#11: Getting out of a rut (part 2)
I've been doing more than just eating dosas and drinking beer
Issue 11 | 27th May, 2023 | 10 minutes reading time
Heyo, Multituders. Welcome to the end of May and to the realisation that somehow, half the year is already almost over. *Cue an existential crisis*.
Last month, I wrote about my attempts to break out of the Sisyphus-ean life I’d been leading in Bangalore. I’d been stuck in a rut doing the same things at the same places in a city that offered so much more.
This rut extended beyond the coffee, dosas, and beer I consumed, to the things I watched and read. Though I spent more time than ever buried in books and on the internet, I rarely journeyed beyond my genres of comfort - nerdy non-fiction writing and reruns of TV comedies from 2005-2015.
2023 has been one long experiment in changing this by rewilding my imagination and attention. Rewilding is, in essence, experiencing the world beyond comfort zones and curated algorithms, letting new thoughts and ideas take root. It’s what I’ve been doing for the last five months, and what I want to talk about today.
Reading
For the better part of the last decade, I’ve been a devout non-fiction reader. I became this creature in response to insecurities that plagued me when I started college. Throughout my school life, I cared little for knowledge in any way, shape or form. My abysmal grades and my mother’s despair during parent-teacher meetings are a testament to that.
When my curiosity miraculously awoke at the age of 18, I felt like I was playing catch-up with everyone else. I gravitated towards non-fiction, cramming as much information about the world into my head as possible. Sometimes, this was genuinely exciting. Books like Patient HM by Luke Dittrich read like a thriller while also teaching me about the history of mental illness and its treatment. Travel writing by Bill Bryson and Rory Stewart took me across the world, telling eclectic tales of these places and the people that inhabited them. Maybe You Should Talk To Someone weaved together stories of grief, hope and humanity as beautifully as any novel I’d read. Why venture elsewhere?
Why? Because sadly not all non-fiction I consumed was as engaging. Some books were outright boring. Others, like An Immense World by Ed Yong, were filled to the brim with captivating trivia but also incredibly dense. My restless desire to be the world’s biggest nerd was leaving me fatigued.
I was reading not because I enjoyed it, but because I was afraid of becoming intellectually inept. And because I wasn’t enjoying it, I started ignoring it. (If only this kept me from buying books, which I shamelessly continued to). I chose to doomscroll through Twitter instead of taking a book out of my bag on the metro and re-watch episodes of Modern Family instead of reading before bed.
I needed a reminder of the joy that came from turning page after page after page. In search of a gripping plot, I turned to a murder mystery - The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino. Holy cow it was everything I wanted and more. I was sucked into its un-put-down-able brilliance and blown away by the plot twists throughout. I cursed whatever part of me had haughtily decided that a good plot wasn’t worthy of my time. I couldn’t imagine being able to craft something as intricate and engaging as this - anyone who could do this deserved all my admiration.
That book set me off on quite the journey. I suddenly didn’t feel intimidated by the 500+ pages of Pachinko, surrendering my attention to the lives of Korean immigrants living a subdued life in a racist, early 20th century Japan. I followed that up by giving into John Green’s YouTube wholesomeness and finally reading The Fault in Our Stars. I also dabbled with short fiction, reading Birthday Stories edited by Murakami (spoiler alert, it was quite underwhelming). And then, for the first time in forever, I was genuinely laughing out loud at the hilarity of The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. If you’re someone who enjoyed Forrest Gump, go pick this up ASAP.
All of this gave me the momentum I needed to pick up Embassytown, a book I’d excitedly bought in 2015 and promptly set aside for fear of its dense sci-fi world-building. The fear was well-founded, as it turns out, but also worth it. The book centres around the lives of humans on a faraway planet ruled by spider-like creatures called the Ariekei. The Ariekei and humans share an odd symbiotic relationship; the Ariekei use the humans as figures of speech to expand their linguistic worldview (yes, it is exactly as confusing a premise as it sounds), and in exchange allow the humans to live on a corner of their planet. The book chronicles the near-collapse of this delicate arrangement and the battle to save it. The effort it took to read it was worth it, but I’m still going to maintain a respectful distance from sci-fi for a while.
Poetry’s been even further out of my comfort zone than fiction for as long as I’ve been reading. Barring a few poems by Wilfred Owens (Dulce et Decorum Est in particular) and Aubade by Philip Larkin, works of verse have generally felt inaccessible to a cultural heathen like me.
