Cheryl Jacob, Coordinator (content & curriculum design) wrote Who am I? for the session on Day 2:Reading/Writing/Re-writing/Telling/Re-telling using prompts, 20 December 2019.

Who am I? I am free. I am free to flow, free in nature. I take the state that nature gives me. In your hands I am turned into something that nature, perhaps, did not intended me for. But then who knows.

In the hot and the cold when people raise their voices, the governments abuse my power to quell the rising of the people. I have been contaminated with ammonia in Indonesia -1996, and liquid teargas in Turkey - 2013. Some have simply caught their deaths and many others injuries. Some of my many forms.

But many of those voices shout – BE WATER! We are formless. We are shapeless. We can flow. We can crash. We are like water. We are … many everywhere. In 1932, clever Chakkarai Chettiar used my value to take back the two vans from the Commissioner D. D. Warren – an act of subversion within the restricted power- sharing attempts of the British Raj.

If the Corporation Commissioner or the Police Commissioner thinks that any property of ours can be made use of by the police without our permission, I protest against that[1].

I am for everyone- the good, the bad and the ugly. But use me well. I am not without limits.  I am water.

Pedogogical tool: Rere-imagining a text/article in context of work or way of thinking
 

[1] Singer, Wendy. June 2018. The Watering Van Incident: Madras 1932/Chennai 2012. (due for publication)