World Kindness Day celebration brings community art to Chennai

Celebrate World Kindness Day with Chennai's Kindness Foundation through community projects promoting kindness and love languages.

Kindness is a virtue. It is what makes us human, we are told. World Kindness Day (November 13) serves as a gentle reminder of this. .

Chennai-based Kindness Foundation celebrates it each year with a different community project that brings people in the city togetherto help them express kindness. “We ran this programme even through the pandemic and have done things like expression through the spoken word and photography,” says Mahima Poddar, founder and managing trustee of the Kindness Foundation.

This year’s theme is the expression of kindness through hands and gestures. A canvas with tracings of over 20 hand gestures, decorated and painted over three days by more than 1,200 people at the Anna Centenary Library is the centrepiece of the event. Each gesture on the canvas has a theme, ranging from mental health to environmental preservation and women’s rights and safety.

Visual artist Vijayaraghavan S, the mind behind the theme, explains that since the installation was placed at the library, it became essential to include elements of academia and literature. “We decided to use writings and quotes along with drawings of hand gestures. It means that knowledge should be shared and not held within one community,” he says, pointing to the 20-feet-wide canvas placed on the ground floor of the library.

“This library is a space open to everyone and not membership-based, and we wanted a space accessible to all age groups and social strata without barriers,” says Mahima.

Along with the canvas, another installation this year is about the five primary love languages. A cut out of a person is at the centre, surrounded by five poles, each representing a love language. Different colours of thread are tied from each pole to the figure, symbolising how we express our love — through acts of service, gift-giving, quality time, physical touch, or words of affirmation. “People come and tie threads based on their love languages, and at the end of the day, we will have a heat map of the city’s love language,” says Mahima.

This year’s Kindness Week is sponsored by the Drop Dead Generous programme, part of the Suspended Coffee Movement. John Sweeny started the Suspended Coffee Movement in 2013 after reading about an age-old tradition from the working-class cafés of Naples called “café sospeso”. In this tradition, people pay for an extra cup of coffee that someone in need can later claim, creating an endless ‘pay it forward’ loop. “When they heard about what we have been doing here in Chennai, they reached out and told us they wanted our movement to be the face of the Drop Dead Generous programme which they are launching on World Kindness Day this year,” Mahima explains.