John Green being a messiah of hope in the video above inspired me to give poetry another chance. In that video, he invoked Hope is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson to console a stranger in a difficult place. Those 58 seconds made me feel more for the written verse than a decade of English literature classes did.
So I began a short-lived poem-a-day experiment, where I crowdsourced recommendations on Twitter. In those two weeks, I came across some poems like Learning by Jorge Luis Borges that I appreciated for their clarity. Others, like The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, were a rude reminder of the despair I felt in my literature classes. Prufrock went waaaay over my head and, besides one line that read “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” had little that I could understand or relate to.
Scaffolding by Seamus Heaney floored me through a combination of simplicity and serendipity. An ode to the strength of relationships built with care, the poem came to me at a moment when I feared the loss of one of my closest friendships. In ten simple lines, it articulated my anxieties and hopes better than I could ever dream of. While reading it, I kind of understood why people made such a fuss about poetry in the first place.
Watching
I can’t explain why, but sitting down to watch a movie feels hard. I’ve destroyed my patience through YouTube binges and was unable to sit and watch something for two hours at a stretch. Earlier, if I really wanted to watch something, I’d scroll through trailers for half an hour and then re-watch something I’d seen 20 times over, like The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. But, in this year of novelty, YouTube rabbit holes and re-watching old stuff wouldn’t cut it.
As with poetry, Twitter became a useful source of recommendations. Someone posted a still from Fleishman is in Trouble and, because of my undying fondness for Jesse Eisenberg, I started watching it immediately. Another stranger-turned-acquaintance introduced me to the obscure niche of Italian animated content, where I watched an angsty teen be guided through life by an Armadillo-conscience in Tear Along the Dotted Line.
I felt like a true cinema junkie when I borrowed a friend’s Mubi subscription to watch Aftersun, a movie that I loved but was also kind of confused by (the subtle messaging of those strobe-lit disco scenes was completely lost on me)? In The Mood For Love left me feeling much the same - I was mesmerised by the visuals and soundtrack but couldn’t find it in me to love it the way most do. More accessible for my basic brain were Monica O My Darling and Pathaan, which I watched on successive days.
My greatest discovery in these cinematic escapades has been the chemistry between Colin Farrell and Brendon Gleeson. They played much the same characters in The Banshees of Insherin and In Bruges, two absurd and dark comedies directed by Martin McDonagh. In In Bruges, Farrell’s a young, happy-go-lucky, simpleton who screws up an assassination and is then protected by the wiser, older and more cultured Gleeson. In Banshees, Farrell’s a young, happy-go-lucky, simpleton who’s abandoned by the wiser, older, more cultured Gleeson. Both movies are an homage to friendship, care, and loss in their own ways. Bruges showed what happens when Gleeson sees hope for Farrell and will go to any length to nurture that hope. Banshees depicts the tragedy of care morphing into hostility and the inability to cope with loss - Rahul Desai’s essay on the movie and the death of a friend capture this beautifully. (Spoiler ahead) I’m not sure whether there’s a message in them both ending in bloodshed, but their brilliance stands regardless.
The absolute highlight of these adventures, though, has been Chhello Show, a Gujarati movie that’s ironically about a cinema-obsessed child called Samay. Samay does everything in his power to feed his obsession, from under-the-table agreements with the projectionist to building a jugaad projector to screen stolen reels. No amount of threats from his father or jail time in a juvenile home shake his devotion. He spreads this cine-mania to other children in the village, co-opting them in his creative (if occasionally illegal) antics. All of this is tied together by visuals and music that make it a feel-good masterpiece. If you’re looking for something to enjoy this weekend, look no further.
This quest for novelty hasn’t been easy. It’s a perpetual tug-of-war in my head between the comfort of the known and the promise of the unknown. Till this year, comfort had always won hands down. I remember my therapist telling me that this could partly be a symptom of my anxiety - a brain in a perpetual state of stress seeks familiarity.
Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that it’s taken till now for me to attempt this. Life feels settled, both inside and outside my head, so the unknown has felt more inviting.
I can’t pretend to have achieved any sense of enlightenment through this, but I have found joy. Whether it’s been through beer, dosas, books, or movies, I’ve come to appreciate all that awaits beyond my comfort zone. For now, that’s good enough.
That about does it for this issue, which is also a little special because it’s a mini-milestone - six months of regular writing! After my inconsistency over the last two years, it’s been nice to have some sort of rhythm. Thanks for sticking around for the journey.
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Till next time,
Shantanu