Dear Sansa, I was asked by someone today about how many battles have I seen in my life. I could not respond with an exact figure as I was instantly reminded of the thousands of battles, we see and we fail to see everyday. The world is a stage, set for battles. So huge that any battle can find a place. Some find better places on the stage and are noticed. Some stay in the corners, in bad light, and stay invisible. Overshadowed by the ones in the middle. But placement is no criteria to reject the existence of an occurrence. Just because the battles, you are witnessing as you stand in a different corner, are not the same as the ones, I see, does not make your battles any less entertaining, any less melancholic or any less devastating than mine. You see your battles, I see mine. And as an audience, we are so intrigued that we hardly can take our eyes off our battles and see others. We hear screams, joyous screams, we hear cries of loss, and it merely distract us for a moment and then we come back right where we were. Tangled, occupied and lost in our own battles. And when I start talking about it, I understand how amazing is the mere concept of it and how time and space play such significant roles. Like right now, I sit in a cafe, and there are more than twelve people in negligible distance from me, but their dimensions, their sight, their battles are so different, my love! I still cant see theirs, and they mine. And the world is a theatre as they say. So as audience, we all have our taste/our genres. The battles that I see, are the battles that I like to see. If I am forced to see a battle that does not interest me/intrigues me. I just have to move a centimetre or less and I would find myself a new battle altogether. A battle thatl suit my taste or wouldnt discomfort me much. The audience, my love, seeks comfort while watching any play. We seek our comfort while we watch our battles. And then comes context. Like a prologue to a play/ a book. If suddenly you attract my attention to your battle, I miss the context. I miss how it started. I miss the introduction of your characters and hence I could never be the right critic or an admirer of the act. I could merely empathize or say try to empathize. But all this while when I am trying to show interest in your battle, the characters, the props in my battle/my play stay significantly strong in the background of my attention. Like a background music. That constantly plays. Ah! Do you see, my love! That background score never leaves us. Our letters. How many times, have we talked about it?! : What about family, Papa? : Absolutely, my love! Yes. Family is a set of people who stay so close to each other that most of the time, they end up seeing the same battles and hence the empathy towards the characters and occurrences stands purest. There is a huge possibility, my love, that your battles would stay mine. Or at-least most of them. Till the time, time and space play their roles and you find yourself in another corner, in another dimension, in yet another battle. There is much more to write in this letter. I would save it for the next part and then I will tell you how this idea takes different forms and how the audience start enacting the battles into their lives. I will tell you about violence and I would certainly tell you about love. Kisses, Dad. Letters To My Daughter Sansa
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 12:57:01 +0000