WHERE HAVE I BEEN?

Somewhere around last month when there was no internet in Rajasthan for three days straight, I had too much time on my hands and two assignments due. One of them was not as exciting as the other and would not really add to my overall grade. For the latter, I had to write about Shakespeare's adaptations outside the Anglo-Saxon world for my drama class, and so I did. It took almost a week and I am super proud of how it turned out. All throughout my school, assignments involved a lot of tacky glitter pens and craft material and there was little I could actually be happy doing. Growing up, I did not have a lot of good teachers. Most of them were either bullies or just really bad at teaching their subjects. One of the very few who stood out was Rakshita Ma'am. She taught me English for two consequent years and god did I love it! And I wasn't alone; everyone she taught loved her. I remember she would give us feedback for the answers and essays and stories we would have to write. She would be very happy reading this assignment and knowing full well that I am getting marks for doing something I have always loved.

Flashback aside, here is the assignment that I am very cleverly using to make you all forget about the seven months I have been MIA:

Shakespeare’s relevance, even after 400 years of his death owes itself to his universal and flexible themes. But I for one thoroughly believe that we should give credit where it is due—in the sheer imagination of the artists who have and continue to adapt Shakespeare. Without them, Shakespeare’s legacy would have never molded itself into the dynamic and phenomenally diverse cultural fabric outside the Anglo-Saxon world. Would the insurgency in Kashmir or the Mumbai underworld ever be the backdrop of Hamlet (Haider) and Macbeth (Maqbool) if not for Vishal Bhardwaj’s sheer ambition and imagination? Would the truce between the Capulets and Montagues ever be the weapon to honor kill Romeo (the Hindu Parma) and Juliet (the Muslim Zoya) if not for Habib Faisal’s didactic Muslim gaze in Ishaqzaade? The thing with any phenomenon is that you can never really pinpoint a clear reason behind its gigantic success and influence. Shakespeare was a phenomenon.

               Ishaqzaade, Haider, Maqbool

Romeo becomes the dashing, testosterone-loaded stud Romil and Juliet becomes the 'chocolate-boy good looks' (as his younger sister Ramya describes him) Jugal. Capulets become the staunch academic Subramaniams and Montagues become the overstated, extra-loud Kohlis. It is a clash of cultures and stereotypes; Chetan Bhagat's 2 States all over again. It is all set in a fictional hill-station named Caulvingunj, set in Himachal Pradesh (for Romil and Jugal go for a concert in Manali on a weekend picnic). Caulvingunj is like every small town ever where everyone knows everyone and it does not take too long for rumors and truths to spread. Romil and Jugal go to a college, even though we are never told what they study. Not that it really matters. Romil directs the titular parent play, Romeo and Juliet for his college theatre, along with his best friend Mehar who clearly likes him despite his sexuality. Jugal rejects the sexual advances of his dad's boss's daughter, Rosie. This ceases the promotion of his dad and soon there is a new family in town, the Kohlis, the patriarch having gotten the designation Jugal's dad was aiming for. Unlike the original text, there is no Rosaline who renounces the world and becomes a nun, thus breaking Romeo's heart. Instead, Jugal appears in the show before Romil does. It is love at first sight for him, replicating the first time Romeo saw Juliet at the Capulet house. There is no way that Romil could be into men with his over-the-top masculinity and conventionally cis-heterosexual disposition. Jugal is smitten by his good looks and emotional unavailability and casts him as Romeo in his play, much to his best friend's dismay. In instructing Juliet (played by Rosie) on how to say her dialogues, he frequently plays Romil's Juliet and gets even closer to him. Much like Romeo and Juliet, what lies within Romil's perfectly toned body barely matters to Jugal. It is raging hormones and the lack of any queer action in town that cast a spell on Jugal, giving him the stupidity and courage to profess his love through a kiss on the aforementioned Manali trip. In exchange, Romil gives Jugal a black eye. It is his sheer toxic masculinity that we are expected to use as a justification for his violence. Jugal is heartbroken, bruised and self-jilted but soon enough, Romil climbs on his balcony (replicating the infamous scene from Romeo and Juliet) and gives first-aid to his literal and figurative wounds with a passionate kiss. Turns out that that seemingly straight jock is not really straight. 

