In the past one week Mom and I have watched almost every Sushant Singh Rajput movie. And they are all good. They are different, genuine compared to the regular Bollywood fare and Sushant is brilliant. I would have never seen these movies given my priorities. But more importantly it would not have mattered. The world is too vast and history too long for us to be stubborn or hold grudges. As a famous man once said, “If you know how quickly people forget the dead, you would stop living to impress them.” Sushant will be harder to forget but at too great a cost. YouTube has everything from a Tarot card reader predicting investigation results to a man hanging himself to show how the rope marks on the neck would have been different had it been a suicide. We are long past the last trace of decency. The only real struggle is to hold on to one’s sanity.
It is the hardest thing to do in artistic fields. Extreme sanity is often indistinguishable from insanity. It is at this dangerous cliff that the most enduring art emerges. It is a necessarily lonely place making it all the more difficult. Surviving this tight rope walk is perhaps the highest endeavor to aspire to. It certainly can’t be fame and record deals. The fact that bittersweet stories told by self-made artists are making it to a broad audience is a miracle by itself. To grudge that Sushant did not get the fame or monetary success that the most commercial inbred cinema gets is not only childish, it is an insult to the man and his work.
I am beginning to see life more and more as levels of consciousness.I am not the same person who left a corporate job to do stand-up five years ago. And he definitely was not the person who joined as a management trainee more than a decade ago. Do I identify with that person? — Yes. Would I want to be him again? — No.
The first few levels of consciousness take the most time. Surviving, competing, chasing money, chasing women, chasing money to chase women, being mean, wanting a bigger car. Some people never make it out of this stage alive. Most; in fact, spend their entire earthly existence on this merry-go-round. It may go faster and higher but you are still circling the same drain.
Everyone accumulates experience but only with the subtext of knowledge does it become wisdom. You start asking questions, increasingly uncomfortable ones. Is a 3 hour commute and 10 hour work day interspersed with junk food the best justification for your post-graduate education?
How much money do you really need?
Does the status of your job mean anything if it only works while you are in employment?
Can you invest so much of yourself in one person when you know how thin the veil of monogamy is?
Can you complain about your middle-class upbringing when people are still dying of starvation and heatstroke in this country?
Most of us do ask these questions but the pitfall is buying into meme-level wisdom. ‘Life is a drama and we all have to play a part.’
‘You win some, you lose some.’
‘Everything that happens, happens for the best.’
And other such royal examples of intellectual laziness. People who have pushed a little past convention find a breather in such pop psychology and they stagnate. EMIs and kids finish them off.
But the point is to keep pushing on. The climb gets steeper and lonelier. But these are small prices to pay for real freedom. Even the most artistic pursuit that you may have chosen as your path starts feeling frivolous with time. And that is a good thing. Otherwise between ticket sales and video views, art can also degenerate into another day job. There is no end to the numbers one can chase. All that is left to endure is the acute passage of time. And even the most blessed can’t take it.
Quality time is all everyone seems to be fighting for. But when you finally get it, you don’t know what to do with it. You fritter it away with endless scrolling and pointless tasks. Only to complain later that it is Monday again.
The Lockdown has given us more quality time than one would have ever hoped or prayed for. And we have all deteriorated into t-shirt challenges and gibberish. You can’t run away from your thoughts forever. If not now then after the next break-up or when old age finally catches up with you. It would be too late by then and the backlog too large. In the unlikely event that the world goes back to normal soon, will we be a little more aware of how uncomfortable we are with ourselves? And why that is the first thing to be addressed?
After you successfully strip the baggage that you carry around as a personality and all the hubris accumulated on your CV, life only comes down to an acute passage of time. Just life observing itself, in the most conscious way possible. Sadly, that has become the hardest thing in the world.
– Punit Pania
