he would ever support India, like his older brother, he says this:

Jab main koi naukri karunga, tab karunga main Hindustan ko support, koi job jab milega. … humko jab bijli bhi nahi, kuch nahi, Hindustan kya hain, kuch nahi hain

(When I get a job in India, then I will support. … We don’t have electricity, we don’t have anything, so what then is India to us?)

(40:21 - 43:36 in the movie)

The first thing that came to my mind when I heard him say this was, this is all that people need. I mean, clean running water, proper electricity, a stable job, that’s all everyone wants. It’s almost like the citizens are kids, and the government is a parent, and the government needs to do so less to please everyone. It’s just the basics that people want. Nothing huge, nothing extraordinary.

POST #1 is OVER

Edit: Using colons in the post titles seems to mess with the Yaml formatting, so switched that to a hyphen

Edit 2: The image is actually at /blog/public/img/day-1-1.png, I totally got that wrong!