Recently, while sitting in Posvar, I was approached by a young woman to be interviewed for Humans of Pitt. After sharing my story and seeing the response it got on the Humans of Pitt Facebook page, I decided that I wanted to interview Anish Kumar, the creator of Humans of Pitt, about his experiences.
Year: Junior
Major/Minor: Linguistics/Spanish
Organizations on Campus: Pitt Nourish International (a student led non-profit that is focused on education about global poverty issues and sustainable development), Dhirana (a board of students that organize a classical Indian dance competition every year in Soldiers and Saliors, the profits of which are donated to the Birmingham free clinic), and volunteer at the Birmingham Free Clinic.
Her Campus: How long ago did you create Humans of Pitt?
Anish Kumar: I started the page at the end of freshman year, with my friend Sarah. We got really involved with it then. Into sophomore year she got really busy so she kind of stopped doing it. I was managing it by myself for a while but that was really hard, so just last semester I started to get a few people to help me. Emily, who interviewed you, is one of them, and I just had someone else start helping me. So it’s just the small team of the 3 of us.
HC: Obviously Humans of Pitt is modeled after Humans of New York, but what specifically inspired you to start Humans of Pitt?
AK: I was sitting in Gen Chem and I was scrolling through Humans of New York on my phone because I was really bored. The model was Humans of New York, you’re right, but I think what inspired me to start it myself was, since coming here, I’ve been really fascinated by Pittsburgh so I was wondering if we had one. I looked up to see if there was a Humans of Pitt or Pittsburgh and there wasn’t really anything. There were a couple small things, one of them just had like 3 pictures of people dressed up as zombies, so I was like “I don’t think this counts” and thought we should have one. So I texted my friend on my floor who was pretty into photography and she said “okay, but only if you help me with it”. So then we started doing it. But the real inspiration was just being inspired by the diversity of Pittsburgh and wanting there to be some sort of platform to show that.
HC: How do you go about picking the specific people you interview?
AK: For me going up to a stranger has always been the hardest part. Usually I try to find someone who’s alone just because it’s easier and a better, intimate connection if it’s just one on one. I usually try to find some place where people are sitting down and you aren’t going to stop them, so Schenley works really well. It’s a little bit of people watching. You go to an environment and you look around and see who might be willing to talk to you and then you just approach them. I guess Emily did it to you so you know what it’s like!
HC: How do you go about picking what part of the interview to include with the picture when you post it to Facebook?
AK: That’s hard because a lot of the time I ask at least 6 to 7 different questions. I think for me it’s usually during the interview when they say something that I felt some sort of emotional reaction to. I think I always sort of know during the interview what I want to pick and then I listen to it and get the exact quote back. It’s always that feeling of what moved me during the interview and hoping that it’s something that everyone will connect with. Just what made me feel the most.
HC: Is there any particular person’s story that has really resonated with you?
AK: So the first one that really struck me was really close to the beginning when me and my friend Sara first started doing this. It was a middle aged man in the strip district who was a sociologist. I forget what question we asked him that made him say this, but he just had one line and it was “There’s no such thing as a simple person”. And I really love that because one, it was just an amazing and really profound quote to say about the human experience and the diversity of humans in general. But it was also just so encapsulating of what Humans of Pitt is about, like the idea that there is no such thing as a simple person and everyone that seems like a stranger and puts on this façade of ordinariness really has a lot of deep emotional layers and a profound story to tell.
“There is no such thing as a simple person.”
HC: What type of stories get the biggest response?
AK: I think the stories that get the biggest response are the ones that people connect most with. A big part of this whole process is trying to elicit empathy between people because you see parts of yourself in it or see parts of experiences that your friends and family members have had. So I think the ones that have gotten the most responses are the ones where people feel connections to the pain or inspiration, the happiness of the sorrow, that that person is experiencing. A lot of the time when people are talking about missing one of their family members I think that that’s something that, especially in college, people feel. Another thing that tends to get a lot of support with a lot of likes, shares and comments are the ones where people talk about mental health problems that they’ve dealt with. I think that it’s something, especially at college that a lot of people deal with, but it’s something that we don’t like to talk about. And seeing it there and seeing people be open about it and strong about it is, I think, really inspiring. I think that’s why there’s a lot of response to it, because it’s like “wow, that person was so strong to talk about this thing that I might have been dealing with” or everyone knows someone who deals with mental health issues and we just don’t talk about it enough. I think it’s really that empathy that comes out.
HC: How do you hope to see your follower base grow? Do you plan on extending Humans of Pitt to other social media platforms?
AK: The social media platforms is something I’ve been thinking about from the beginning. We’ve always said we should go to Instagram and Twitter but there’s just something about Facebook and the page that has already organically grown on its own that I think I like. I think that Facebook is just a really good platform for Humans of Pitt because I think Instagram and Twitter have a little bit different personalities. Facebook exists to connect with people and I think it just really works well on that platform. In terms of growing a base, I know it’s called Humans of Pitt so it has this focus on our university but our school is pretty well integrated into the city, so we don’t limit ourselves to just Pitt’s campus. We’ve gone out to other areas in the city. So I would like the base membership to be students from Pitt, but it would be really great to have it grow to something that is a token name around the city. That’s my eventual goal, to have it representative of the city as a whole.
Then, in true Humans of Pit fashion, Anish began asking me questions about what it was like to be interviewed. Amidst our conversation, Anish shared the following:
AK: When I first started this with my friend and she asked me to help her, I was so skeptical as to how successful we were going to be at this. Who am I to go up to a stranger and ask them questions -I’m sure it happened to you, you get very personal very quickly- like “What is your biggest regret” and “What do you worry about”, these really really personal questions. I was like, how am I going to get a stranger to tell me these things? And I think what really surprised me, and why Humans of Pitt has been so successful, is that people want to talk about themselves, especially about these really hard issues, because we live in a society where it’s really stigmatized to show weakness and be vulnerable, and that just leads to us isolating ourselves and not talking about a lot of these things that are really important to us. I think it’s just a serendipitous moment when this stranger comes up to you and is like “I’m giving you this platform for you to share your story because other people care”. I think that’s something really powerful and that’s something I’ve learned from this process.
Anish’s final comment is what really inspired me to interview him in the first place. So many stories from Humans of New York and Humans of Pitt have resonated with me and touched me in ways I can’t explain. I hope that Humans of Pitt continues to expand and receive the attention that it deserves. If you haven’t visited the Humans of Pitt page yet, make sure to take a look here: https://www.facebook.com/humansofpgh/?fref=nf
Photo Credit: Images provided by Anish