Gay men in Hindi cinema had never looked so straight. Truth be told; they barely existed. Beyond the indie queer gaze of Onir's I Am and the real-life tragedy of Aligarh's Professor Siras, Hindi cinema (or Indian cinema at large, if you really ask me) diversity of any kind is dismal, let alone the diversity within a minority community. 

Passion and gay love blossom within the constraints of fake contact names and shady huts on the city outskirts. It does not take long for Ramya to follow Jugal one day and see him in an intimate moment with Romil. She does not really out him but it is Romil's reluctance to accept his identity that creates the environment for his parents to mistake Romil and Jugal as "close friends" and engage him with Rosie (she becomes the count Paris to Romeo instead of Juliet). Jugal, despite his understated masculinity is the one who comes out to his parents in a moment of impulse and betrayal. He is the courageous one here. But this is where the straight gaze of the show creeps in. Any piece of art that judges and shames queer people for not coming out comes from a place that does not really understand the consequences of coming out. Soon, everyone in the town knows about Romil and Jugal being a "gay" couple and they face a social boycott of sorts where their college principal says, "Even I went to college in the US but "all this" is unnatural." Romil is forced to come out to his family by the straight gaze of the show. Banishment becomes "coming out" here and both Romil and Jugal, its prey. Why 20-year-old college students are coming out to their parents and leaving cities for someone they have known for two months is something only Shakespeare can answer. Is it the preposterous passion of the original text being replicated? If you ask someone who is just as old as the protagonists, their answer will be "because it happens in real life". Indian teenagers get in similar and worse situations quite often and it is not just their parents they lose hope in, but also society.

Homophobia and ignorance are rampant in Caulvingunj, across ethnicities and generations. Jugal's literary mother reads Arundhati Roy's A God Of Small Things with its incestuous themes and radicalism but calls homosexuality an American trend. Jugal's younger sister, Ramya calls Brokeback Mountain a waste of two handsome men. Romil's family is no different. The only allies in this show are Mehar and her mom. Mehar is the closest Romil and Jugal gets to portraying the nurse. She is cool, hipster, has a very Katrina Kaif-esque Hindi accent and above all, is unconditionally in love with Jugal. She might not possess the nurse's vulgar humor but she loves Jugal just as much as the nurse loved Juliet. And better still, she does not betray him. Her mom gives shelter to a heartbroken Jugal, betrayed both by his family and lover (a heartbroken Romeo crying over Rosaline (?)) who seeks solace in slack and alcohol. She might as well just be the Friar, Lawrence, as she is the one both Romil and Jugal's moms reach out to make their kids "understand". But she is firm in her beliefs, knowing full well that there is nothing that Romil and Jugal need more than their support and acceptance. There is no Mercutio flexing his comic timing but the show makes up for it with its decent rom-com setting. Romil and Jugal both possess a set of guy friends who objectify women and call fruit beer “gay” but they are not important enough to be remembered by their names. Multiple Mercutios maybe?

Jugal's sister Ramya, still in high-school, crazily infatuated by Romil is the one who confronts Romil and calls him a coward for saying yes to marrying Romie despite being gay. She is also the nurse. There are more than two nurses in this show, if you count Mehar’s mom. A moved Romil seeks forgiveness from Jugal and both of them move to Mumbai to work at call centers and run errands. Why this impracticality? Ask Shakespeare. The very essence of Romeo and Juliet is immature, senseless passion. If leaving your undergraduate degree to seek employment in Mumbai is impractical, so was choosing death over marrying the prince instead of Romeo.

Jugal might be more appealing, but it is Romil who has bigger inner demons to fight. In one remarkable scene, he buys a condom to make out with Rosie, hence trying to brush off the "phase" called homosexuality. He fails, naturally. Raised in a much more boisterous household than the Subramaniams, there was little he could be but a pumped-up jock. He hates mangoes but drinks mango shake every morning because his mom finds happiness in it. He has semi-nude pictures of female models in his room in order to appear straight. Truth be told, he has more depth than both Romeo and Juliet combined solely on the basis of his sexual identity. There exists no character like Romil in Hindi cinema before 2017 (a year before homosexuality was decriminalized in India). He is a revelation despite the show's lightheartedness.

