In November 2021, a group of eleven women found themselves sitting together in a room in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. Three of us (Anushi, Ekta and Angarika) had traveled from Bangalore, and the rest from different parts of Madhya Pradesh. There was a nervous energy in the room. “Why do you think we’ve all come here?”
How do objects become precious to us? How can one object hold the multitude of our desires, dreams, fears, aspirations and inhibitions– sometimes pushing us away and sometimes propelling us towards itself?
It is a warm April day in New Delhi. The session we are about to conduct is our third with girls who attend a bridge course in a resettlement colony. The course helps girls who have dropped out or never enrolled in school to come on a par with the literacy and learning levels of those in school.
Eight of us – four young teenage girls and four women – move about the room imagining ourselves in different places. Sometimes we are walking in open fields, sometimes we are catching the metro. Sometimes we are shrieking in glee and running through unexpected rain.
The world of play and rules have an interesting equation – you need them, you play within them, and yet, something else emerges. Winning, losing, anger, disappointment, joy, excitement…
