Yet Untitled 121 - Michelangelo's...Giraffe?
A film festival triggers me to consider how I have chosen at key moments
Dearest Yet Untitler,
I love film festivals! To me, a film festival is:
…an onslaught of narrative that you willingly subject yourself to.
I guess this can be true of literature festivals and theatre festivals too, but I experience such narrative onslaught most often at film festivals.
Last week at the Mumbai MAMI Film Festival, I encountered all these narratives; all these different ways of looking at the world! Such an experience always ends up altering my mind. I receive the world differently after a film festival. I feel as if my mind was stretched like a 3-year-old going medieval on a dollop of play dough.
I’ll confess, dear Yet Untitler, that many of the thoughts that follow aren’t very well formed, but think of it as me wading through the thick feeling left behind after encountering so many narratives at MAMI.
So I’ll run with this short, freewheeling exploration. If, in the end, you google the next film festival happening near you and make plans to attend, it would make me very happy. If in the end, you gain an even slightly newer perspective on your personal narrative, I’d be ecstatic!
As a tribute to film festivals (and gainful narrative onslaughts), I’ll pepper this instalment with images from some film festivals I’ve attended. The text in between is a collection of scribblings about stories - how we not only tell them but choose them; and - in choosing - become who we are.
Some bullet points about Narrative.
Narrative is assigning meaning.
Narrative is seeing one part of our world in isolation.
Narrative is focusing on all the things that connect, leaving the rest aside.
Narrative is choosing.
Have some more bullets you’d like to add?
Shoot 🔫💥📷👉
Michelangelo’s Giraffe
I’m suddenly imagining our forefathers looking at the stars and naming constellations. Our forefathers made a choice: Orion the Hunter could have been Gendry the Waterfowl.
Michelangelo could have seen a giraffe in a block of marble but instead he saw David.
Thought experiments with my narrative
Ever since I saw my first movie about time travel (likely the one with the DeLorean), I’ve been fascinated by what would happen if we had opted for different narratives than the ones we did - what would happen had we chosen differently?
While this could have been a reason to segue into a thought experiment about the different versions of my life based on an imagined set of choices at crucial moments, I found it more interesting to go the other way - giving attention to the junctures when I made some strong choices that created the narrative I’m occupying presently.
More bullet points, anyone? Here are some ‘turning point bullet points”:
🤘🏼 When I chose to remain in India
The reason I list this is because I’m aware of all the various counter-narratives I’ve imagined that may have pulled me elsewhere.
Two images come to mind.
One is cooking spaghetti in suburban Tokyo wearing a kimono, much like one of Haruki Murakami’s protagonists. Another is walking down a rainy street in New York in a black trench coat with my collars turned up, much like James Dean in a surprisingly similar photo 😁.
Both imagined scenarios could have been the truth. I had got through my final year of school after spending 6 months immobilised with a slipped spinal disc. Despite this, I didn’t do too badly in my finals. Had I simply wanted a gap year, my family would have likely honoured my wishes. With a little bit of cajoling, I could have dropped a year, properly prepped for film school and gone to New York. I could have found some way to get myself to Japan, learned the language and bummed around for a bit if I wanted to.
But I didn’t.
Even after 2 years in Cambridge when I could have found ways to remain away, I didn’t.
These were conscious, narrative-shaping choices. I have no regrets.
🤘🏼 When I said yes to arranged marriage
Believe me - this was a very difficult choice for someone who had chosen to live as I did in the 2010s, pursuing a career that nobody in the history of my family - not even an uncle’s uncle - had chosen. Choosing not to join our family textile business and moving to Mumbai to work in film - I had labelled myself as the road-less-travelled-guy who only did things of his own volition.
But one evening, while looking at the trapping patterns of my life, I decided to make a counter-intuitive choice, agreeing to meet someone who my parents wanted me to meet for the purposes of potential matrimony.
At the time it felt like I was making a compromise. It was only later that I realised that it had been one of the strongest and bravest choices I had made - because I had made it in the face of everything telling me to choose otherwise. I made it with the loudest part of myself telling me that I had lost.
Vani and I met on the 12th of December, 2009 and got married on the 7th of April the following year. We kicked off our Honeymoon by attending the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles together.
By the way we danced there - I knew we had won.
🤘🏼When I directed for the first time
I was 17 when I wrote and directed a one-act play called “We’re Crazy, Aren’t we?” at the Doon School. I also played the lead. But very soon, I realised that my vision necessitated roping in others to help actualise it.
This frightened me. I’d have to make people listen and persuade them to do what I said. Albeit reluctantly, I made a start.
I think that while realising the play showed me what I was born to do, it didn’t show how to do it. As it came together, it was clear that while the effort was worth it, I’d have to develop myself as a leader in order to keep directing.
I wasn’t born a leader, I had to learn how to become one. I had to change my narrative, and my love for the process would be my strongest motivation.
I’m so happy I took the cue.
🤘🏼When I chose Belief
I decided to practice Buddhism in my mid 30s against a long spell of passive determinism and spiritual listlessness that had set in during my late 20s. At 36, this impulse suddenly felt important.
With this choice, I consciously decided to see the world differently and this resulted in a series of choices that either led to forming or strengthening some of the key pillars supporting my narrative. Becoming a father would have been far more frightening had I not opened this spiritual chapter in my life.
Seeing how my Buddhist practice constantly permeates my day to day life - my choices - it’s easy for me to imagine how my life would have been different had I not been practicing. This is one place where a giraffe emerging from a block of marble suddenly sprouted abs and sported a sling. It’s a transition I’ve observed closely.
My present narrative undeniably gains momentum and direction from this key choice made sometime in December, 2015.
🤘🏼When I decided to remain in boarding school
There was a year when I was bullied really badly at school - the year of the demonic seniors KS, CM and RS; iykyk.
My parents came over to meet me and took me for an outing. At some point, the butter chicken ran out and I cried at the prospect of returning to school. My folks spoke to me kindly and gave me a real choice to opt out and return home to find a new school. It must have been difficult for them, but I remember that the choice offered was sincere and genuine.
I chose to stay.
I had my reasons. Part of it was pride, part of it was not wanting to lose my friends. But the choice was very much my own.
From that day on, I have a lingering sense that no matter how hellish a scenario - I do have it in me to persevere. God knows, some vestige of this feeling must have played out and helped me survive the 6 month slip-disc ordeal I mentioned above.
Shonali sees Giraffes
My dear dear friends Shonali Bose and Nilesh Maniyar made this film.
The logline:
An intimate personal journey in which a filmmaker is tasked with shooting the physician assisted suicide of her close friend
More info on the film here.
In the film, it’s as if Shonali and Nilesh constantly see a giraffe while the rest of us see David. The film is funny, elating and often absurd - kind of like a giraffe.
Since death for most of us is heavy and larger than life, it’s easier for us to see it in its David-esque form - as the narrative that most easily traps us.
I watched “A Fly on the Wall” for the second time at MAMI, and because of it and films of its ilk, my gaze has become freshly attuned to looking beyond David’s shoulder to check for any lurking giraffes.
Happy hunting, dearest Yet Untitler. I wish you a film festival. I wish you giraffes.
No giraffes were harmed in the writing of this newsletter.
No giraffes must come to harm in any YU reader’s quest to find them.
Thanks for listening!
Luv ya,
V
P.S - Another YU on film festivals:
It looks like you have made many brave and wise choices. I love David as a giraffe. Michelangelo missed an opportunity there!