Yet Untitled 047 - Compulsory Letter Writing
An epistle on epistles
Dear Yet Untitler,
Back in boarding school, we had “compulsory letter writing” every tuesday. For me, this was a cue to get creative on those “inland letter cards” (that were not really cards). Although receiving letters was the thrill par none, writing a letter and preparing it for the post box was also something else. I feel a version of this thrill every week before digitally posting Yet Untitled, but it’s sans the stamps, the smell of glue and the haptics of a red, sturdy, metal postbox.
Today, I thought - rather than posting - I’d write you a letter. I’m wondering whether there is a difference. It entails no change in medium but perhaps there will be a change in tone. What I remember about letters was that there was no rule saying you needed to know what you’re going to write about at the start. Perhaps I’m thinking in a circle, because, essentially, every instalment of YU is exactly this - a letter to you that takes shape as I write it!
So here I go - likely doing essentially the same thing while attempting a variation.
Let’s see where we land.
Compulsory Letter Begins
(again)
Dear YUer,
I’m excited to tell you that I got a chance to direct actors this week. Directing an actor can be like seeing life afresh all over agin, to know its abundance. An actor is so generous in making themselves transparent and letting you inside. I came away feeling - human beings are such fantastic, multi-faceted things!
I was directing a group of young women, and I felt that I’m really lucky to be the father to two lives who will be young women one day - that I’ll have the privilege to see two young people at such close quarters. This week, Ananya and Aahana come one year closer to becoming young women themselves. They are quickly leaving a childhood behind that I’m grasping at in desperation not to let it go. But directing these young women just showed me that I have so much to look forward to.
I also got a chance - in a simulated environment - to look pure, unadulterated fear in the face. The place where my kids had their birthday party had a rock-climbing simulation. I gave it a shot: when the kids were doing it, it seemed easy enough, but when I got up there…
It was my first time, so I had not yet felt the effectiveness of the harness and pulley that secured me. At that moment, no harness felt strong enough to save me from the abyss that descended under me.
Kids were watching me as I had just stopped short of peeing in my undies out of fright. “GO, UNCLE!” They called out. I told myself that I’d reach the summit so “I don’t plant a cause towards cowardice in their lives” - words that sounded so absurd when I stood atop a flimsy pillar one step away from free fall. Daily life itself felt absurd, looking down at it from that place. Wasn’t it absurd that in the course of something as everyday as a children’s birthday party that I had convinced myself to scare myself shitless?
I did take the final step. It seems it was more out of losing patience than bravery - “the more I stay, the more scared shitless adult I will exhibit myself to be!” But, I gotta tell you, managing that final step was worth it. It reminded me of something I tell myself often -
“courage is always a good idea.”
Also, I wrote a random stream-of-consciousness paragraph on feeling angry. The seed thought was “anger is easier”. This is a tendency and not a belief. I believe in the opposite. Acting in anger is never a good idea in my book.
I have studied anger, mostly mine. It’s interesting - because it’s told me so much about who I am. You can read about some of my reflections on anger in YU Lite 007:
I have various strategies to mitigate anger when it rises - and rise, it does. I sometimes avoid doing regrettable things by deciding to even say something with a delay of 5 mins. It works surprising well. Sometimes, I write about it, which gives me a similar distance from the emotion as those 5 mins do. This little paragraph was amusing:
Everybody … is smashing things! So….Smash it up! Smash it up! Smashitup! Smashitup!
So went a song from my youth.
Taking a hammer and smashing things is satisfying. They serve cakes that you can smash in certain restaurants. Some chocolate I bought recently was a slab that came with its own hammer to help you smash it. The glazing on crème brûlée is asking to be smashed.
Peas. Oh don’t get me started on elusive peas rolling around on your plate. It’s the fork’s flat end for them.
Smashed peas don’t roll about.
There was a lot of anger on the boil when I wrote these lines, but, Right now, I can’t stop laughing at them. It’s as if I lifted a jackhammer, attacked a rock and after an hour of smashing what was left when the dust settled was a rubber duck going quack quack.
Anger well transformed, no?
Lots of love
V
(end of letter)
There we have it, dear Yet Untitler.
Three or four, often disconnected things strung together by someone wanting you give another person a piece of their life: this was the beauty of letter writing. You had to fill a page, not a digital box with a blinking cursor. What that page pulled out of you was a snapshot of your brain more than reportage. I find a blinking cursor to not have this superpower.
See this excerpt from a letter written by my brother Uday to my parents in the early 1980s:
Trans: “On Sunday, we watched a cinema artefact so named “The Mission to Kill”. I liked this cinema artefact a lot. There was a lot of fighting in this cinema artefact. How’s Vasant?”
It’s heartwarming to learn that I coexisted inside my brother’s head simultaneously with his appreciation of “The Mission to Kill” at some point in the 80s. Interesting flick. It’s even more interesting dubbed in Hindi.
Writing YU to you has been essentially sending you such a snapshot of my brain, captured to communicate some of its fascinations, curiosities and perspectives.
In another age, we all used to do this a lot more and more often. In another age, some compulsory things gave us more than we give them credit for.
Lots of love once again,
V