For those in the corner seats

illustration/Ravi Jadhav

I had a friend who seemed to be always living in the future. Every conversation of hers was plotting and planning for a magical future, in which everything worked to her advantage - she would have money, love and leisure, in the right degree and perfect combination. Needless to say, she was happy only for the few minutes she planned that future. Since those few minutes of joy were so pure, it stands to reason she sought them out often and there was no conversation with questions or uncertainty. The rest of her time, she spent feeling resentful that the universe had not cooperated with her plans, how awful people were, how mediocre whole cities were. As a permanent caveat queen, I naturally annoyed her, quickly becoming the enemy, when I brought up past miscalculations or apparent problems in the plan. My bad, actually.

Doesn't listening to some political conversations nowadays feel like this? During demonetisation, anything - from complaints about having to stand in line to puzzlement about alleged GPS chip in the notes - would result in either snarling mansplaining from some friends and denial from others. To listen to them, I alone in the world could not get hold of cash. All complaints were hysteria born from cynicism of the impending utopia.

Now we don't bring up stories of how demonetisation failed, when these friends ask for change for '2,000; just like I don't bring up my fantasising friend's pehle se hi dodgy lag raha tha ex-boyfriends. This awkward equation does get destabilised by reports about what's doing well (propaganda) and what's not (projects). But in this ginger diplomatic silence, there was a touch of acceptance, a potential for engagement. Not saying ‘I told you so' is helpful, when someone is reassessing their choices and opinions. Anyway, this is all behind us now, because we are back to the future. The PM has just announced in an address to the nation, mera matlab hai speech someplace, that a pilot project has just been completed. The real thing will happen now. Oh, vague and fantastic utopia, you player of ambiguity, hello again.

Well, can one really feel surprised by fantastical thinking, given that many liberal assertions of peace and progress have been uttered with a literal-minded emphasis on ‘reason' and ‘reality', such that realism has become equated with being intelligent, avant-garde and, well, just better? You need only look at film reviews to confirm this bias. It seems with the polarisation of politics in our society, the polarisation of ‘fact' versus ‘feeling', ‘fake news' versus ‘real news' has become an inevitability, and neither side relates to much else but each other.

Reality has often been a debatable character, but for the participants of this drama, reality is now only the ‘other' side - it is the only thing they react to. In order to be someone, perpetuate a fantasy of yourself - as patriotic or liberal, or nationalist or detached - you obsessively seek out an opposite to be right against. It is a camera looking at a camera, and calling it a movie. Somewhere between these cameras, in the corner seats may be, an audience (people who pay attention, usually). Exhausted with these ricocheting camera confrontations, they are probably ignoring the movie
and making out, yaniki, making love, not war.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com

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