An Open Letter

An open letter?

Is it not the recourse of attention hungry fellows?

What would you write, if at all?

What is the pressing need and NOW for heaven’s sake?

You have knocked every door and aren’t you done already?

Who reads the inane crap?

As of writing this thing, I have no idea why it all propped up suddenly and why I have to justify all sorts of imminent doubts creeping at the back of my head. Prolly, cuz I have never written one. May be I want to tick this off from my ‘to do list’. May be I am at the crossroads where people take a pause and reassess, reflect and make sense of things around them. As for as I remember, it started when too many assignments at the start of my PG took the sheen off my brain conditioning and threw me in a bottomless pit. When I proclaimed around the same time, my love for cinema and my desire to be a filmmaker, it cut me off from the normal. I would fuck up in placements, I would fuck up every job that came my way. And along all this I have had a perfect alibi; ‘but I want to be a filmmaker’. I tell you what, justification for worldly failure is easy but to fuck it up where it all matters, you need to be an expert self-liar. May be I am tired of all this regular hollow reasoning, that I am suffering from bi-polar disorders for over a decade, that corporate world has always been unfair to me, that I tested the water in Bombay spending all I had saved, that I am not cut out for networking, that I am a lock in a cell with a pen and paper fellow, that I didn’t find a godfather blah blah blah. But fact is “Kabhi hum kaminey nikle, kabhi doosre kaminey."

Deep down all of this is a lone voice somewhere that reassures ‘you have waited tables, you have taken orders from the lowliest of kinds, you have been damaged all it had to, moving on you have nothing left to lose-so you might still be bestowed with the dancing girls’.  Bloody hope; it’s a bitch, a recourse that refuses to leave.

So how does a loser cope with the failures? But isn’t what art and literature and cinema is for? You don’t need a life to have a philosophy or ideals, you need ideals and philosophy to have a life. God knows how else would I have fared had there not been a Howard Roark or a Tyler Durden in my life? A being is wedded to the idea of heroism always and mostly subconsciously but he definitely is. And what would life be if it is not invested into being a hero oneself or for that matter try to create a metaphor of one’s own imagining. I liken my suffering to the Dostoevsky’s created tragedies, I get my weird kinks in the world of Chuck Palahuink, Howard Roark steadies me, and the idea of a telling a story spurs me like nothing else.

Wherever you are in life, there will always be people more skilled, more intelligent, more talented, more gifted than you are. And to learn to deal with this fact is the greatest challenge in today’s time. And that’s where arts come into the play. You just need to outdo your own self here and none else; no peers, no colleagues, no cousins, no none.

I have been fed up an endless ‘How to Crap’ myself. How to keep your passion going while keeping the day job, how to cut corners wherever you might, how to lay low for the final blow and how to survive corporate juggernaut et al. And the verdict is nothing suffices in itself. People dictating so have no idea of your real true self. They are teaching the same stuff to machines which are fast catching up. You have to save yourself from the algorithms and from your distracting self and Internet is the biggest disruption there ever has been.

Life is a struggle even without your approval so you might as well pick up the battle of your choosing and then fight it like hell. It’s too long otherwise. Ask me.