Dear reader,
I hope you had a beautiful beginning to the year. I know I did, with those that I care about near me, eating good food and gulping down two bottles that had 8 per cent alcohol. Well, even if you didn’t, I have some good news: the notion that the beginning decides how the rest of the year transpires is…bullshit.
Each day is different, each moment is. All I can hope is that this year gives us all a little less grief, a lot more love and teaches us to be kinder to others and ourselves.
Also, I know I am late. But that’s not new. A weekly newsletter is a commitment and my >9 relationships will tell you how much I struggle with it. Just kidding, I was dumped through most of those. Okay, well, more than half but you get where I’m going.
What is new is that I have decided to watch 365 new movies this year. I added the word “new” because I’m a nostalgia junkie and keep rewatching old movies so those don’t count. Some other resolutions include buying an Apple Watch, finishing a novel on my two favourite characters - Hasan and Hari - and completing a screenplay that may or may not be based on the same book.
What are your resolutions for the year? Do drop in a mail as a reply to this one or via theparadoxwhowrites@gmail.com. I’d love to read what you guys are upto. Also, keep a close eye on the end of the newsletter. My writing prompts are for everyone to collaborate with me and/or get a shoutout for their artwork/writing.
Alright, enough. Let’s begin.
stories are everywhere. stories are everything. gossip, anecdotes, history, metros, markets, lanes; name a part of space or time and you’d see the consistency with which we partake in and/or create stories. as someone who found survival in stories and by extension, in storytelling, love has been a predominant theme through the stories that i have come to write, read and consume on the screen.
in fact, my obsession with love in storytelling was at its peak at a time when instagram and social media was far more conducive to my kind of posts: moderately long, with a hint of longing and often employing incidents from real life that people would invariably find what is now an overused word — relatable. i revelled in all the virtual attention i would receive during this time, largely from the female gender, telling me all about some guy they were pursuing or were in a pre-tiktok era situationship with. having been devoid of any such attention in school as an introvert that continually got bullied, i felt this was my time to shine. it helped that i had so much patience in me back then to listen to what would eventually turn out to be exhaustive tales of human stupidity. not all was bad of course. in fact, a few of these interactions ended up blossoming into relationships, some of which gave me more material to write on. peak productivity, aye?
but for all that i write or have written about love, almost all of the women that i have been with have had a singularly simple complaint: that i am not romantic enough. that i am not romantic at all and the characters i write about portray an image of myself that is just not true. i mean i could easily rebuke such statements and say something along the lines of how i have written about serial killers and scary sex-starved characters as well but such responses seem witty as replies to instagram stories, not when you are having a real conversation with people you claim to love. they may love you for your otherworldly sense of humour but no one really likes a know-it-all funny guy.
so, what really is it? why am i this way? and if i am, how am i able to write about love in a way that is so meaningful without actually being able to love the same way myself?
i have tried to introspect, often during fights, about what causes me to behave or not behave a certain way. it has never felt like i didn’t love that person enough. no, the quantity of love being questioned wasn’t right. i could actually stand in front of a moving truck to save my loved ones if i am being honest, so, no, i am not going to accept such allegations (strong word? i know) ever.
was it the fact that i could compartmentalise things better than i was expected to? i mean that emotionally, wherein all hell could break loose now and i would be okay gulping down chole bhature an hour later. that doesn’t mean i have forgotten about the breaking loose of all hell, all that means is i can somehow behave “normal” despite being under an immense amount of stress. or grief. or both.
i remember once cooking something off a ranveer brar video and getting a call in the middle of it which ended up becoming this massive fight that could have ended the relationship. it didn’t stop the cooking or the fact that i had a rather sumptuous meal afterwards. neither did it stop me from being upset about what had transpired. i mean you could argue i could have skipped dinner that night like any other sane person but what would that achieve?
even as i am writing this, i realise how i would sound saying such things out loud. cold, calculative and maybe even someone that needs help with how to emote but hey, i don’t run away from hard conversations like many of you. i believe and can get people to testify that i have emotional intelligence that far exceeds most people i know. this is not me being pompous but something i have realised after conversing with, and understanding myself more deeply everyday. if there is a problem with someone in my life, i would always, always talk to them about it no matter how difficult it may be.
it’s a larger problem that i discovered along the way that i think storytelling has had a part to play in. stories are more often than not describing people or characters in specific situations or scenes. a scene plays out and this happens between these characters. that’s how stories go, right? the problem with that is when you take this framework (sorry for these startup-y terms that i pepper in throughout my pieces) and apply it to life, things fall apart.
why? because life is a continually moving series of scenes. this happens, that happens and so on. Ruhan could be indulging in a romantic gesture with Noori in scene one but what about scenes 43, 56 and 75 when things are playing out rather mundanely that is not on the screen or in the pages of the book? for the sake of literature, good storytellers would make even these mundane moments seem out of the ordinary. a smile there, a tear there, and you have a scene that may be playing out perfectly ordinarily in your own life, but you read it and yearn it anyway. that is the power of storytelling. could that ice-cream have been as orgasmic as the copywriter deemed it so? maybe. but the actors acted it and you believed it, so now when you go out there for your scoop of the same and it doesn’t meet your expectations, you will leave a one-star review on Zomato and wait for the next time that ad shows up on your gram.
the thing with stories is that they will always be slices of something greater but never life itself. they can’t be because our lives are stories that tell themselves as we walk and eat and sleep.
now this is not to say that i could not have remembered to pick her a gift from Sarojini like she asked me to (which was frankly a disastrous move of forgetfulness on my part) but this is me trying to bring some logic into why romance in literature would hardly ever work the same way in real life. moments perhaps but your whole personality being based around a character who you only read glimpses of? nu-uh, not happening, sister!
Recommended for Consumption
Husn by Anuv Jain (the last time I recommended a song that was misattributed to him)
Merry Christmas by Sriram Raghavan featuring Vijay Sethupathi and Katrina Kaif (I mean, what a movie?!! This deserves a separate newsletter in itself but please go watch. Please!)
Three of Us by Avinash Arun featuring Shefali Shah, Jaideep Ahlawat and Sanand Kirkire
Writing Prompt
If the past was a room you could walk into, what are some moments you’d like to visit? Once you did, would you be a mere observer or would you intervene and do things differently?
Write to me at theparadoxwhowrites@gmail.com with any writing or piece of art relating to this prompt to get featured in the next one! :)