कहने सुनने को बोहत हैं अफ़साने

A few weeks ago I was walking with Rhia and, rather unexpectedly, had to narrate అస్తిత్వం to her. I remember being so flustered, embarassed, almost ashamed to talk of "my work" and rushed through the story in a haphazard manner. But even in that state I couldn't but feel a little proud of the climax and slowed down to prolong and dramatise that scene to the best of my ability. Two days ago in the middle of a long, lovely conversation with Ankur, I spoke to him about థియరీ & ప్రాక్టీస్ and the underlying sentiment that I've wanted to convey in both that story and the short film Based on a True Story. These two incidents brought back a gush of emotions that I don't remember feeling in a long time- Of for how long I so badly wanted to be a writer.

"Writing is going from what is important to you to what is important to everyone", I read recently on Substack. And that explains why I've always felt nervous and abashed to talk about anything I've written. Because whatever's come out has come out of its own accord and the only reason I recorded it is because it was important to me. My thoughts, my experiences, my questions are mine, and it felt indecent, uncouth, self-obsessed to take up others' time with those concerns. Yet, the desire to create art and share it with society, to become part of the culture class burned intensely. Spending that one month on 101 జిల్లాల అందగాడు was intensely cathartic. Realising I didn't have that talent at all, that I wasn't depriving myself of my life's calling out of timidity freed me up to try a lot of other stuff. And in the years since, I've had long durations of immensely pleasurable intellectual and artistic engagements.

Everything I consume, and I use that off-putting word pointedly, goes through a filter of how it would contribute to my creation one day. As creations slowed down, consumption became its own end. I kept sucking in more and more and, instead of making me better prepared, it made me even more restless. Why isn't all or any of this catalysing me to start creating?, I wondered. I suppose one does get intellectually obese too, burdened by so much that not only can they not find use for but that also limits their mobility. A period of intense frustration found some release in థియరీ & ప్రాక్టీస్; Although it must be said both what I could manage to write and Madhav గారి editorial process almost dampened all the euphoria of having a story published. In that sense day night day night was supremely joyful. I had no idea what I was trying to do, was certain nobody would give a shit about it, so I let a certain inexplicable intuition take over. The medium really helped too because I didn't have to wrestle to push feelings into words and then lament that they weren't doing justice or that those feelings weren't worth expressing anyway. The images stood for themselves, the words weren't mine but were from others that resonated with me so all I was doing was sharing them, and it was a boon to discover Dhrupad because it seemed to lend the images a mythical quality. Ofcourse there was still the embarassment at being viewed a phony for using Classical Music to elevate this uninspired mundanity- I remember Bujji mama's reaction to the film was "Random images with classical music :)"- but like I said, I really didn't expect anyone to see it except Amma and Sravani so it felt okay. That and material sublime provided solace through 2024.

Now the creative keeda is beginning to bite again. Even using the word creative, to refer to what I do, sounds preposteorous but I'm trying to make peace with myself that that is what I want to do. And that is the only medicine to that feeling that is reappearing. I've really tried to walk away and make peace with intellectual and operational pursuits over artistic ones but maybe its not all phoniness for it refuses to dissipate. I have to create- however lame and juvenile it maybe, however derived and irrelevant. This hedging has become second-nature too, this preemptive dissing of anything I have to say so that I deprive the other of that opportunity. I don't mind it too much because beneath the facade is a real stubbornness that helps me hold onto my rights but I wonder if its proving detrimental to my work. By not expressing it with pride, am I letting myself off too easily, "getting away with being half-good" as Sudhir saab once said?

A big part of it has been muddled thinking. I've been asking myself why films should only be a certain way for two decades now without arriving at a definitive answer. I want my life story, my umwelt to be portrayed on screen. Part of it is pure ego, part a belief that that is what I know best and so should communicate only that, and part to connect with others on what I believe to be my corest being. And the best way to do that is, I deduced, to transcribe with as much fidelity a slice from my own life. Which led to the creation of artefacts like BOATS and థియరీ, and led me down this path. To be fair only part of it is affectation and a failure of the imagination. I did harbour, for the longest time, a genuine desire to portray the everyday infraordinary parts of my life and to use art as a way to capture my most personal sensations. Now I realise that there were two problems with that approach that led me to a deadend.

One, I took the notion of 'art is to express my truth' too far. I didn't realise that art/ story is, like they're calling LLMs these days, a social technology. It is a tool, a cultural invention "designed to inform, persuade, or connect emotionally". Owing to my shyness and, at the time, a kind of loneliness, I was reluctant to share what I wrote. Then as it became more and more idiosyncratic, it felt less and less pertinent to others until what remained, more or less, was this blog which turned into an island. Transcription replaced communication on most occasions. And its a truism to state that art exists to communicate. Ofcourse with communication comes the risk of being misunderstood, judged, misrepresented, perhaps even reviled and abused. To not jump into the river afraid of those reactions is to remain bone dry for the rest of your life and lose the chance to have fun, make friends, and see new places.
Two, I conflated fidelity with truth. And the fidelity became more and more pedantic, the 'accountant's truth' in Herzog's classification. I can see now that while that approach can show trees well, it misses the woods. Its the equivalent of arguing that what's 'true' in a computer is just binary 1s and 0s, and everything else that it builds and enables, from operating systems to information on browsers, is just an illusion. Its so bad that its not even wrong. Even with the pigheaded desire to portray 'normal, everyday life', that is a ludicrous mistake because we don't live in space and time- pure sensations as it were- but swim in concepts. This is a realisation atleast 2500 years old, I remember reading about these questions in Prof. Adamson and Prof. Ganeri's Classical Indian Philosophy, so its jaw-droppingly stupid of me to realise it this late. When we tell a loved one I wish I could remember every one of the moments I spend with you, we're promising something impossible. Not just because that rapturous moment will end and 'life' will take over, but also because our brains simply can't store, even if they can perceive unadulterated, all that raw data. Which is why we use narrative tricks and allusions to convey feelings like boredom and ennui and everything else too. And I spent a long time assuming the way to do that was to show characters bored and hoping to induce the same boredom in audience (I may have succeeded in the latter though).

I'm sure I've had realisations like these before. And while I may have not changed as much as Id've liked, I must've swerved on those occasions enough to arrive at this point today. Will this point be that place in my life where I'll look back and see a curve. I don't know. What I know is that I feel rejuvenated and somehow ready to embark on a journey I've dreamt of for a long time. I have ofcourse walked down on that path a few times before digressing and while this time may not be different too, I really feel like re-trying. And the only way to do it, the only way and this I'm certain of, is by creating not consuming. I may not get there, wherever there is, ever by writing my story but I know for sure that I won't just by consuming others'. Art isn't a commodity that people can simply take off the shelf and contort themselves into. It is also not a solipsistic intellectual masturbation session. It is a mechanism to, like Kaufman once said, "make someone else feel a little less lonely". I refuse to remain stuck in my head. बनाएंगे और बताएंगे हमारी कहानियां|