With "bad lip reading" memes and gifs taking over the internet, I decided to add something different to the heap.
This is a one-minute photo essay that I made for an assignment for my course. I had been putting off the assignment for the longest time and finally the day before the submission, panic set in and I decided to go ask my professor for help. I had been thinking along the lines of street photography or putting together photos of people in my living room, coming and going each with different yet the same stories... basically I wanted an easy way out. Nagesh (my professor) took me for a walk and said, "Why don't you try something different? This has all been done...Do it on something that YOU relate to, that means something to you..." and in response to my blank face he said, "Why don't you do it on lip-reading?"
Lip-reading is something of an "inevitable skill", if I may call it so, that I picked up when I was a child of five or six. When I was four, I suffered from something as trivial as viral fever but being prescribed the wrong antibiotics cost me my hearing. Instead of going into the details of the how's and why's and when's and all the difficulties and stress and melodrama that accompanied it, I just have one thing to say- it wasn't and is still not easy. My hearing loss was discovered three years later because doctors could not identify what was wrong... some even said I have ADHD. I got hearing aids when I was seven but during those three years without them, I began to lip-read and also developed a lisp that haunts me till today and has made public speaking my biggest fear.
I've had my fair share of troubles and obstacles, but I have been lucky enough to overcome most of them (thanks to extremely supportive family members, teachers, friends and most of all Mumma and Dad).
Lip-reading is a double-edged sword. It helps me get by somehow.
Coming back to the assignment and this photo-essay; I made it in the course of one morning, catching hold of various people- from my "didi" who comes to clean the house, my sister, classmates, various shopkeepers(who were unfortunately too impatient to mouth each word/syllable while I clicked them because they had others customers waiting and hence do not feature in the essay). I was quite satisfied with the end-product and showed it to a friend. Her roommate suggested that I put it up on the internet and showed me Bored Panda. So here I am, putting it out there for you to see and hoping it makes a little bit of a difference.
