"I built this for my parent first."
My mother is single, and she lives in the same house as me. For years I measured how she was doing the way most of us do. Is she healthy. Is she safe. Will she live a long life. By that record, she was fine.
Health was the part I could measure. The part I missed was purpose, the thing most of us find in work, or a marriage, or raising children, and then have to build again once those chapters close.
She sings. She gardens. She watches her series. So do plenty of people within a few miles of this house. I had no way to find a single one of them.
So I built it by hand. One introduction at a time, until she had people near her who wanted the same things she did. Shared interests. Shared evenings. A reason to be in the same room. That is what turns someone into a friend.
What takes the rest of us minutes on a social platform took us months.
And people were only half of it. She still asked me to order a ride, or her groceries, or her medicine, not because she had lost anything, but because the world had moved onto a screen and nobody had bothered to bring her with it.
Help should be a choice. It should come from love, not from having no other option.
Kanika Tandon
Co-founder, Eldovia
