Keshav Chaturvedi
Yuval Noah Harari, in his global bestseller, Sapiens, propounded a thesis that one reason humans emerged as the apex species on Earth was their ability to tell stories and believe in them. According to him, fiction and gossip made us who we are. Even today, the most hypnotic words for a person of any age are “once upon a time…” and you are hooked. Not because you want to, but the weight of 40000 years of history has genetically shaped you to respond to those words. These three magic words create anticipation and excitement for the juicy diet your mind is craving.
American psychologist Abraham Maslow, in his 1954 book Motivation and Personality, gave the world a hierarchy of needs. It started with self-preservation, and at the top of the need pyramid was the need for self-actualisation, which is a form of self-expression. Storytelling, conversation, and other forms of self-expression are not new phenomena. Way back during the hunter-gatherer times, our forefathers took time to observe nature, create cave art and eventually started narrating stories.
The early self-expression universe was unfiltered. People expressed themselves for the joy of it or as a release for their creative urge. They never expected applause, financial benefit or special treatment. The fact that they never put a price on their effort made their work priceless.
Since then, as history advanced, those who followed in the footsteps of our ancient forefathers created literature, art, and music as their own creative signature.
A society is known by the quality of its conversation. Luckily, as civilisation advanced, despite enormous political, religious and economic headwinds, self-expression grew over the ages through intense conversations that unfolded in European bistros, Kehwa shops in Istanbul, during baithakis and mehfils in our own country and then in 20th-century coffee houses.
It was because Ideas tend to appear in a relaxed atmosphere, free of stress and fear. These places offered safe spaces where even a heated argument wouldn’t end in vengeful animosity.
However, since the dawn of social media, human conversation has steadily lost control to algorithms instead of being governed by human wisdom. Over the years, our feeds have increasingly fed our fears, biases and prejudices, trapping us in familiar feedback loops and creating an ever-tightening invisible bubble around us.
People globally are coming together to create a digital version of a baithaki, or coffee house, for great conversations and the exchange of ideas. We know that social media and digital platforms are an integral part of our lives and a preferred medium for consuming information, having conversations, and disseminating ideas. We are also aware that as communication media have exploded, the space for conversations has shrunk. Media are many, but meaningful conversations are few and far between.
Hummingword is an initiative to seek music in the noise, especially in our conversations and expressions, putting humans above the algorithms.
We draw inspiration from the versatile hummingbird. It is an umbrella term for a cluster of 375 species of tiny, agile birds with a soft yet distinct sound signature spread across both continents of America in every geographical feature. Like our inspiration, Hummingword offers an umbrella for various forms of creative impulses – literature, art, painting, music, films, photography, and theatre—allowing them to be expressed with abandon in every Indian as well as foreign language.
Roman god Janus had two faces: one looking forward and the other backwards. It had two interpretations: one is that one needs to look forward to progress and backward to keep an eye on the mistakes made in order not to repeat them. The other interpretation is that one face looks outward and the other inward.
Hummingword, like Janus, will straddle the global literary and creative universe while remaining rooted in the Indian literary and creative space. It will bring the latest work to the fore while also digging deep into our history to share priceless literary and creative gems.
We have started humming. Our initiative is an open invitation for everyone interested in free-flowing exchange of ideas, opinions, discussions and conversations to connect with us and make it a symphony.
