The Wish Collector Talks to a young California-based filmmaker who is currently in India documenting people’s wishes for a book that she hopes will give them faith to follow what they desire

The Wish Collector

Talks to a young California-based filmmaker who is currently in India documenting people’s wishes for a book that she hopes will give them faith to follow what they desire

On the streets of Dhampur village, Uttar Pradesh, 23-year-old Courtney Kelly Ziegler randomly walks up to strangers. You’d think she’s crazier, as she further asks them to reveal their most secret desire. She does this because, when she isn’t teaching photography and art to children at Pushpa Niketan school, Ziegler moonlights as a wish collector. “I ask people about their wishes. It’s the best way to break the boundaries people put up when they talk to strangers,” says Ziegler. She intends to document these wishes in a compilation she calls The Wish Book. Armed with a book, her personal journal and a camera, Ziegler walks up to people she finds interesting and starts interviewing them. “Sometimes, I am taken aback by how much some strangers open up to me, they’re not afraid to tell me their deepest secrets,” she says. Ziegler’s wish collection is simple: she tells people she wants to interview them, asks them two questions — the wish and why they think it would be good — and finally gets them to draw their wish, her favourite part of the whole exercise. It was two years back, in a bookstore in New York, when Ziegler chanced upon a children’s book of wishes. A blank book, it had about ten pages for children to write down and draw their wishes. Intrigued, Ziegler bought it and then proceeded to interview friends to fill it up. Her first stop was at a musician friend’s home. “I asked him to complete the sentence ‘I wish there were a million..’ and he replied saying ‘birds of a feather so that they could fly together’. He was quite serious and then actually spent half an hour drawing hundreds of feathers,” she says. In over a year she recorded some 60 wishes from friends and interesting people she happened to meet. Back then, it was a part-time project. The project gained priority when she took up the teaching job in India. make a wish The one common wish that touches her the most is when adults talk about wishing they were doing what they truly desired, instead of their daily routine. “In the bigger cities, the wishes tend to become complex and at times abstract,” she says. There were also a few outrageous ones — a boy Ziegler met at an Illinois coffee shop wished Wikipedia was a religion because, then, no one would argue about it and if they did, they would just have to refer Wiki to settle the argument. Not child’s play It’s the children that delight Ziegler. “Children are very practical and simple. They have no inhibitions, are the least hesitant and love the opportunity to draw,” she says. Her favourite ones are — asking for an extra finger to help with homework, a young girl wishing that her shoes were her soulmate so that she wouldn’t need to have babies and a girl asking for pink shoes because she likes the colour pink. Ziegler will travel to Thailand, China and then the US to collect and document wishes. Next on her wish list: “publishing The Wish Book and making a film on the videos I’ve shot”.