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.
