When it comes to finding either a film or a series to watch, I can be extremely undecided. I feel pressured by the fact that I have a limited bandwidth. I want, often, to be moved by something, and so, find, I don’t enjoy frivolous viewing, unless I’m specifically in the mood for it. I’ve also evolved into that peculiarly critical person that has possibly too many demands to make of television. I’m careful not to watch something that might totally destabilise me. Even though, for example, I was mightily impressed by the first season of The Handmaid’s Tale, I didn’t find it in me to immerse myself in the second. I was unsure how not to receive so much of what was being screened as rape pornography. Or, for instance, Michaela Coela’s critically acclaimed series whose title I May Destroy You I have taken as a threat. I am afraid of being triggered to a point of difficult return. I experienced that anxiety, recently, of being simultaneously drawn to the narrative style and characterisation of an excellent show and yet repelled by the core plot when I watched Broadchurch. I had the weirdest dreams and I often woke up to this heaviness inside me. Fundamentally, I’m unable to watch anything passively.

Sometimes it takes me so long to decide on what I want to watch I forget why I was browsing to begin with. This happens even on long flights. I browse the TV menu, scour the trailers for possible red flags, look closely at the cast, themes, etc until 45 minutes to one hour later I finally settle upon something. I’ve just understood this to be part of my process as a viewer and spectator. And often enough I am rewarded for my cautious foresight. What I finally choose pleases me endlessly, and thanks to the air pressure within the cabin, I experience the film in a deeply emotional way and it tends to form how I frame the journey I am either about to have or from which I am returning. When I saw Roman Holiday, for example, on a flight back from Italy sometime last year, after having had to leave my partner behind to return to my then life in Delhi, I found myself drawn to the film’s central dilemma, of Audrey Hepburn’s character having to navigate what I see now as a false choice between love and duty. I began, myself, to wonder about what it meant for that predicament to be framed within female subjectivity, especially since it is generally men who grandly make sacrifices for the sake of nation state, like in the Ramayana. I still return, time and again, to the debate I have with myself over the film.