My King

I want to pour my heart out. Every morning starts with my dreary eyes scrolling down the Facebook feed and like me, millions were not prepared for the news of Chadwick Boseman’s death. I shouldn’t be feeling this overwhelming sadness for a celebrity with whom I don’t share a cultural connection. Yet I do. I am a young Indian adult who just happened to witness and relish the joy he instigated in the masses. I adore and absolutely cherish people who be role models and spread their roots of inspiration to a whole lot of others. When Black panther was released, I remember seeing videos of people from Africa coming out of theaters dancing and feeling an abundant joy of seeing a representation of themselves in the big screen. How good it must have been for a heart broken black kid coming out of the cinema to connect his/her struggles to that of a character and to gain a new hope from the character’s arc of overcoming the obstacles. This is the promise of cinema. It absolutely gutted me to know that he had been diagnosed of cancer years ago and yet he pushed his struggles to the personal life and showed up to his work and dedicated himself to deliver that promise. To me personally, In 2018, I was not doing well in my professional life and loneliness was enveloping me. Movies, my love to talk to strangers online and this blog were the only aspects of my social life that made me smile everyday. Every time I went home, me and my sister would be doing the Wakanda salute to each other and even now she loves calling herself Shuri. To be honest, I haven’t talked to my sister much once I started college, hostel life and after that work put me far from home. It felt good to be connected to her again and playing like kids after a long time. Thank you Dear Chadwick Boseman. I respect you for being a gentleman, a soft spoken person, a humble man remembering his origins. There is so much goodness this man had to offer. To the world mostly he might be known as the fictional black super hero T’Challa but he also played a line of real life black superheroes, Thurgood Marshall the first African American Supreme court Justice, Jackie Robinson the first African American to play in Major league baseball. What an illustrious career this man had had. The lessons he left will be remembered and he will still live in the seeds he planted through his art form. Rule the heavens, My King!