I am sitting in the library with an unstable internet service and an equally unstable state of mind. I’m glad that the deliriously long weekend (five days long for me, Thursday to Monday) is finally over and I am purposefully out of the house, though I seem to be miserably failing at grasping the purposes of it right now. I planned to be ‘super productive’ before the holiday began but somewhere in the middle lost my productivity streak to an incumbent emotional breakdown which I am unable to properly have since crying doesn’t come easy to me.

This weekend I bid adieu to two friends, one who left for higher education abroad and one who moved back to their country of origin for a job and to cohabitate with their spouse again. In actuality I bid adieu to much more; an evening walk partner, a friendly face to look forward to in the park and a sense of tethering to the place I have grown up in. Within the last two months, every last one of my friends (even those younger) moved out of their parent’s house and so did my brother. My partner moved abroad earlier this year for higher education as well and none of my college friends, except one returned to this city after graduating. Needless to say, it’s been a little lonely here.

On the bright side, I inadvertently ended up playing cupid for two friends who moved away to the same city, finished a research project I did not even dare to imagine I was capable of writing and got into a master’s program at a university of my choice. In a way this year has gone by in a flash but it has seriously forced me to grow up. Questions of “what I will do?” and “what next?” became ever so imminent and with it came a sense of inundating doom. I feel like I am descending into a rabbit hole of madness.

On Saturday, I went to the post office (for the second or third time in my internet-enabled life) to send a letter to my partner for their birthday which is in a couple of weeks. At the post office, two elderly women needed help with filling up some forms. They had also come there a day prior but had to go back since no one helped them. A very kind employee had come across the counter and was trying to help them when one of the women asked me for help. I filled out her form in English, copying her details from the photocopy of her Aadhar card and voter ID card. She also had the rest of the details written on a piece of paper, possibly by a family member which was an immense help and I was able to fill up the form in no time. Since I had carried all the necessary items such as glue, pens and scissors, I was also able to crop her photos and paste them on the form without asking anybody else for the stationery. The two women thanked me profusely and the employee commented that God had sent me at that exact moment to help them. Overcome with an overwhelming feeling, I kept thinking about the happening for a long time.

…

It made me think of the time when sending and receiving letters was more run-of-the-mill for people (and still may be) in many parts of the world; when filling out forms was a necessarily physical activity and the online method was unheard of and birthdays were celebrated in person with your friends. In other words, I was reminded of my childhood and stories retold to me by my parents and grandparents.

When I narrated this incident to a friend who had ‘faked’ work experience on their resume to get a part-time job (in addition to their degree) abroad, he commented I could pass this as volunteer work if I ever wanted to apply for further studies abroad. While I had volunteered during my undergraduate years, it was mostly online, since it coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. My experience of volunteering was mostly limited to organising webinars on gender and mental health. While these were significant for developing my understanding of these issues, starting conversations around them and creating awareness; on the other side of it, I was also asked to get X number of followers on the organiser’s social media platforms and Y amount of likes and comments on their posts. Also, the webinars were inevitably accessible only to people who already possessed electronic devices, internet connectivity and even fluency in the English language, which was often the lingua franca of these webinars organised by university students. The awareness created and conversations started around important social issues by these webinars being restricted in accessibility and discursive lens to people of a certain class was something that never quite sat right with me. I now wonder, as I did back then, if could I be doing something better, something more, which would help people who needed it the most.

I wonder how many people could be helped with filling out forms by students on weekends (or once a week) if this was institutionalised as a volunteer practice by schools and Resident Welfare Associations (RWA)s? What if the nature of volunteer work did not expend so much energy in getting a social media reach and instead focused on the original aim: making the world a better place? Would decentring the digital influence as a primary task also tackle related issues such as poverty porn? What if students did not engage in volunteer activities simply to check off an item on their foreign university application bucket list? Are we as a society thereby commodifying actions that were originally altruistic? Moreover, do these trends reek of larger contemporary issues: the increasing rates of student out-migration in India, moving abroad being considered the epitome of a good life and success, even if it comes with a slew of related problems: large student debt, racial discrimination, homesickness, brain drain, elder abandonment and more?

Perhaps, I am overthinking an uneventful day but I do hope that no one has to suffer again in such a way to simply fill out a form. That sending paper/“real” letters (as a dumbstruck friend called it) does not become yet another thing we lose to the digital age and young people like myself don’t always put pressure on themselves to be ‘super productive’ on long weekends and doing volunteer work for purported benefits owing to a robust hustle culture and inherent commodifying tendencies of the world we are living in. 

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Medhavi Gupta is a student of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. Her other writings can be found here: https://linktr.ee/Medhavi_Gupta