The infamous balcony scene and passion of Romeo and Juliet

Ram and Leela kill each other in Bhansali’s Ram Leela

One of the most iconic things about Romeo and Juliet is the scene where deaths are faked in order to live happily ever after. Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Goliyon ki Rasleela: Ram Leela does it in a more subtle way. Leela carelessly signs an order that reads the killing of Saneras, the rival community that Ram heads. Leela hears a rumor about Ram’s death and goes berserk. Romil and Jugal, on the other hand, do it in a very Ekta Kapoor manner (who is also the producer of the show), they lie as corpses in a hospital room and convince their families that they have in fact died in a car accident. Romil says, “What we really want to know is whether you love us for who we are or for who you want us to be.” They get the sympathy they seek and their families truce with each other and their sons.

Ramya narrates all of this to Ahalya, who turns out to be a Supreme Court judge presiding over the archaic and now abolished Section 377 litigation. With this, the show brings to mainstream spotlight the misery and plight of the queer community in India. It makes a political statement despite not taking itself too seriously.

What really got me is how they bring out the tragedy of the play. Just when the show starts to end on a happy note with both the Kohlis and Subramaniams about to fly to New Zealand to meet Romil and Jugal, they get a call informing them about Romil and Jugal's divorce. Just because the protagonists madly in love with each other belonged to the same gender does not mean they will have a perfect relationship. Perfection is a universal myth.

There are a lot of discrepancies between Romil and Jugal and the original text but what really makes it an adaptation instead of an appropriation is the sincerity with which it tries to replicate the hormonal passion of the latter. Not a lot of people elope at 20 with an unfinished undergraduate degree in order to be able to love and live. But at the core of the play lies impractical passion that does not need any more synonyms.

A Tamil show that I have lately been watching is Suzhal: The Vortex which might not be a straightforward adaptation of Romeo and Juliet but it sure does extend the imaginations of adaptability. Two non-protagonist characters from two rival families elope and end up getting murdered, embraced within each other’s arms. Truce follows. Finding their murderer is one of the many mysteries in this mystery-thriller show. I did not start the show expecting a full-blown, well-written Romeo-Juliet arc but it becomes apparent mid-way that the frequent comparison of the couple with Romeo and Juliet is much more than just a dialogue. It is a well-cooked, intentional foreboding. One of the main characters says, “Being in love makes you feel big. In this tiny town, a baby love story. But it’s as though they are Romeo and Juliet. Is Regina and Shanmugan's feud that big? Kids these days are overly dramatic.” Perhaps even the bard would have never thought human sacrifice a probable cause of Romeo-Juliet’s tragic death. 

Laal Ishq

 Exactly five years ago in the harsh winters of my hometown, a fourteen-year-old Sarthak faced heartbreak for the very first time. It was a heavy feeling, as if I was freefalling down a bottomless pit. The only way out that I could think of was crying a river. So I cried and cried and cried. Presently I am not someone who finds crying a solution to his problems. It’s not something to be proud of. Abstinence from tears isn’t a healthy coping mechanism. So I got inside the heavy razai of year-end and cried until you could see remnants of a fleeting stream on my cheeks. I was not aware of my true feelings but they were so obvious and obnoxious that they hurt me like a toxin that was my own. A toxin that I thought was too abnormal to be accepted for what it was, love. A forbidden love. I remember being all dressed up to have a nice time on Christmas 2016 only to get stood up and have nothing to explain to my mother. This is exactly why I am always skeptical of older friends. They hurt you and don’t even realize that they did. The December of 2016 still haunts me to this day. I get goosebumps thinking about how much I went through as a mere kid. All my self-respect crumbled and tore into pieces it took me all my teenage to gather. 

It was more of a cycle. I let the same set of people hurt me to the core of my existence all over again. 

Since then, year-ends have been strange for me. They have always been chaotic where my disorientation competed with the burning cold. December 2017 had me preparing for my 10th boards. December 2018 had me trying to figure my head out. December 2019 had me all hollow and full of cinematic rock bottom. December 2020 had me posting this snap.

December 2021 has me trying to compress my feelings into this 400-word blog. 

ḳhabar-e-tahayyur-e-ishq (revelation of the wonder of love)

I, for one, absolutely believe that two persons loving each other is a thing as rare as it’s beautiful. It’s very rare and beautiful for two people to get married after having dated each other for 9 long years starting in school. Every relationship seems infinite at its peak. I have known a plethora of relationships that hoped to culminate in marriage crumble under the tough test called high school. I have seen people date for all years of high school only to see each other as just friends in college. It’s a strange thing, something you don’t know whether to feel good or bad about. Bad because you hoped to attend the wedding of two of your closest friends who also happen to be high school sweethearts. Good because maybe we change a lot through and throughout high school and it’s not unusual to feel totally different about your past decisions. But the thing about everything is that life goes on and if you are someone like me who struggles with getting over people and things, past-dweller is how you’d describe yourself. At least, that’s how I describe myself.

