Grip

Hand series. Day five.

Not the shot I had originally planned, but due to the power not being there, had to compromise a bit. Though I am not very happy with this shot, it will remind me of the evening, the laughter, the aggressiveness and the magic.

It just occurred to me, while writing about Jhumpa Lahiri last night, that someone was talking about our "roots" a few weeks back. Which, apparently, if one remembered, some preferences would be made automatically without the individual being involved in the act of choosing! It made me laugh, which I thought better of and kept stifled. I mean, at what point in time do we look back to determine what our "roots" are? Should we go back 50 years since the country became independent, or should we go back as far as the origins of the culture or the sub-culture, the language perhaps. Or should we go back to how the various races bred among themselves to give rise to certain cultures. Or for the pedantic, one might even consider going back to the Indus Valley civilization or even the monkeys (if one is a Darwin fan). I mean, what point in time do we exactly go back to, to determine our roots?

Instead of overly simplifying things with broad labels, we are escaping from identifying the diversity among us, which again is further a fuelled by circumstance. Are we not educated enough (if I may say so), to be comfortable with our differences? It is the unimaginative among us who need these labels in order to define an identity, in order to justify the choices they make.

It's stereotypes like these, that stand in the way of a free mind.