Yet Untitled 112 - Roundup, Roundup

Using the chaos of a-last minute publish to think about YU's future

Dearest Yet Untitler

As always, I hope you are well!

Hello 👋🏼 from a very last-minute instalment this week where new work stuff has led to a scramble and tossed me about. As always - before this shindig of ours becomes another reason for panic, I give myself the immanently usable option of not publishing; and this week I’ve been as close to not publishing as I have ever been.

Let’s see what happens.

Travel. Now. C. 2024

I took on a small directorial gig this week - a commercial! It’s something I haven’t done before, but it came, it felt interesting, so I didn’t say no. As a result, what was promising to be an easy peasy week turned into manic pandemonium! In many ways, it became a mini version of my more prolonged experience of shoot from last year.

Things experienced and written about

Shooting! Miranda House College, New Delhi, c. 2023

Shoot is a total change of rhythm. I find that initial this shifting of gears often throws me into a funk. But I’ve been around that block a few times now and have experienced settling into things and having a decent time of it despite all the chaos. But in the run up - in the shifting of gears - I experience various exciting things like MORNING DREAD, which I had written about extensively in YU 061.

Here it is for you again:

Yet Untitled 061 - Waking Up

In the past days, I also experienced, in quick succession, both the feelings of wanting to be where I am and a desperate desire to escape, both of which I wrote about sometime last year.

Yet Untitled 063 - Don’t want to be Elsewhere

Yet Untitled 070 - Want to be elsewhere

At the same time, my memories how my wonderful wonderful colleagues (who are also my wonderful wonderful friends) handled the various vagaries of shoot came back to me and gave me confidence in a way that I covered in YU 080.

So this instalment is a bit of a roundup, and that’s a good thing, considering the number of new YUers we picked up after the post.

tulseatalent

A post shared by @tulseatalent

Rounding up, revisiting all these thought-loops reveals something - that I am a creature of THEME, and, at this point in my life I’m repeatedly circling a defined set of concerns. I have been writing YU for two and a half years now, and perhaps this time has been adequate to cover, maybe exhaustively, all of my present themes to the maximum extent I can.

But this by no means means that I want to stop

What a sentence, I’m surprised I don’t remember consciously using it before!

When I started writing Yet Untitled, the first few exploratory instalments were more like a game. Trying to figure out what YU was, I played by a set ‘rules’ a process inspired by Craig Mod’s essay The Rigour of Process - a piece of writing that influenced me a lot.

Here’s a ‘rule’ I shared in YU 001:

Here's what I’ll try to do…

I want to bring you one photograph a day from my archive, write about it and relate it to ideas that are forming in my head or insights that I find useful, in the hope that they will prove useful to you too.

I had also set myself a goal in the same instalment:

A small note about VOICE. I’m using this exercise to wring out a voice that I know is there, but for now only I seem to be privy to, which isn’t ideal, because I feel - saying this without ego (or trying to) - there’s value in it. It’s elusive, and while it has found some sort of regular expression via my screen-writerly life, I feel writing scripts doesn't give that voice the tyre-screeching torque I want from it. Why, because our voices are unique, and everything unique has the ability do something new and special for the world.

I felt very happy in reading this because the one thing I’m sure YU helped me find was a voice that simply does not want to be shut down. Many of you have told me now and again that it carried value for you. So there’s every reason to continue, notwithstanding the immense value YU has created for me!

So, the good news is that - far from wanting to stop because of some abject fear of repeating myself and becoming boring - I feel it may be time to explore more processes, more ‘rules’. I think that over time - upon finding voice - I stopped needing to consciously lean on rules so much to arrive at the instalments I wanted. I’m sure there were rules operating because each week an instalment popped out from my toaster brain, with me somehow knowing how to steer my way through it. I still find it unbelievable, and I mean this in the humblest way I can because, weirdly, it sometimes feels like I - the Vasant I’ve known all my life - had nothing to with this weekly endeavour. It feels like it’s been coming from another Vasant yet to exist.

I have more than half a mind to delete the last paragraph, dear YUer, but I’ll leave it in, because it’s you, and I feel that I can say this kind of stuff in front of you.

Advancing

Any thoughts, dear veteran Yet Untitler? What part of me would you want to tap into going forward from here? Any suggestions for new ‘rules’ that could, if we’re lucky, unearth a hidden treasure of new themes?

And dear newbie Yet Untitler, I hope this introspection doesn’t scare you away. You have come to a well with deep aquifers that’ll likely and hopefully be there for you in your inbox each week for much time to come.

Drop me a line, either of you. Both of you!

With deep gratitude,

Thanks for listening

V