Tag: workshop

#15 Postcard – Switching POV (Barfi! movie)

There’s no way to run when your past corners you like that, at Puja dukaan counter with the Prestige pressure cooker.

“Wo jo ruki si raah baaki hai
Wo jo ruki si chaah baaki hai..”

– Phir Le Aya Dil, Barfi! (2012 )

You’d think things would have changed after 6 years. After Jhilmil, things have. Yet so much hasn’t and you do not know until your past shows up right in front of you.

Barfi saw his past through the stained glassdoor of Puja dukaan, now dressed in a starched cotton saree. The saree was unfamiliar but his pulse rose as he identified the figure through the glass. Shruti – he engraved on the new Prestige cooker, hands shaking.

He swallowed the knot in his throat, combed his hair down, pasted an all-too-easy smile and walked out to the main shop to meet her.

When she finally turned to him she smiled surprised, her eyes vulnerable as their last goodbye, while the scarlet of her sindoor stared down at him.

Barfi smiled back.

He smiled at the lie that you stop loving somebody once they leave your life. That one day, 6 years later when they show up, they will not take you right back to where they left you, a moustache-less heartbroken 20 year-old chasing after her bicycle and running along on her busrides.

He smiled, and this time Barfi knew well enough to not fall.

The ends of her saree were wet from the outpour, Shruti mumbled a goodbye as she stepped onto the road where her husband awaited.

Heartbreaks are hard not because of rejection. Heartbreaks are hard because of the shared future that crashes down before your eyes, because of the pretty-faced kids and grandkids you won’t raise together, bus rides with them that you missed and the what-ifs that haunt for long after.
There’s no way to run when your past corners you like that, at Puja dukaan counter with the Prestige pressure cooker.

On the street, the man switched on the engine to go home. He looked smart. He probably read their kids bedtime stories to sleep, sang to the tunes of the radio and listened to her daily complaints. He probably woke her up from sleep by whispering her name, the name he could only do a botched job at engraving. Barfi watched as Shruti walked into the car, colorful bangles tracing her slender arm.

Jhilmil taught him that one can love again. Life reminded him there’s nothing quite like first love.

PS : I wrote this as part of Switching POV exercise for my writing workshop. I didn’t like it enough then because my narrative voice didn’t feel authentic, but it doesn’t seem too bad now 🙂

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End of Writing Workshop

Today was the fourth and final session of Art of Clear Writing workshop.

Today was the fourth and final session of Art of Clear Writing workshop. I missed last Saturday’s class because I was suffering chills and fatigue from my second Covid-19 vaccine shot (Pfizer). So I lay on my bed after logging into the Zoom session, Amit Varma moved forward with the workshop as I drifted into exhausted sleep. By the time I woke up, Zoom had logged me out.

We had a bunch of writing exercises over the past couple of weeks, I will publish some of my workshop pieces in the coming days. But the key takeaway from the workshop was that you figure out a writing process that works for you, and most importantly to keep writing.

Building a tribe/community was another one – to discover other writers who are in the same stage of our own writing journey. I realized I have WordPress and I hope it’s going to be an easier task here.

PS – I counted the adverbs I used in this post and it’s only one out of 148 words. Nothing impressive, but to be mindful is the first step!

The Art of Clear Writing – Of dance and writing

I signed up for The Art of Clear Writing workshop by Amit Varma, and the first session was today at 10 PM IST.

(Listen on Spotify)

I signed up for The Art of Clear Writing workshop by Amit Varma, and the first session was today at 10 PM IST. Like so many other things in my life, my brother had recommended it to me a few weeks ago (well, more like he asked me to do it :D), and my first thought went – High time I attended one of these.

I have never stuck to a deadline with my writing because deadlines to me have been a part of the routine side of life. The day regime where you go to work or sign into your laptop at 8. Attend standup calls, plan sprint schedules and keep track of your projects on JIRA boards and OneNote notebooks.

The rest of my life is disorganized – writing and dancing occupy huge shares in it, and I indulge in them whenever I feel like it. To me, that’s also what was fun about it and I staunchly believed that adding timetables and discipline to it would take the fun away.

Yet I have to acknowledge the best part about the times that I do stick to learning a dance choreography lies in the impressive (and much-lacking) discipline it brings to my life. I work out regularly in the two to four weeks that it takes to finishing a piece. I fall asleep by midnight as I’m exhausted by the physical activity, so I end up getting a full 8 hours sleep. I take multiple showers and eat really well because I build a normal-to-huge appetite. I drink tons of water.

Which is why I initially decided that I’d see about the writing workshop later, and that I’d join Bharatanatyam classes first (I have wanted to attend them for years, but it’s a lukewarm urge 55% of the time).

Last week though, I got thinking about my writing. Like I mentioned, I am not one to push content or impose deadlines with this blog. This space in fact has always been less of a blog and more of a dwelling for my thoughts. Yet once I started reading more again in the last month, I have wanted to write more, and to take it up seriously.

This is a stepping stone.

PS : Too little about writing in this first post on the topic; the upcoming ones will be more on writing and less about everything else 🙂

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