Falling head over heels with the wrong people has cost me a lot in my life. It has forced me into some of the most miserable situations of my life. It has stripped me of my sanity and self-esteem. Clearly that ‘rare’ and hence, ethereal event is the story of most residents of this planet. Lata, in Mira Nair’s polarizing adaptation of Vikram Seth’s magnum opus A Suitable Boy quotes Clough’s two kinds of human attraction to describe her dilemma, one that merely excites, unsettles and make you uneasy and the other, the calmer, less frantic one which helps you to grow where you are already growing. I haven’t read Clough but it’s easily something that has stayed with me from that show. I have experienced the former kind over and over again. I feel it’s time we all experience the latter.

Even if two people do fall in something otherworldly and love each other, how often do we see a toxic, unhealthy version of them? Very often do we see people being in relationships with problematic power dynamics. Is it really worth it if it drifts away from the normalcy of your life? Are normal relationships effortless or do they require tonnes of confrontation and fixing?

Of bullies and bullying

Trigger warning: mention of bullying, sexual assault

Growing up as a privileged, sheltered kid in small-town India, my teenage years were pretty easy, so to speak. I went to arguably the best school in my city, which as a matter of fact, is catholic. It was tough adjusting and settling but I did it all and before I knew, I had fit in very well. Just after a year, I became a member of the school parliament through popular support and was anything but a loner. I wouldn’t say I was the coolest kid in my class. In fact, I tried to tag along with “cooler” people for the whole of my 8th and 9th grade. I thought a few of my seniors were much cooler than I was and in order to be as “cool” as them, I traded my self-esteem and individuality for fleeting moments of limelight. It was terrible but I am also glad it happened for it absorbed the rose-tint from my glasses and by 10th grade, I had realized that coolness is subjective and all the people I considered cool were barely cool. What most people and I thought made them cool should have in fact made them problematic but alas, our mutual and universal conditioning! 

If you’ve ever watched a guilty pleasure American teen rom-com, you will be familiar with the concept of bullying which most desi parents would consider “necessary” in order for their kids to become strong and ready for life’s challenges. I wonder how throwing your kid down in a deep ditch is a necessary step to make their bones and body stronger. I wonder how reduced self-confidence makes one ready for the challenges that life throws at them. 

Like every other Indian kid, I was bullied too. I am not the most muscular guy and it has taken me a lot to be this long-haired dude who talks about feminism and woke politics and the absurdity of gender on Instagram and in real life. I would be lying if I said that the bullying that was inflicted upon me didn’t affect me. I was once brutally trolled and bullied for posting a "feminine" picture on Instagram. Apparently, girls thought that it was inferior or demeaning for me to have femininity, something they possessed much more than me. I wonder if it’s internalized misogyny or just the irresistible need to mock and oppress any kind of individuality. It was horrible having to see the same people being advocates against bullying, body-shaming and gender stereotypes in a clearly hypocritical Instagram reel made for some hypocritical college club page that was being shared widely. So, on account of not being the meek 14-year-old kid I was anymore, I called them out. That reel should not have existed. It’s like a rapist speaking on a panel about women’s safety, insensitive and fundamentally heinous.

I am a firm believer that people evolve over time and it’s important to allow them to rectify their mistakes. But, in a very predictable way, the bullies made themselves the victims and wasted much more time in justifying their actions than it would take to simply apologize. Apparently, it turns out that all the “once a bully, always a bully” people have their reasons. 

Tujhse Naraz Nahin Zindagi

These are bleak and meek times. As the nation fights a deadly second wave of COVID-19, people struggle to regain the normalcy associated with the first wave. The healthcare infrastructure is collapsing while the supreme leader is busy pretending to work 18 hours a day with no results. The virus has infiltrated our houses and I barely know of a house unaffected by it. 

