Raavshya: Turning a full-stop into a comma.

August 2015 did to me what the British did to undivided India, except that I didn't need a Radcliffe. Not knowing what to do with your life is a far happier option, but knowing that you want to do numerous things all at once is a devastating experience. The problem intensifies when you realize you're average at each one of them. Books, films, and music have fascinated me beyond explanation. It took me some time to come to realize, but I kept running away. To trace back its origins, I will have to go back to 2008. I would sneak out of the house at night in the name of studies and sit in those rustic theaters, watching the same film over and over again until the next changeover on Friday. The first show would be about immersing in the story. The second, third, and so on would be about the camera angles, cinematography, characterization, and plot. Not that I understood these particulars through these lenses, but it was a very juvenile perspective of understanding the craft. I felt a sense of comfort in that darkness. I felt escaped. That darkness dawned upon me things that I would watch in awe.

A theater in a town is not a very lush place like a multiplex. It had broken iron chairs, and, of course, it came with tons of litter. The place stank of gutkha and tobacco. The scent of that gutkha is reminiscent of my memory with films. Even today, when I enter a theater, my senses search for that typical stink of gutkha. That's how I am mentally aligned with the theater. What makes talkies a unique experience is your relationship with the projector wallah. If the sound malfunctions or the fans turn off or if the movie is fast-forwarded, all you have to do is howl an abuse. Then the whole theater joins in unison in abusing the projector wallah, and the services would resume. And then there's a commentator who passed lewd comments throughout. It's a fascinating experience as to how each show had to have a commentator, especially from the stalls section. Watching a night show about the same film made me discover many things. It's a deep insight into the human psyche as to how a different group of people respond the same way to different emotions, the jokes, the punches. But sometimes there's a subtle difference. Some crowds are more receptive to the jokes, some are less. This experience is seldom found with the advent of increasing sobriety. Now the humid lazy fans are being taken over by central air conditioners and iron chairs with reclining cushions and salted spicy 2rs peanuts with chips and burgers. I would pay any day to be in that setting again.

I further moved to Pune for further studies, and this romance with movies didn't stop. I would go and sit alone in rustic theaters for late-night shows and walk my way back to my hostel at midnight. Nothing felt more fulfilling. My fascination never took a front seat, but it was a strong undercurrent. My curiosity knew no bounds. I worked as a junior artist on the film sets for a mere 250/300 rs per day, just to be able to see what goes into the making of a film. But then that was that. I had film studies as a major component. I appeared for the entrance exam of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in 2013. I never mustered the courage to look for the results. I just like to believe that I had cleared the exam. Had I actually cleared it, I fear I might have taken that road to wilderness.

In 2015, a documentary filmmaker sought my help to write the script on the aspirants preparing for competitive exams. There were a series of suicides in that year. I helped him, but that project tanked, like it always does. The pipeline of projects in the film fraternity is like a wormhole. It absorbs not just dreams but their corpses too. This idea stayed with me for the longest time. At first, I brushed it off as romanticism, but it took roots. My life was at a standstill. I was on a slippery slope. I had nothing to hold on to.

A random visit to my hometown meant sitting and dining with my schoolmates far away from the town at midnight. Amol, who was working in Abu Dhabi at that point, said, "You should do this. I will provide you with the monetary assistance. Someone would have to have lodged his rationale in some pit to agree to such a thing, especially when it had no returns."

Fast-forward. I gathered the resources and started working. The details are too many. I do not have the will or energy to go back and write everything related to it. All I remember is I lacked the basics. I just didn't know the craft. And the first day into the picturization, I realized I am messing up. I realized what a point of no return meant. I just kept traversing without a vision. All I remember is that I hadn't slept for 48-50 hours at one stretch. And I was delusional. And I was mourning. Mourning a loss of an incomplete chapter of my life that kept poking needles into my heart. My heart raced, and breathing was irregular. I couldn't sleep. I somehow finished the shoot and went back to Pune and got the film edited within 8 days and left the city and went to Delhi without turning back. Many would ask me about the film, and I would oblige. They would shower praises, and it didn't affect me. I have an innate immunity to flattery and praise. I just cannot take appreciation well. I may have submitted entries to a few film festivals on the insistence of a few people from the film fraternity. But that was that. I uploaded the film on YouTube with a private link and left it lying there dormant. People associated with it would ask me once in a while about it, and I kept ignoring.

You write something. You sleep over it, and the next day you realize it's shitty. You can rubbish the idea altogether. But to make something like this by spending a good 50,000rs and to keep it dormant is a burden you cannot unload. I could see nothing but mistakes. And how shallow it looked. As a mediocre person with a mediocre track record, I have been afraid of this mediocrity all my life. That pursuit of excellence, minding everyone else's opinions and catering to what stands out as a textbook example, has plagued me for a lifetime. The number of things that I have actually posted is just a drop of what lies in my iPhone's notes. There are a hundred stories I've written that never made it to any social media. Alternatively, with the advent of digitization and democratization of the internet and visual media, all of this got too mainstream, discouraging me further.

But you wake up someday and suddenly find yourself having made peace with it in order to move ahead. The more I understand cinema, the more my appetite grows. And I think now is the time to jump that puddle and start afresh. And the ladder would seem incomplete if I skip that step. Thus the effort. People who are associated with it have given up on me over the years to convince me to turn the link public. I am surrounded by such selfless people who go to any extent for me. I cannot help but wonder why these people do what they do. Shivaji Patil shouldered the responsibility untiringly. He even did many menial tasks like that of ferrying the equipments. I sought help for a hospital to shoot a few scenes, and a whole multi-specialty hospital was put at my disposal for two full days. I sought help to borrow a government bus, and the bus was given to me at odd hours for a petty sum. My cousin went to the extent of demolishing the wall of his house to make it look like a desi-daru adda. People from my native village, where I have grown up, came in mobs, leaving behind their daily wages. I don't understand what I have done to be this lucky, especially when I have never been able to return any favor.

The violence in my 23-year-old brain was far larger than a camera could ever capture. This film has some important people who meant the world to me, who were standing beside me, but who are not visible in the frame. Some are alive but not in my life anymore. Some are dead. Actually dead. It is a passing attempt to allow the people who loved them to be able to see them on the screen, even if for a moment. It is for them.

I never had the courage then, and I don't have the courage now to pursue films as the primary force in my career. But what has remained constant is my unwavering love for the craft. Who knows what unravels next! If it has stayed all this while, it might stay forever. I am hopeful. This post shall serve as a bookmark before I turn the next page. This film has chaos, and its characters are loud. There are a few abrupt cuts like those abrupt goodbyes. This 3rd September marks the eight years of it. Let this post be a full stop to all those incomplete sentences.