The Prompt: Open the first folder on your PC containing pictures (personal ones, not wallpapers), choose the 15th picture from that folder (count however you want to). Now, for 2-3 minutes look at the picture. After that for 10 minutes write whatever comes to your mind about that picture and how it makes you feel. Don’t restrict or censor your words, just write for those 10 minutes.
The Asbestos Sheet
What I see here, is an asbestos sheet. Manufactured by a company called Tata Shaktee. A pretty mundane thing to write about if you ask me. But that is what prompts are about, arent they? Some us might have had asbestos sheets at their homes as a partial roof in some parts. It gets insanely hot during summers and insanely noisy during the rain. Trust me, I still have it at my home so I know quite well. And if you dare to switch on the fan during this time, be ready to experience a dragon breathing down your shoulders, waiting for you to switch it off and switch to the puny but far better alternative of the table or stand fan.
Looking at this sheet, another thought that does inevitably come to my mind is, for the manufacture of something so simple and commonplace, perhaps thousands of people have lost their homes to make room for the metal mining and industries to mass produce such things. Then those same people inhumanely work in poor conditions so that we can use such things at our homes and call them ‘temporary arrangements’ and plan to throw them away the first chance we get. Why can’t we think and do something better or different that does not affect such people? Are we that weak and young as a race? Yes we are.
We still fight about copyrights and IPR’s when there are children dying of hunger and politicians being deaf to the common man. We live with it, just like we live with the heat under the asbestos sheet. The last time I checked, asbestos was poisonous. And it gives us a home. An interestingly helpless irony.
If you look closely you shall notice the difference in brightness and darkness in the folds of the asbestos sheet if you go from the centre to the edges. Life is somewhat similar isn’t it? The closest things to us appear bleak and grey at times, whereas the thing farther appear interesting and high in contrast. But eventually we do realise, that the high contrast things can’t even be looked at for long, and if you try to get too close, everything is bleak and grey, unless you fill your own colours in them, like I did, at my home, in my own asbestos roof.
Who knew one could write for 10 minutes about an asbestos sheet and not know it was in him? Nobody knew. Just like nobody knows who the person writing this piece is. Randomness and anonymity are a beautiful combination. Perhaps one of the most illusive concepts for man. I dare you to find out who made this asbestos sheet. Perhaps a poor man in rags now, perhaps a steel tycoon.
*completed in precisely 10 minutes. Coincidence!*
Arnab Mukherjee 