Personally speaking, I haven’t been doing well lately. Just after my uncle recovered from COVID, my mom and grandmother fell prey to it. It’s tough. It has been anything but easy. We have been wearing masks at home for almost a month now. I go to the loo with a mask on. That’s how horrific the situation is. A minor sneeze or slight discomfort in my body makes me scared. To combat these miserable circumstances, I ordered garlic bread the other day which gave me diarrhoea. I have to go to a washroom on the opposite side of my huge house which takes about 15 minutes so in case I plan to go back to sleep at 7AM, I am most likely to fail. Also, we are privileged people. We have enough resources needed to fight the virus but it has broken our morale. I am tired of ranting to my best friend, Gangaur and there is nothing I crave more than to roam freely in my house without a mask on. To add to the problems, my other best friend and I had a fight and now we are no longer on talking terms. My friend circle is torn apart and I miss those zoom calls and playing fuck, marry, kill until 3 in the morning. I miss being able to say that I follow the precautions just by wearing a mask as a mere accessory. Though what I miss the most is my mom’s cooking, which says a lot about the role we have made women play for 2000 oppressive, patriarchal years. A homemaker’s sickness devoids a home of its very spine and yet all we do is romanticize and glorify their pain.

Thattathin Marayathu (transl. Beneath the Shadow of the Veil)

 

I was trying to stalk two seniors from school a few minutes ago when I stumbled upon a picture of my ex with one of them, dating back to 2017. Note that we never really dated but I was so close to them (not them to me though) that a mere ghosting incident felt like a brutal break-up. I was devastated beyond the capability of my catharsis. I remember crying like a baby deep in hunger, the Diwali lights blazing both my incessant tears and the eyes producing them. It was a cinematic muse, an inspiration for art and words that I am typing at the moment. I was a 15-year-old 10th grader in 2017 and they were a college freshman. It’s a sight to behold how different we all look from our high school years. I have grown and highlighted my hair. They have shed their cuteness and replaced it with a very protective, rugged look. I don’t think they are aware of my hair. I don’t know if they know that I look nothing like Jon Snow from Game Of Thrones, as they predicted. I wonder if they know that my love for Malayalam actors and cinema has only grown. I want to ask them if they borrowed their personality from a Muslim Malayalam actor. I want to rave about Parvathy and Kumbalangi Nights and Joji with them. I want to talk about that amazing dance reel by two Malayali medicos on Rasputin that now has almost 10M views. Or do I? I don’t think I possess an answer. I don’t want to go to a person who just can’t reciprocate my feelings no matter how hard they try. I deserve better. I don’t want to be that underconfident, miserable and perplexed person I used to be some months back. 

A personality trait, good or bad being subjective, is that I can’t hold grudges. I am always likely to forgive people no matter how greatly they hurt me. I have found, over years, that this helps me to move on. Vengeance is never a healthy emotion. How do you get over a person when you’re constantly wanting to hurt them back? I believe in forgiving people so that they still respect me as a person and vice-versa. 

I still have no idea how I would react if I come across them in the city bazaar or in a millennial café. Would they recognize me? I sometimes try to find them in random strangers I never come across more than once. Are they so magnificent? I know them enough to know that they are long asleep right now.

In the pursuit of progressive men

Nothing much has been going on in my life. I live a boring life where a mere hangout with my male friends lands me into a deep existential crisis about my morals and beliefs as a feminist. Indian teenage boys thrive on rape jokes, constant objectification of women, porn riddled with the male gaze, homophobia, misogyny and transphobia. Sometimes I feel sad and sorry for the women associated with these young men for they’re constantly stripped of their agency and individuality just because men fail to know any better. Younger brothers being chaperones to their elder sisters is one such example we see every day but fail to evaluate. I have identified as a feminist for as long as I can recall but in a household devoid of daughters, it wasn’t until I turned 18 that I started realizing the deep-rooted patriarchy, casual sexism and misogyny which have always existed. And now I can’t help but notice this in everything, everywhere. Men romanticizing the toil and misery of their mothers instead of contributing in the housework. Men wanting homely wives. Men justifying dowry but hating on that one stereotypical gold-digger from some Punjabi music video. Men slut-shaming Swara Bhaskar for her masturbation scene in Veere Di Wedding as if they don’t joke about their penises and their emissions most of the time. Men calling effeminate men “chakka” or “meetha” as if they don’t sexualize lesbians to death. It’s a sick experience hanging out with guys and I really hope these men don’t give trauma to the women they date. Just men being men and women having to change themselves because of them. 

Where are all the progressive men?