In 2016, I quit my corporate job and did some odd jobs to survive. I taught skateboarding, did some freelance content writing, took guitar lessons, and did some live sets. But nothing paid well enough to pay the bills and pursue my dream to become a Singer/Songwriter. It was during this time, while I was taking a skateboarding session, that I noticed one of the students pouting over something.
After inquiring a bit, the babysitter told me little Avni wanted to go for a swim with her favorite person in the world. However, she was a bit under the weather and hence, was disallowed from entering the water. It was extremely cute to see her squirm in sweet envy as her best friend enjoyed swimming with some other girl.
I have an affinity for capturing silly things that I find interesting with my phone or video camera. And I did so to capture Avni’s emotional turmoil, her honest, genuine emotions, and facial expressions. Little did I know that when I went home and watched the video footage I’d shot, I’d end up writing a song about Avni’s feelings. Chiku was Avni’s pet name.
I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to sync the song and lyrics with Avni’s facial expressions, but I took a leap of faith. I started working on the song. I had a few lines written. I fixed a tempo and did a test run. Luckily the rough take synched with the video perfectly. And I was thrilled and excited. I had accidentally captured something honest, innocent, and pure and tried to tell Avni’s story through my song. And I’m sure we’ve all gone through her feelings of jealousy when our favorite person in the world was hanging out and giving importance to someone else.
I spoke with Avni’s mom to take her consent and permission about using the video footage for my music video. She thought the video was pointless, it had nothing special or interesting. I told her, wait till I finish my song and you see the final product. I worked on the song for a month. I couldn’t stretch the song more than 98 seconds, because that’s all the video footage I had. I had to tell my story in 98 seconds.
After completing the song and synching the whole thing I showed the final product to Avni’s mom again. I don’t remember if the mom liked the video or not, but I remember her asking me to not publish the video on my channel. I was traumatized. She mentioned she didn’t want Avni’s video to be abused or vandalized on the internet. I somehow convinced her mom to let me publish the video and so far no one has been hurt.
Check the video for yourself and tell me if I gave a voice to Avni’s emotions in the video or not. Tell me if you didn’t remember yourself being jealous of someone you loved. I was just in the right place at the right time. It was a huge accident that I caught her emotions on tape. Without which I would have never written a song called ‘Chiku’.
