There’s a kind of grandmother in Kerala who can teach you life, correct your posture, and feed you something fried in one minute. My friend's Ammachi is exactly that. Every afternoon she sat in our backyard, doing kasavu (gold thread handwork) with the calm that only age earns.

One day I asked her, “Ammachi, what was the hardest day of your life?”
She stopped. Her hands rested. Her eyes drifted to a place the rest of us will never see.
“The day my husband didn’t come home,” she said.

She spoke about the years after her husband passed. Ten children. Barely any money. She worked wherever she could, cooking, stitching, caring for others, and somehow kept all ten of them afloat. “No help. No rest. Only responsibilities waiting for me every morning,” she said.

I remember sitting there, suddenly aware that my biggest concern that week was a delayed Amazon delivery. After a long pause, she gave me a small, steady smile and said, “I built it all again. Brick by brick. Day by day. You learn to live not with what you lost, but with what you can still make.”

That line stayed with me. Soft, but sharp enough to rearrange something inside.

What Immortals Showed Me

While making Immortals, I kept meeting versions of her everywhere.

The team travelled through fields, lanes, and houseboats that seemed older than most of our worries. They sat with men and women in their eighties and nineties who had lived through storms and somehow held their dignity together like it was part of their spine.

A farmer showed us his buffaloes and spoke about how he and his wife built everything with sweat. A woman who survived cancer said she never saw herself as sick. She cooked, prayed, and believed in tomorrow with a kind of quiet stubbornness the rest of us save for cricket.

A Haji in Kashmir sat on his seventy-year-old houseboat and told us, “Real peace lives with your people, not in the things you couldn’t buy.” A father laughed as he spoke about going from a Maruti to a Mercedes because of his daughter and said, “That is the return on investment. I invested in my children.”

Somewhere along the journey, an elder said something that has stayed with me ever since: “Not loneliness. The fragrance of belonging still stays.”

Their words stayed with us long after the cameras stopped rolling, and the film started taking its true shape. It felt right to honour that spirit with a simple Hindi poem the kind that feels like it belongs to every home, every family, every old photo album we never open enough.

A Poem for the Immortals

ज़िंदगी ने जो सिखाया, वो किसी किताब में लिखा नहीं था।
हार और जीत से ज़्यादा, सब्र का सहारा ज़रूरी था।
रिश्ते संभलते गए, वक़्त बहते-बहते बदल गया,
जो साथ था, वो याद बनकर भी दिल में ठहर गया।
दौलत का मतलब तब समझ आया, जब उम्र ने थोड़ी तमीज़ दी,
सुकून पैसे से नहीं, अपने लोगों से मिलने लगा।
आख़िर में जो टिकता है, वो घरवालों की वही पुरानी आवाज़ है,
और प्यार का छोटा-सा टुकड़ा, जो सालों बाद भी साथ रहता है।

(What life taught me was never written in any book.
More than winning or losing, it was patience that truly mattered.
Relationships kept adjusting with time as it flowed and changed,
and the ones who stayed became memories that still rest in the heart.
I understood the meaning of wealth only when age gave a little wisdom.
Peace did not come from money, it began to come from my own people.
In the end, what lasts is the familiar voice of those at home
and a small piece of love that stays with you for years.)

What They All Had in Common

Today we count everything. Likes. Steps. Salaries. Deadlines. None of these elders did. They spoke about people. Meals shared. Saving a little every day. Not spending beyond your peace. Showing up even when life felt heavy. And controlling impulses because that is what keeps a life steady, not numbers.

Everywhere we went, two truths stayed constant. Health is the real wealth. Peace comes from people, not possessions. Ageing is not decline. Ageing is depth.

Why Their Words Matter Now

The Immortals are not extraordinary. They are ordinary people who lived honestly for a very long time. Their words remind us to pause, call our parents, listen to stories we usually rush past, and stop measuring everything like life is a scoreboard.

As our anchor Sahil said which i will never forget: “It is easy to die. It is difficult to take control of life.”
And it leaves us with a simple question. When we grow old, what will remain? The things we owned or the people who felt loved because we existed?

The answer feels clearer now.

To meet the Immortals, here is the film: