(it’s sincerely so frickin’ wonderful to write those words)

I’ve been bringing a few things back to life lately.

Some writing I hadn’t looked at in years. A CV I hadn’t updated for yonks. A few story ideas I had quietly filed under perhaps not. My LinkedIn page. This ol’ newsletter. 😄

“Bringing back to life” increasingly feels like the wrong description. Those things weren’t dead. But my confidence was. Not dead, but perhaps knocked down.

All those things were just waiting for me to get back up.

They say in my Buddhist practice

Big fan of such sayings.

So, here I am, standing before you, getting back to building - bleeding hands, splinters in my skin, tools vibrating like tuning forks.

But there’s one truth I have to admit - I cannot write Yet Untitled anymore, because I’m no longer the same person I was when started writing Yet Untitled.

But here’s the thing. I’m going to write sumthin’ else 😁💪🏼.

Not got a name yet, but I can feel its shape.

Don’t know exactly what it’ll be, but I know pretty much what it won’t be.

Something’s cooking.

Please keep some space on your plate.

Lots of love

V

I must have been around 7 or 8 years old.

My grandfather - who liked modern things - brought home a portable radio set that you could wear as a headset from his travels abroad. In 1986, in the small town of Panipat, Haryana - this thing totally blew our pre-economic-liberalisation Indian minds.

I was a curious kid and not someone who usually made trouble. But this time, my curious, exploring hands made trouble for me by ripping off the headset’s fragile sponge stuck around the earpiece.

For awhile, I stood there - not knowing what to do! Some strange logic told me that I should rip off the other sponge as well, maybe to preserve balance in a situation that was already going from bad to worse 🙈.

But the worse was yet to come - an alarm was blaring inside my mind saying: Its broken! It’s broken! Unfortunately, I had recently developed a strange way of dealing with things that were broken. My elder brother had played a part in arriving at this method - we had been tossing all my broken toys over the backyard wall, into a small construction site that lay on the other side.

Yes, this instinct was wrong on many levels😱.

But, at 7 - in 1987 - I had not yet developed the wherewithal to think beyond the blaring alarm in my brain.

All I wanted was for it to stop.

Tossing the perfectly functioning, radio receiving wonder-machine from the Americas that my grandfather had been waiting to flaunt on his morning walks over our backyard wall was the climax I chosen for this unfortunate narrative.

Memory has mercifully not retained a clear record of the consequences I faced thereafter!

Dearest YUer,

I have drafted this instalment about four times before arriving at the version I wanted to share.

It’s about not writing Yet Untitled. After FOUR YEARS of publishing more or less every week, I’ve been absent from your inboxes for four weeks.

For a part of this time, I was surprised. Where did the seemingly indomitable instinct that hit me sometime on Thursday - to etch out the shape of some ghostly meaning that my spidey sense had caught on to - disappear? It was as if my trusty gym buddy for four years had stood me up, without telling me the name of the other gym he had joined.

Another part of these four weeks were spent in despair. Was this development temporary? Or would I never feel this particular solace of regular and constant creation again for the foreseeable future?

The answers to these questions eluded me. I leaned heavily on my original pact with myself - one that had earlier - counterintuitively - kept me writing:

Given everything that this weekly ritual has done for me, I just could not justify stopping. What of all the insight I’ve gleaned about my relationship with my father, about my children, about the tooth fairy, for god’s sake? What of the invaluable sense of victory to have published on a Sunday night when I was sure I was going to cash in on my self-awarded get-out-of-jail-free card? What of the times when I started thinking that I was writing about X and ended up realising that I had been writing about Y all along, where Y was an intrinsic insight into my identity? What of the bonds I have build with readers I have never met? What of it?

All kinds of dire questions and conclusions swarmed my head in the past weeks.

One topical one that you may find amusing: Has AI robbed me of my edge? Was I experiencing the fallout that all AI naysayers had predicted? Were they gloating now, watching me as my abilities degenerated into resembling a bowl of soggy corn flakes?

I thought that writing an instalment about all this would help me unpack such feelings. Yeah, why not? I set out to write, but I’d end up stopping in the face of an inkling that this instalment may be my very final one. Ever. Contemplating the dark seas that lay beyond stopping set off a blaring alarm inside my head.

For whatever it’s worth, I thought that this was interesting as I edged closer and closer to the metaphorical wall in my metaphorical back-yard.

It was only when I thought of the headphone story from 1987 and the context of not writing YU together that the narrative changed.

Something did happen in the past few weeks that stopped me from writing YU. What was it? I don’t know, man… like, a hundred reasons; and I didn’t find any of them worth writing about. But there did come a point when I felt like feeling what I felt when I wrote regularly again. But, I’ll be honest - I was petrified that I might be broken and I may never feel that feeling again.

Consumed by the blaring internal alarm that rang out indicating that the part of me that wrote YU (read: “part of me that wrote anything”) may be broken, the only thing I could think was tossing the broken thing over the wall, confirming that seven-year-old-self’s logic still lived and operated within me at 46.

The storm has passed, and light explodes from behind the clouds.

The headphone radio would have still worked without its sponges. Yet Untitled can still exist and keep doing what it does after any kind of hiatus.

So, here I am, back in your inbox like a government service notice warning you against “fraudsters” who would want to hold you under “digital arrest”.

Yet Untitled shall go on, dearest Yet Untitler. It isn’t broken…

…but four years on the road show on the rubber of its wheels. Perhaps a little re-treading, perhaps a little tuning. But all for the sake of the loooonnnngggg haul.

I love you too much to let you go.

Thanks, always, for listening.

Xx

V

PS. Didjya miss me? Feel free to…

Leave a comment

And…

Also,

I went to bed the other night anxious about something. It wasn’t anything serious or, heaven forbid, existential, but it was putting my head in a loop of circular thinking that kept my brain going round and round in 360 directions, none of which pointed towards sleep.

In the bargain, I had a little conversation with myself.

I’m wary of the incremental cycle of anxiety that can be set off when the minutes falling away from the night compound with the worry of not utilising them for rest. Hence, the conversation was about how I might avoiding this hazard altogether.

Here’s what I did:

Desperate to find my way back to sleep, I talked myself into a kind of hypnosis and imagined that I was falling. In that liminal state, this was a pleasant, floating sensation through which I could occupy my mind and keep it from losing itself in whirlpools of abstract anxiety.

Those thoughts kept coming to me, thoughts that alluded back to the killer sleep-smashing loop. I wondered what to do with these thoughts till I realised that the liminal world had its own physics and rules that offered many possibilities beyond the ordinary. Deciding to put them to use…

I drew some enjoyment from this video-game approach to negotiating insomniac thoughts. There I was - ensnaring them in prisms while falling happily through ether. Sleep had became a kind of playground.

I embraced this sleep-as-playground idea further. Liminally, I thought about playgrounds. I thought about sand. Suddenly, I was struck with the idea that where there is sand, there might be buried treasure. Already, my writer’s brain was seeing (and coveting) treasures of all kinds - stuff that it could not manifest with such ease when awake:

Hmmm. In a parallel universe, I would worry about myself 🤭.

But, in the liminal world, this was all legit and the stuff of every-liminal-day.

Here, I was also under no pressure to deconstruct what I saw. And to top it all off, as I kept falling while on this treasure-hunt taking place on a vertical plane, I found the liminality of my experience thickening like honey - I was drifting towards sleep.

My initial priority of getting to where I wanted - sleep - was shifting. Instead of achieving the prize of sleep, I wanted to remaining in this playground of treasures - falling, floating, playing.

More than play, I wanted to forage. To collect.

Thankfully the liminal world is free of judgment😆. I can see what I see and not think it cheesy, derivative or below my dignity to be in awe of. I felt sure there was a reason for everything I saw.

But, I was getting greedy. I wanted to remember what I saw in this vertical, liminal playground. Perhaps I thought - if I remember, then I can carry it back with me to the waking world and impress my readers by using what I saw, turning it into art 🥸.

But the moment I got greedy and coveted what I saw in the liminal playground, the honey started thinning again and sleep suddenly shifted away a hundred paces further.

It was as if the liminal world was screaming at me - covet, and yer owt!

Here in this liminal space between sleep and waking, suddenly I became aware of the things I would leave behind every time I awoke. I tried, and made an effort, to remember the things I saw. I became the star-baby from 2001: A Space Odyssey, seeing the mysteries of the universe as if for the first time.

My greed turned to desperation. Even if I could not bring back thoughts and artefacts from the liminal world, could I at least bring back this feeling of discovery, of awe? Was that too much to ask?

I don’t know at what point sleep took me.

It snatched me away from everything - the fall, the sights, the feeling of hanging between…life and death, really. Did I think Lucifer-like thoughts as I fell away from the grace of that comforting, removed world I didn’t want to leave?

God knows!

Outside the liminal world, the words were just shadows of what I saw.

Transmitting faintly through my memory, the other world signalled to me knowingly. In broken morse code it let me know:

Thanks for listening!

Lots of love

V

PS. This is new👇🏼 Wanna try?

Or just be old-fashioned:

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And…

Aur…

Long ago, when I entered college, it was fashionable to listen to Pink Floyd. In the hallways of the notorious Mukarji West hostel inside New Delhi’s St. Stephen’s College, your street cred pretty much depended on the stuff you listened to, so you learned to rattle off the names of the usual suspects - Tom Petty, Mr. Dylan; all those hall-of-fame sort of people - to sound cool when asked.

I did this too.

What I found was that even while pretending to like these then-alien cultural artefacts from way-out-west, I invariably started developing a personal relationship with some of them.

Take Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’, for instance. When one of my closest friends attempted suicide - this song was where I took my incomprehension and tried to decipher what had happened. The song spoke to me. Whatever the bands’ intent may have been when they wrote the song, I read my own meaning into it. At the very least, it invited me to step into my friend’s head, that seemed to be full of so much stuff different from the contents of my own.

That was nearly twenty five years ago. I didn’t listen to ‘Comfortably Numb’ much in the interim, but I always associated it with feelings of incomprehension, sadness and helplessness.

Now, suddenly, this song has resurfaced before me in a very different form. The other day, a friend in London sent across this re-rendering of the ‘Comfortably Numb’ by rapper and heavy-metal artist Ice T and his band Body Count.

I was very taken by how topical his re-rendering is, with the middle-east currently blowing up and all. The old song about disconnection and emotional numbness stands reappropriated as a social commentry responding to the zeitgeist. What I find interesting is that I can still register incomprehension, sadness and helplessness when I read between the lines.

I’ve been thinking about the health of the world all week, and while thinking about it, Body Count’s version of ‘Comfortably Numb’ has been playing on repeat in my head. There’s an urgency in Ice T’s singing that I’m hearing everywhere. I heard it loudest the trailer to Asif Kapadia’s documentary - ‘2073’. It’s an urgency that desperately trying to get us to see where we’re headed and to change course before the Titanic hits the iceberg (Kapadia’s documentary upturns this metaphor on its head though; you’ll see what I mean when you watch the trailer).

This whole week I found myself thinking about shifting meanings, especially in the realm of music that’s meant something to me. I thought of Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer’, which first came to my attention via Cameron Crow’s coming-of-age film ‘Almost Famous’.

In ‘Almost Famous’ there’s a (the?) scene where a song serves as the trigger to bring a bunch of road-weary rock ‘n rollers and their posse back on the same page after weeks of fighting, arguments and heartbreak. If you’ve seen the film, I’ll bet you remember it well.

‘Almost Famous’ was set in the 70s, well before, well, everything that seems to have been domino-ing to collapse since 9/11. Lovingly documenting key moments of growing up, ‘Almost Famous’s’ use of Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer’ was a promise of joy, of how music could bring us back to ourselves from anything.

Today, in 2024 - the same song is being used to chilling effect in the latest instalment of the John Wick saga. Check out the trailer of ‘Ballerina’, especially around the 1:00 timestamp.

Ballerina
You must've seen her
In the audi-to-ri-um...

It’s hard to believe it’s the same song, and I’m still reeling from how anyone could pull this new film’s violent, dystopian tones from the song that made me look forward to my 20s with shining eyes full of hope and promise!

Good art and its many meanings

I’l step aside from apocalypse and dystopia for a moment and speak about…well, art. How fertile is good art! I arrived at this thought as I stuck with Elton John for a bit in the course of this instalment.

While searching for other Elton John covers on YouTube, here are two noteworthy versions of his song ‘Rocket Man’ that I found":

Hearing the 14 year old Sara James’ version really moved me because I remember being moved by ‘Rocketman’ - its simultaneous melancholy and jubilation - at a similar age. Like Goscinny and Uderzo’s ‘Asterix’ - this is a song I have appreciated in different ways at different aged. But I also find that with every cover version of it I hear, I get further affected in new, different way.

I consider - songs like ‘Rocketman’ seem to take on the times, the personas and the emotions of the both the people who are singing and those listening to it. I found this best illustrated in this documentary’s depiction of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ and how its journey over 40 years has draw out newer meanings and hidden layers to the song. The film’s on Apple TV+ and I highly recommend it.

“About a Boy and His Dog”

Farrukh Dhondy once told me that Steven Spielberg’s E.T the Extra Terrestrial, was nothing but a film about ‘a boy and his dog’.

Today, I’m remembering Farrukh’s utterance again in the light of shifting meanings as I age, as the world ages. I like this idea that if you peel enough, boil enough, a piece of art is left simmering as a reduction in the pan, pared down to an essence that can be surprising.

Then again, maybe this is the wrong metaphor. Maybe it’s us changing and not the art, with art being the mirror reflecting us back at ourselves. Maybe, if I can ever get Ananya and Aahana to watch E.T, they’ll tell me that it’s not about a boy and his dog but about kids being denied phones by adults (they’re 10, and sometimes I think this is all they think about!)

I believe in the principle of art mirroring our times, but I do that we don’t recognise this enough as a two way street. I feel that our dystopian narratives are over-amplified, I feel our fears currently have louder voices than our hopes in the culture we consume. AND I DISAGREE.

Miyazaki to the rescue

Counter-narrative-of-hope types like myself find ourselves pretty lonely in the current dystopian landscape of cultural production. To be honest, I found myself sliding towards despair while writing this instalment, but thankfully, I had been catching up on NHK’s four-art documentary on the legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki over the past few days and the man himself stepped in to counter my downslide.

In part 3 of the series, there’s a bit around 20:15, when Miyazaki reflects - stating:

“These days fantasy films face difficult times. When people are in high spirits and not aware that the end is near, that’s a good time to make fantasy films. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind for instance (laughs). The question is, what should we make in bad times?”

Towards the end of the same segment, the documentary shares how Miyazaki and his son Goro were in the thick of film production when the 2011 Tohuku earthquake struck, provoking Miyazaki to reflect even harder on his question. Studio Ghibli was forced to cease production for reasons of safety. Everyone seemed to agree that it was a good idea…

…except Miyazaki.

Like a headmaster chiding petulant students, he’s filmed bluntly telling his production staff that work will carry on. Later at a press conference, he shares the impetus behind his position, with which his son Goro concurs:

“All we can do at a time like this is to keep making movies”

Of course, Goro doesn’t mean making just any movie. He means - “All we can do at a time like this is to keep making Miyazaki movies that always reaffirm our faith in the world.”

This, I agree with.

When India was at the grip of crackdowns against anti-CAA and anti-NRC protests, my friend Ankur Tiwari responded with this amazing song that amplified the need for kinship, for opposing oppression and for unity against divisive forces.

At a time when huge and dangerous rifts are widening between Israel, the Palestinian state and now Iran, my friend Bharatbala shared this video in which he reaffirmed his own commitment to the ideals of peace as postulated by Gandhi.

There’s a project I’m working on that’s burdened with lots of obstacles between where we’re at and its realisation. But, the core theme of the project is peace and humanism. In the face of every dystopian narrative I encounter, I will pour every bit of myself into its realisation.

This is all I can do in a time like this. Thank you, Mr. Miyazaki.

And thank you for listening, dear Yet Untitler.

I wish you peace.

Lots of love

V

PS. Is there a counter-narrative you have that stands against the times; your battle cry for something better? What is it? I want to know.

Leave a comment

PPS. I’ll leave you with Jacob Collier’s new, warm hug to the world, which he gives from a very cold place!

How are you?

I realise that this is a loaded question for our times, but I also feel very lucky that I can ask it, ask you the question in this manner. It’s not a great time to feel alone.

But we aren’t. And that’s the truth.

The poem below came to me as a flash. It came as one, whole sentence - with a feeling behind it was very real. I reached out and captured it like a photographing fireworks in the sky. Then I stared at it a bit, scrutinising, wondering whether it was worth sharing with you.

But then it became quite clear that I must.

I thought - having each other and benefitting from it is contingent on our being real with one another. Otherwise we would be alone in our silos of pretence while being in each other’s company.

I thought - wouldn’t that be a tragedy?

Sometimes before sleeping - my daughters share their very real feeling with me as I lie next to them in bed. Those moments before sleep are like a truth serum for them. Often, I think - “I’ve felt those things before” and sometimes, because of that, I can give them comfort. But because they tell me those things, I am always comforted; by the thought that I’ve felt those things and lived past them; as shall they.

So, in that spirit, here’s me keeping it real with you. I do it because I know that it can only amount to good.

Lots of love to you, dearest Yet Untitler.

04.04.Sat

For a moment, I forgot the war.
Suddenly life lay open before me.
Wondered why I was stuck a second before, 
Then forgot that too as I got busy. 
 
Later someone asked me, “How’s work?”
And it felt as if someone had died.
I could do nothing about it. I watched 
As my disappointment replied.

Still later, when I sat at lunch and chewed,
Something got stuck at the back of my mouth.
A feeling ensnared me, a strange kind of mood…
My tongue failed to dislodge it, and soon it all went south.

Then at night, my dreams felt a bit off…
Like the taste of just-gone-rancid milk in tea.
The dreams were all made of the usual stuff,
But something off-camera radiated unusual-osity.

In the morning, I remembered the war.
I spied it through shadows lingering in my head. 
There it was, the red-handed culprit, behind
My disappointment. My sadness. My dread.

But there was something in this remembering:
This reason - no longer diffused.
The empty space in its absence
Was what had left me confused.

I remembered the war,
But remembered other things thereon.
I remembered the war, and remembered
That I had to: I had to go on. 

Thanks, always for listening.

PS. Click below or reply if you need to get real. I’m here and listening.

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Hugs,

V

Sleep has been eluding me for some days. Perhaps something exciting is imminent and I’m feeling it in my bones, that are vibrating from within and keep me awake.

Nonetheless…

…when I can’t sleep, I lean on a technique I’ve been using for many years - where I try to steer myself back to handshaking distance of my subconscious. Today, I thought I’d elaborate that impulse into a poem for you.

I wish you rest, dearest YUer. Let us wake refreshed so that we may fight on the side of hope tomorrow, and again the day.

Float. Float
Over that dream that 
Hangs below you like mist.
Touch. Reach
Out to that memory of 
When you first were first swaddled and kissed.
Drift. Drift 
Down the river that 
Pulls you gently to the deep. 
Rest, Friend, 
Fall slowly to a kingdom
Where may you reign in sleep. 

Sleep, forget.
Forget that you ever
Plummeted from your rest.
Ease, release
The spring that sits coiled, 
Wound tightly within your chest.
Dream. Dream
Of waking where you  
Arise and love anew. 
Collapse. Disintegrate 
Into galaxies that like
The indomitable sun renew. 

Awaken. Reform.
Let your eyes see me smiling once again
Float. Float 
To where I stand  
And wait for you, my friend.
My friend, my dear,
I swallow all your fear.
I burn it in my furnace 
While you’re nowhere near. 
And when it is molten
And it's light glows golden
I forge a sword for you to bear.

Dream of things that 
Up till now were invisible .
Sleep soundly, 
And wake up invincible. 

Thanks, always, for listening.

Lots of love

V

PS: What do you do when sleep eludes you?

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Thought I’d publish a bit early today to give you all a short Sunday read.

The poem below evolved first on my notebook page and then over here, at this serai that you and I frequent.

I hope you enjoy it.

‘More Than Ordinary’

I thought about faith
When from sleep did I awaken.
Did faith fool me
When I said “I’m not shaken”?
Will faith come to me
If my heart lies broken?
I thought all this and more,
Waiting for faith to have spoken.

I thought:
What of the times when courage recedes?
When fire has burned the last of the trees?
What will remain when everything leaves?

I’m in a barren land. 
Desolate, I fall to my knees.
There’s nothing to grasp
As far as my eye can see.
Where are your promises, faith?
I need an answer. Please.

No wind.
Yet something flutters in the breeze.

Did I see something?
Or was it all imaginary?
In seeing
Did I become more than ordinary?

—

Did faith come to me
Or did I to faith awaken?
Did faith fool me
When I said “I am not shaken”?
Was it faith that mended me
When my heart lay broken?
Faith’s voice answers clearly
From the other side of my questions.

Thanks, always, for listening.

Hit me up with any thoughts this may have evoked.

Leave a comment

Lots of love,

V

I’m reading the Mahabharata - a very unique version by M.T. Vasudevan Nair - told from the perspective of the second Pandava: Bhima.

I’ve not been able to put this book down! M.T. has managed to tell the story of demigods while keeping them as human as myself - talk about the superhuman without making me suspend my belief.

It feels like I’m truly understanding the subtleties of this monumental epic - with its machinations of war, class and betrayal - for the very first time, even though I’ve been engaging with the story since I was seven years old, when it was serialised for Doordarshan.

What’s going on? Am I finally ‘mature’? At 46, have I finally come of age?

But wait!

This has happened before! In my 20s, I directed a play based on the Mahabharata at Cambridge. It was written by the late Kiran Nagarkar - a play called ‘Bedtime Story’ which transcended its source material to become a commentary on contemporary geo-politics - with Krishna urging Arjuna to “push the nuclear button” et al.

The play was talked about. I was complimented for my treatment of the material as a director. We went on to take the play to the Edinburgh fringe.

By the end of this experience, I remember feeling that I had ‘got’ the Mahabharata. Perhaps in the same way how I felt - at the time - that I had ‘got’ the Romantics, the Metaphysical poets, maybe even Shakespeare! 🙄

I was 23.

I’m about to turn 46 now and I’m remembering how invincible 23 felt, how sure I was about the things that I (thought I) knew.

Interestingly, right after that 23rd year followed a spell when I felt like I knew nothing! I came back to India after finishing with Cambridge and embarked on becoming a filmmaker with no real plan. None of my big books came to my aid, neither did any of my authors.

All those hours in libraries - I wondered what they stood for 🧐 - especially when I was asked to stand in the hot Delhi sun doing crowd-control on a film shoot about a kilometre away from where the camera was filming the stars.

Taking a step back - I don’t think my education failed me in the end! But I don’t think that’s what this instalment is about.

A few decades ago, I had a revelation about the Asterix and Tintin comics I used to read (and have read to me) as a child.

I had always suspected that there was more to them when my mum read them aloud to me. I used to hear her chuckle at jokes that I didn’t get; nod knowingly about some allusion to history that didn’t make sense to me.

Then, in my 20s, after reading a bit of history myself, developing a sense of humour beyond the slapstick thrill of my childhood and travelling the world a little, I remember feeling, at some point, that I finally ‘got’ my Asterix and Tintin.

But I was wrong…

As a parent, I got a chance to re-read the whole Asterix and Tintin collections again with my twins during the pandemic.

There were some nice surprises in store for me ☺️.

There were still jokes in there I had missed in my 20s, puns that had remained inaccessible to me all this time (the kids would notice me chuckling as I read to them and would demand an explanation - likely how I must have demanded one from my mum when she read them to me!).

Interestingly, the same thing happened with me and the Mahabharata during the pandemic. A friend told me about a fantastic children’s author I had not heard of before and recommended her retelling of the epic for younger readers.

Writing for kids did not stop Arshia Sattar from calling a spade a spade in her rendition. She called out traditionally recognised heroes for their unheroic behaviour. Till-then forever-dastardly villains were given deserved commendations for their fair deeds. It was sheer pleasure, ploughing through this well known epic with her iconoclasm clearing a way beyond its well-trodden paths.

During the dark times of the pandemic, it was delight to learn that life still had so much to reveal to me.

I’ve been on a bit of a roller coaster recently…

…one that looped the loop between knowing and not knowing.

A few months ago - when I was putting together a pilot episode for a drama series I really believe in (I’ve engaged with the material for years now), I thought I knew everything. That’s how it felt when I sent the pilot out to the OTTs to consider for a commission. I felt like I had finally ‘got’ it - this whole thing about putting together something that’ll get made.

Then when the rejections started coming in, I felt like I knew nothing again.

This time around feeling like I knew nothing hit me hard, and I had to - in plain sight -retreat into a deep unseen place to fight through it. These words that you are reading now are part of my fight - the sparks that flew and singed the cave’s walls as I clashed with the swirling demons that circled between knowing and not knowing.

I was inside that cave for a couple of days. The hurricane withdrew. When it grew cold, I lit a fire. Once the fire was lit, I danced around it. As I danced, I thought less and less about the knowing as desirable or undesirable, and less about not knowing as hell.

When I emerged from the cave, I marvelled at how little I know.

It’s fascinating.

There’s a lot that I saw in a new light. I chanced upon a micro-drama online, one that is being spoken about a lot. I watched it, and found it fascinating.

I never thought that I could find a micro drama interesting! But there it was, in a form that I could not take my eyes off.

I never suspected that my dreams could adapt to these changing times.

I never knew that despite the chaos of the age, I could keep going.

It’s amazing how little I know.

With you as my witness, dearest Yet Untitler, I promise to remember and work with this knowledge better than I have till now.

Thanks, always, for listening!

Lots of love,

V

PS. It’s always amazing to hear from you.

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There’s a medical drama series I’m pitching that I think ‘captures the Zeitgeist’ of our times. It’s about the ongoing penetration of AI into healthcare. Everything I’ve written about is actually happening around me. I’m not making this shit up.

I’m making my rounds before commissioning executives with this Zeitgeist thingie as the arrowhead of my pitch - all with great conviction and belief.

But…

This word: Zeitgeist.

What does this even mean??

(For those of you who are flummoxed about the context of the above clip, read here. Psst: it has something to do with the utterance “What does it MEAN?”)

Thinking about it, it’s like trying to say that I - some kind of explorer-pioneer - have gone to the South Pole and captured a rare penguin which I will now display to you in the attempt to convey the current state of affairs in the Antarctic.

The truth is, the moment I’ve caged the penguin, I’ve changed it. It exists in a different reality from that moment on and will evolve differently in its cage, with us ogling at it from the outside.

Perhaps that very theatre is the zeitgeist I mean: us humans, making theatre - spectacle - of everything in order to understand what may be happening right in front of us in the first place.

I found myself turning this thought over and over in my head last week. Like a fluffy omelette.

Penguins are fluffy, endangered things. But sometimes even endangered things need to be captured, tagged and let off again after being studied in order to understand how to help them survive.

Penguins are fluffy plodding things. What of leopards? Leopards are fast, ferocious things. In order to study a leopard up close, I would need to corner it, or make it stationary first.

In the light of this reflection, I found myself thinking about Our Times, looking at them undulate from up high like an eagle watching a rabbit move on a grassy knoll below. Like the rabbit (and the leopard), Our Times are quick-footed. The eagle will make a rabbit stationary by putting its talons around it. The only way I’m going to make Out Times stationary is by putting a frame around them.

I feel it’s my job as a storyteller to make some kind of sense of our fast-moving times. It makes me reach for my framing bow and keep my quiver at hand.

Camera, notebook and Yet Untitled are frame-creating arrows in my quiver.

They isolate what’s happening in front of me, freeze the scene in sharp relief. These now well-worn arrows help me put a frame around the flashing fractals swirling inside my head, so I can see them - hurricane-like - frozen in a sea of clouds when viewed from an orbiting astronaut’s port-hole.

I have a Frame for you

What undulates before my eyes is a source of continuing fascination. What undulates behind them is just as fascinating to me, if not more.

It reminds me of looking at audio visualisations from the late 90s and early 2000s when apps like Windows Media Player had just started to blow our THC soaked minds.

Surely this theatre before me and within me should not be mine alone!

But when I turn to look for it, in a flash it is gone; unless…

…I stalk it down and trap it in a frame.

For whatever it’s worth.

Inspired by the words of the Indomitable Beyoncé -

“If you like it you’d better put a frame on it” 😆💃

Inspired by the words of Henri Cartier Bresson:

“The photographer is a kind of hunter, but instead of killing, he collects.”

Sometimes I wonder, though - am I just collecting trophies? Stalking Meaning, and then parading it? Peddling it like I do before those commissioning executives in the hope they give me a pot of money to make my medical drama?

Is this even dignified?

Every once in a while, YU finds itself at such crossroads, where I ask -

“Why are we here, you and I?”

What’s my incessant framing got that’s of any value to you, dearest Yet Untitler?

Is it trapping and bottling anything at all, or it’s just an installation piece entitled “snapshots of whirling sinkholes in newsletter writer’s mind”?

You tell me…

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An absurd theatre is unfolding on our phone and TV screens, one that froze me before I could freeze it with one of my frames. I had to fight before I could find and feel my quiver.

It takes some courage, this hunt. Courage is the fruit I pluck from the trees as I gather my resolve and pursue my prey.

I’m going to keep hunting.

You’ll keep seeing me, carrying the bounty of my hunt on my shoulders as I bring it to your doorstep each week.

You’re still here, and so am I. For this, I’m grateful.

I’m not going to stop. Neither here, nor at the doorstep of those executives.

I’ll keep making sense of the theatre in front of and behind by eyes.

What does it even mean??

I’ll leave you with a short video in which I find the universe in my teacup. (Whisper - What does it MEAN??)

Emoji curated by Ananya:

^_^ —> o_o ?_?

Thanks for listening,

Lots of love, and a prayer for peace.

V

and

Saturday came and went, and this ol’ newsletter-er had not even started on this here missive.

From the beginning, I’ve had a clear pact with myself - I will not publish if I choose not to, and if this happens I will think nothing of it. I instilled this rule as a safety valve, because deadlines are familiars in my world, and I’m a familiar to their perils and pitfalls.

But this safety valve has often been the sole reason I’ve managed to publish week after week. It’s as if it’s allowed me to have enough command over my faculties to squeeze through a closing door at the last moment - like Luke Skywalker as he infiltrates the Death Star: cheekily, boldly, lightsaber blazing, believing in The Force.

There’s another thought that has served me at such times before batshit not-publishing stress overcomes me:

The field must lie fallow.

An aunt had told me this once when I was very anxious about not knowing what to do with myself once my education was done. It stayed me - this realization that I could give myself permission to not advance; to not create.

I leaned on this thought a lot all week. It allowed me to remain in a healthy relationship with this enterprise, but I could tell that my internal negotiation was charged, as if it could explode at any moment. If things tended to drift in the direction of anxiety, I reminded myself:

The field must lie fallow.

So, I kept being ok with not writing all week. Until, of course, I wrote ^_^

What follows is small, but it was a sheer pleasure to write. I drew from it a bucket full of solace that I’m going to keep for a rainy day. I have a feeling that I dug in a place with deep, rich aquifers. Feel free to draw any number of buckets for yourself if you need to!

The Field Must Lie Fallow

The field must lie fallow,
With memories of its soaring swallows
Baked into its sleeping earth.
The field lies asleep, but
Deep within its subterranean marrow
Churn dreams of its rebirth.
The field dreams of tomorrow:
Jocund spring bounding over winter’s sorrow;
But for now, the field lies inert.
Impregnated by dreams
The field’s heart is anything but hollow.
In it lie old roots and seeds.
Fallow though the field may seem,
It will shake itself, it will wake and quake tomorrow;
The field will sleep for as long as it needs.

Thanks always for listening,

Lots of love

V

PS. It’s been awhile since I heard from you. How have you been?

Leave a comment

*Emoji curated by Ananya Nath 😁.

This is new - I’m reissuing an old post for the first time, but why the hell not? Especially because it’s in context. I responding in the same way to the same situation I experienced exactly a year ago.

Call it Karma.

It felt appropriate to reissue the installment that came as a response to that said situation - in this case a haircut. I guess I won’t mention that I’m way behind on deadlines and reissuing an old installment is not only a good thing for my newly initiated Yet Untitlers, but also a little breathing room for your friendly neighborhood installment-maker here!

I hope you enjoy it.

Here goes. Again

Dearest Yet Untitler

I got a haircut after six months. My hair had grown long and heavy. I was looking forward to the joy of letting some of that hair go, shape things up and reveal the me-I-wanted-to-see that had got somewhat obscured in my mass of tress. But this time, my friend and stylist went medieval on my hair after seeing its state (all stretched out and dry) and gave me a haircut that I wasn’t prepared for.

When I looked at myself in the aftermath, shit went down! I looked nothing like how I had wanted myself to look. An alarm went off in the deep recesses of brain. Over the next day, I was thrown into a surprising sadness that I hadn’t expected. To her credit, my stylist friend had done what she felt was best for my hair and scalp, and I trusted and continue to trust her expertise. But I did feel shitty and was suddenly curious about how and why a dang haircut could pull me down and under in the way that it did.

It isn’t psychological rocket science to ascertain the basis of my emotional response, and of course, to my stylist friend’s defence, it wasn’t the haircut alone that triggered me. Having just returned from a fantastic vacation to the demands of the new year, I felt like I had suddenly lost my best and most reliable friend - me - in the face of all that lay ahead. While this may sound dramatic, all these associated feelings were real and had a sharp edge. It didn’t help that my wife and I were arguing at the time.

Everything compounded and in the midst of it all, I felt more than a little anchorless. In the face of such feelings, I recalled this memory:

She broke her throne, she cut her hair

Many years ago, a friend of mine with wonderful hair (photo above) not only just cut but shaved it all off, deliberately. I was very surprised and we were close enough for me to ask directly - why in the world?

She told me about her strong feelings around how hair was associated with a traditional sense of beauty and how she was tired of being only seen through the lens of beauty: a thing that she found reductive…

…hence.

I don’t think I was mature enough then to appreciate the maturity of her impulse, but her decision to challenge the association of self with external appearance comes back to me with full-blown import now.

Who do we have when we are alone?

What creatures we are, I marvel. How easy it is for us to feel alone and abandoned. How difficult it is for us to not find solace in our own selves. How much our solace is dependent on things that can change easily and without warning!

All this said, meta as I may be in vocalising it, I’m also subject to the such vulnerability. It takes me back to what I wrote about in the last instalment (a year ago) - about the punch. How easily my sense of sure footing was destabilised by an unexpected right hook to the face (a big thanks to all who called or wrote in with concern, I was really and genuinely moved!).

I think of the thousands displaced by wildfires in the city of angels. If losing a desired appearance via a haircut can do this to me, what would losing everything - clothes, journals, mementos, keepsakes, photographs, hard drives, cars - have done to LA’s stricken citizens?

Haircuts, clothes, journals, mementos, keepsakes, photographs, hard drives, cars. All building blocks in the Edifice of the Self.

Us and the Edifice of the Self

Didn’t ol’ Leonard Cohen sing about someone losing their hair in ‘Hallelujah’?

“Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah.”

Breaking thrones and cutting hair; that’s what we’re talking about, aren’t we? Throne of what kingdom? Hair from beneath what crown? By now it’s quite clear to me that I’m a regent very attached to ruling over my perceived territory. Take it away from me, you’ll draw from my lips a painful ‘Hallelujah’.

But ‘Hallelujah’ by definition is a sacred utterance of joy. Even if uttered with pain, to my mind it still alludes to a sense of rejoicing. Perhaps Cohen’s song, then, is about transformation, the transformative effect of love…of passion? If you speak of breaking and cutting, both words imply something not immediately reversible. Cohen’s transformation is not a taking apart, but a shattering. If so, shattering of what?

There’s an irony operating in Cohen’s song, from the fact that love and passion - commonly seen as desirable principles - are doing the breaking and the cutting. I find it interesting that punches and haircuts-that-take-a-wrong-turn - things that I would regard as undesirable - ironically also break and cut towards the same outcome I think ol’ Leonard is singing about. If you ask me, I think he’s singing about shattering any attachment to how we like to see ourselves, allowing us to become something more, whether in the face of love, hate or the happenstance of fate.

Dearest Yet Untitler, I feel lucky to kick of the year with what feels like an important insight. My haircut is growing on me, quite literally. My stylist is still my friend, remains very dear to me and we continue to learn from one another, haircuts being a very small part of our relationship. My nose and my upper lip have healed since the box on the beach, as has my shaken spirt that carries forward no darkness from the experience.

At 44 (soon to be 45 [now 46!]) the prospect of having my throne broken and my hair cut feels exciting and hopeful. But I gotta tell you, I may not have been able to write the last sentence with conviction had it not been for this instalment and the last.

Thank you always for listening and helping me make sense of the world and to see its hammers and scissors as tools that build rather than destroy.

Lots of love

V

P.S: Please drop me a line. I always love to hear from you.

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I’m a bit puzzled about how this instalment came about. I was thinking a little broadly about Music, and suddenly I thought about my CD collection, which has been lying at the back of a drawer for some years now, ever since the last working CD player I possessed breathed its last!

I think the thought came about while wrangling playlists on my phone’s music app. I have a top-tier subscription to Apple’s music stream, but the most-played playlists now are the ones my kids create for themselves, always at the top of the “recently played” section.

My old playlists, which at one time used to resemble my physical music collection, are mostly left untouched.

I wondered why…

When I thought about my music collection I considered how it used be a refuge for me - a homecoming. When I thought about how this scenario had changed, I felt - even if only for a moment - homeless.

There was a certain kind of music I would listen to evoke many kinds of moods. I had a very good handle on the varieties of responses I would have to almost all my music.

It was chemistry, and I knew how to mix the ingredients - my music and the moments I lived through - with a certain expertise. Playing a song at any given moment was a very particular kind of feeling. I was deeply sensitised to it and curious about what certain music would evoke in different scenarios. It was seeking, experiential enterprise, powered by curiosity.

Some particular, musically evoked feelings remembered:

Walking through the door of my room in Cambridge after a day of lectures, I remember - palpably - what it felt like to stick Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks into my little CD player and let it play. There was a way in which Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne played out in that small college room - it is the memory of a feeling, with the winter pressing against the window, with the thought of my family being far away, with hunger rising in my belly and the vague thought of eggs lying in the fridge.

I did not carry my music around with me in those days. I would encounter bits of it in other places - on the radio, at a friend’s place, in a bar, in someone’s car - but that would only create the longing to come back home to My Music. Thoughts like, “When I get home I’m going to stick that whole album on,” were comforting thoughts.

My Music was a choice that was available to me. Technically, that same music, and that same choice, is still available to me. You could say - in a way - that it’s more available to me than ever before. Whole albums of music that I coveted but never managed to get my hands on can now be accessed by me anytime and anywhere. Like this one:

I wonder, as I write this, why this still feels like a regression.

First of all — the thing is not a thing anymore. Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising isn’t a CD that I bought in Edinburgh after having read an interview with The Boss in Uncut magazine and having anticipated the album’s release. Of course I could stream it easily right now. But it would be one of infinite possibilities I could engage with, all doled out in mundane similitude in a listed that pops up for me when I type The Boss’s name into a search bar.

Twenty years ago, I may have thought this was utopia. Perhaps it is.

But it’s broken, I feel.

A cold and a very bro-ken Hallelujah…

What’s broken, then?

I think the answer is - me.

I have broken away from My Music. In that severance, a few shards have broken away from my identity.

I confess - some of this has been deliberate. There have been times when I have tried to dissociate myself from things that represented aspects of my identity, mostly because I felt I was done with those parts of myself. In retrospect, I feel I may have been a bit hasty!

I have thrown away journals, books, clothes, and whatnot that no longer conformed to a certain sense of self. I thought that I was freeing myself when doing this discarding. In some ways it was freeing, but over the longer arc, I’ve always felt a tinge of regret.

Did I throw out the baby with the bathwater?

What did I lose?

With My Music, a certain choice on a certain day would evoke a certain sentiment, a certain result, a certain feeling.

Certain.

‘Certain’ is ground to walk on.

‘Certain’ is Flagstones laid over Chaos.

With Music no longer being Mine in the way that it used to be, it feels like this Certainty has eroded. Things seems to have scattered, lost substance, become thinner.

I still listen to a lot of music, but I don’t necessarily make such a concerted choice about what I want to listen to. Usually, I turn on the radio and make a choice of listening to channels - groove or jazz or hip-hop or electronica or rock ’n’ roll or pop. It is a choice, but not a very nuanced one. I’m still broadly chasing a mood or feeling but this choice is so vague when held against how specifically I used to choose. It feels like a cop out!

(This is what I listen to when I want to ‘focus’ 🫢 👉)

Have I forgotten how Tom Petty or Sarah McLachlan pushed my buttons in a particular way in the late 90s and early 2000s? Or have I become alienated from the person who could have his buttons pushed by that music? Did my embarrassment make me throw the baby out with the bathwater?

I suspect this is the case. I did go through a phase when I wanted to quickly graduate to a new era of my existence, maybe a little like my daughters’ overnight abandonment of some of their favourite stuffed toys (You listening, Ananya? Does the name KitKin ring a bell 🧸??)

The moves I made to expedite this process had its costs.

(What a song this was..!)

Cross connections

Once in a while, a radio station will throw up a song that connects me to myself - one of my old selves - in unexpected ways. Perhaps a song I’ve never heard before evokes feelings I once felt when listening to particular songs from My Music. This one did it for me recently -

What does one make of this?

Perhaps it reveals to me that I come from somewhere, that I have a history.

The world I live in feels like a world that is at odds with its own history, one that is charging forward with seemingly no connection with its past.

A sense of history - a sense of where I come from - I need it for the present to make sense. Without that, I’m constantly redefining myself based on the new and find the ground very quickly slipping away from under my feet.

Without the present’s alchemy with who I have been, the present feels sans magic. The self feels unhinged. Rudderless. Flagstone-less.

My Music lives in me just as certainly as yours lives in you. But it is our curse to forget, dearest Yet Untitler.

Let us pledge to each other to never, ever, ever forget the Music that that made us leap up and live.

I will make this effort anew. Will you?

Thanks always, for listening!

Lots of love,

V

PS. Will you tell me about one song from your past that you played to yourself for a very particular kind of effect it consistently had on you? What was the song? Did its effect change over time? Tell me, I want to know!

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Our family lost a very dear member a few days ago. His passing led to immense collective grief that was expressed by all of us in myriad ways.

The one who passed faced death with amazing bravery. That too had an effect on us. The flow of our lives was redirected to deal with his passing. All this made me meditate on death and write what is to follow.

I realise that death elicits various responses from us all and I send sincere love and prayers to those of you who are still hurting from losing someone close. I remember how that felt when I lost my father, something that I have written about at length in this newsletter.

In the face of Death, all I could do was engage with the fact that Death had happened; that Death had taken away. And here I was, carrying on while dealing with Death’s fallout.

As I walked past Death, I tried to listen closely. The rhythm of my footsteps was telling me something. A certain music was rising up my feet and leaving little phrases on the tip of my tongue.

This has happened before:

Last week, I gathered as many of those phrases from the tip of my tongue as I could and strung them together. I now place this harvest before you, with the hope that it is of some value.

If it is, you’ll tell me, won’t you?

Death’s Unseen Feathers

Our life, tossed up by some unknown hand, 
With all its pebbles and all its sand,
Falls back into its box and arranges itself
Around the magnetic lines that Death expels.

Everything arranges itself around this black hole, 
Sitting at the center of life’s every room,
Rising up and down, in and out of view. 
Influencing us tidal beings like a black moon. 

Cavernous, unending. Nothing yet something.
Formless, yet, exerting immense power
On our every action, our every decision. 
We navigate to the beacon on Death’s watch-tower. 

At the edge of every scheme 
Stands Death with his spanner.
Deaths with his hammer 
Is a certainty smasher.
He chuckles and throws
His inconvenient spanner
Into your business
Lacking all tact,
Lacking all manners.

Yes, Death is inconvenience, 
Throwing cold water on your plans. 
Death is a crack
Stealthily creeping up the dam
Till its tumultuous waters rush through, 
Submerging homes, uprooting trees,
Causing havoc for homeless bees. 
Death is the siren calling us to itself.
Death draws us out with its temple bells.
We’re all converging on death from afar,
Walking towards Death’s resplendent star. 

Yet, Do we forget? 
As we fear and we fret 
About the Thing we move towards:
The fact that Death 
Is, in fact, propelling us?
Unhinging us from comfort,
Shaking our stasis up?
Making sons into fathers and
Providers of daughters.
This pain. Is it not life itself?
This movement, is it not life itself?  
Thinking of life without this motion 
Makes it feel like a cold place, frozen.

This movement - is it not Time itself? 

Look with me at Death anew: 
At Death as a giver of Time;
Not anymore as 
The elephant in the room,
But as the reason for the flower’s bloom 
The reason that the flower,
Thinking of its final hour,
Bears seeds within its womb. 

Time is a generous gift 
For Death to give, I think.
Why did Death even consider it?
Sitting where he is
At the edge of the brink - 
To delay its purpose?
To allow us this Breath?
So puzzling, this choice of Death’s.

As trees pass me on the road outside
I contemplate Death’s gift:
This Time, this ride - 
In Death-afforded breath I move.
I love, I live, I take and I give.
I remain puzzled at Death’s choice,
But I save my breath,
I save my voice.
I gaze at Death
Perched upon Life’s tree.
I see new feathers 
Never before seen.

Thanks, always, for listening.

Lots of love

V

PS. What has Ol’ Bird Death told you when you’ve gazed at him sitting in a nearby tree? In what form did he appear to you? Was it useful?Tell me everything. I want to know!

Leave a comment

Also,

And,

Let me tell you about the past forty years:
I’ve been wanting to share this for awhile here.
Turns out,
In these years: 
I have held speed dear. 
The way of the till-recent so-far me
Was the way of the roaring Ferrari. 
It was the quickness of the squirrel
As it scurried up a tree.
I thumbs-upped darting dolphins
I yawned at lumbering whales,
I wanted to be a speedboat…
Till I realised that I’d rather sail!

Let me tell you about the last one year: 
At some point I was filled with fear!
The gas started to run out. 
Filling me with every sort of doubt. 
I thought:
“Now’s the time to go faster.
How would I finish, already on fumes?”
I imagined I was flirting with disaster,
Dreaming dreams of death and tombs.

This last year…
I imposed a new slowness,
Mostly to take stock.
Perhaps to run fast again,
Pull up my sagging socks. 
But I was loathing,
Secretly loathing - 
How slowly I passed the trees. 
Inside me a wind was blowing
How I hated just drifting along on the breeze.

It was then that I heard the buzzing of the bees. 

My slowness allowed me 
To see the studied unhurriedness
Of the little bee.
A slow drone between flower to flower
A movement built on the awesome power 
Of something invisible. 

The beat of those wings... 
Tiny, fragile, little things. 

The bee's dance:
Things like this changed my stance
I’m in a different place.
Yes, there’s a goal, but there is no race,  
The bee and I both chose 'slow'.
Watching her,
This Runner 
Learned to Flow.

There’s no song and singer more appropriate👆🏼to provide a soundtrack to this installment, dearest YUer.

I’ll keep things brief.

I have a strained relationship with ‘slow’.

An anecdote explains some part of it:

It was in Math class - perhaps it was grade 7 or 8 - I was asked to solve a problem on the board. It was one of those frozen-in-time scenarios when the only movement I perceived were the dust mites moving, bee-like, in the streams of sunlight coming in through the window.

The solution to the math problem was eluding me. Everyone was watching me. The front-benchers were likely pitying me. Then the teacher said it, the single syllable leaving his lips like a black bubble that floated to me and popped right below my nose.

“Slow,” he pronounced. It was a judgment. An assessment. It became a label - dipped in acid and cut with shame.

Another anecdote

A more recent one.

I trained for the 10K run at the Tata Mumbai Marathon for the greater part of January. ChatGPT was my coach 🤖. After studying my patterns and bio-numbers for a bit - it advised me to run slow. Real slow.

With every run, I’d give ChatGPT my numbers - the stats recorded by my smartwatch, my sleep score and whatever else I thought would be useful. Quite consistently, ChatGPT kept telling me to slow down and applauded me when I did it, as if I had won a race!

I found it all very interesting.

I hadn’t run a 10K for two years. I don’t know why. Mostly, I had replaced running - something which has remained of paramount importance to me since my 20s - with other activities. I think, somehow, I was convinced that I was fighting a losing battle with myself that was laid bare by the act of running - that I was getting slower with every passing year and there was nothing I could do about it.

Running had become the site of this conflict inside me, and lately, this fight had become stressful. Then came ChatGPT, turning the whole thing on its head.

As a result, not only did I end up enjoying each day of my training, I also deeply enjoyed the marathon event. I realised that it has been about 4 years or more since I ran ten kilometers continuously without stopping. I had taken to running hard in bursts, then walking a bit to bring my heart rate down before running again. It had become something oppressive, in which I was simply refusing to give in to ‘slow’.

I think I broke that cycle of shame with my ChatGPT-coached run. This 10K was likely my most controlled, most honest and most enjoyable one. I proudly say it was was really slow, but I ran true to myself and honestly challenged my limitations without trying to create the illusion of speed just because I was afraid of its absence.

The run gave me many things. I felt alive and awake enough after it to see the morning baptize Mumbai, giving its grime a gilded veneer.

Seems that I’m not the only one who’s writing about the merits of slowness. Here’s my friend and Substacker Sana Ally talking about similar themes with her usual poignance.

Meandering Musings & Much Love

On mountains, magic and the mundane.

I turned forty last year…

Read more

9 months ago · 21 likes · 13 comments · Sana Ally

I also realised that I’ve been on this exploration of my relationship with slowness for longer than I think:

This lesson has come to me late. But I don’t mind. I’ve written about my respect for late-blooming and late-bloomers extensively:

I think I’ll stop here. But before I go:

What’s sort of feeling does ‘slowness’ evoke for you? With what meaning do you regard it?

Is that a good question? I hope so. I’m too tired from my slow run to think more. Must sleep. But tell me. I. Want. To. Know.

Leave a comment

Thank you, always, for listening.

Lots of love

V

The short lived Mumbai winter is at its balmy peak and I’m savouring it. This fleeting season ends all too quickly like a good book. But savour it, I must.

Like I’m savouring these two good books:

They are:

Arundhati Roy’s memoir ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’ and Claire Dederer’s ‘Monsters: What Do We Do with Great Art by Bad People?’ Both books are exploding fireworks in my mind. The ideas and language in both are so delicious that I simply don’t want them to end.

But end they will. Hence, I’m savouring.

I savoured my end of year holiday, with a clear awareness that it was going to end, more and more so with each passing day.

Now, I’m savouring the short lull before work really kicks it. It’s like getting to the office a few hours before everyone else arrives. I have the place to myself. I can work at my own pace. I can enjoy my coffee at my desk with nobody watching me.

Writing the last paragraph made me think of my friend and fellow Substacker Cali Bird who’s also plodding gently into her January, taking one day at a time:

Gentle Creative

Do You Need A Quiet January?

Read more

8 months ago · 11 likes · Cali Bird

I’m savouring being able to run again.

After a long time, the timing’s worked out: no cold, no fatigue, no travel, a marathon to train for and clear training days ahead of me.

I’m savouring watching Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind in spurts. I’m not getting a chance to finish it in one siting, but I’ve not been able to keep myself away. I keep coming back - I’m reconciled to watching this gem of a film in snippets.

Savouring every fragment.

Savouring seems to be what my pre-teens call a vibe. I took notice of its plenitude in my life at present and felt that it must be pickled into these here pages.

I’m savouring driving an electric vehicle, savouring the fact that I’m leaving no emissions in my wake.

I’m savouring my girls’ last year before becoming teenagers. The dew of their morning still sparkles on their skin.

I’m savouring being able to savour all these things.

I’m writing this down because it’s worth remembering, worth reminding myself - that in the end, everything is fleeting and that, if savouring’s my vibe, then I’m doing it right.

That’s that.

Thank you, always, for listening!

Lots of love

V

PS. Want to tell me what you’re savouring at this present moment. A thepla? A good song? The inimitable haptics of a brass doorknob?

Tell me! I want to know!

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I was at the Kochi Biennale some days ago, looking at a lot of art. This was on holiday.

The art I looked at told me that there’s more to perceive in everything I see.

Also, I was reflecting on my non-holiday life while being out and about in Fort Kochi, walking among some amazing trees!

As I was walking among Fort Kochi’s trees, I found myself thinking about language. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been in some very intense conversations lately - where I’ve felt that language has been failing me.

This sense of failing language is in the context of my ongoing creative collaborations - mostly around my work in screenplays for films and series. I’m no stranger to this feeling - where it seems that everything I end up saying doesn’t make sense to my creative collaborators - which makes me feels as if it isn’t making sense to me!

I hold my creative collaborators very dear because they are one of the richest sources of learning in my life. But these collaborations can be quite difficult. Sometimes they have felt like captaining the Titanic on trans-atlantic voyage where every member of the crew speaks different languages!

This is an occupational hazard in a necessary endeavour. Creative collaborations are necessary - they allow for more than one amalgam of experience to enrich the work. In our common endeavour as creative collaborators, we’re all striving towards a meaning that every member of the collective will endorse.

But how we do this, when the words we use hold different meanings for each of us?

While on my first ever film project, director Deepa Mehta - my then boss - told me, her neophyte DA - that her actors get activated by certain words, and she had learned to use those words to send her actors in the directions she needed them to go.

It worked! I saw it.

I personally watched those words get her the same response again and again when she used them on her actors (the indomitable Manorama always toned down Shakespearean melodrama when Deepa asked her to say the same line ‘sincerely’) but even then, I conjectured that the same action word would likely extract a different response when used on a different actor.

Walking under the canopies of Fort Kochi trees, I thought about how the same words are interpreted differently by each of us. Over the past weeks, words have been flying between me and my creative collaborators, each of them passing through the filter of our individual experience and interpretive engines - like a game of Chinese whispers on steroids.

Meanings get lost. Things feel wrong.

Sometimes, when a version of our work emerges while in process (i.e. while still playing Chinese Whispers), it’s like an embryo half-formed. Each of us collaborators are this embryo’s parents. We all feel the pain when it doesn’t carry the traits we desire it to. We all feel the pain we don’t see our child walking.

I left the trees of Kochi behind and came to a surprisingly chilly Abu Dhabi some days ago. We had some unique experiences there. At the immersive TeamLabs, Abu Dhabi my daughters and I walked through fantastic rooms of light, treading through ankle high water.

On the water floated embryo-like orbs, aglow with their own light. They looked like half-formed things, and the room was full of them. It felt as if all those half-formed things were being celebrated.

I acted on a spontaneous urge to hug one of them. My girls followed suit and I took a picture.

That womb-like room; the abundance of so much emerging life - I feel this scene reflected how life approaches creation. While creating, I believe life works in functions of abundance, following the course of continuous, relentless creating until it gets things right.

I’m reminded of these lines from Tagore’s poem that we used to recite at our school assemblies:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Where tireless striving
stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit…
…into that heaven of freedom,
my father,
let my country awake.

Tireless striving

As I walked under the beautiful trees of Kochi, I felt tired, but I also wanted to keep walking. How else would I see the next tree if I stopped?

As my collaborators and I strive to find our common language, fatigue is one of our occupational hazards; but we must keep going. How else will one of the embryos we hug become a life that shines so bright that it makes us proud?

I’ll leave you with that for now, dearest Yet Untitler. I hope that the end of 2025 gave you the rest you needed that would allow you to take even one more additional step towards the fruition of your desires. “Don’t stop,” says Life.

As always, thanks for listening! We will meet again, each week in 2026.

Lots of love,

V

PS: I have been to Fort Kochi in 2008, as a much younger, much-different human being. I can perceive how different I was from the photos I took the last time! I can see that my eyes were searching in different ways than they are now.

PPS. This instalment has an interesting origin story. It started out as a bunch of scribbles in my Bullet Journal. I was circling something but I was too caught up in Kochi’s trees to tell what I was getting at. I photographed the pages and showed them to Chat GPT and it gave me some interest ideas that opened a way forward.

I confess that I enjoyed this collaboration! Eventually, I didn’t use most of the nuggets it gleaned from my first thoughts, but they felt worth reproducing below.

Here’s what ChatGPT crystallised from my notes:

“Collaboration asks for a compassion that is exhausting. To work with others is to repeatedly confront the fact that words do not land equally, that language fractures meaning instead of unifying it. The frustration lies not in misunderstanding, but in the endless labor of trying to bridge it—knowing that complete alignment may never be possible, yet continuing the dialogue anyway.

Working with others is tiring because language refuses to behave. Words activate people differently, betray intention, and fall short of shared meaning. The frustration is real: the sense that no matter how carefully we speak, we may never fully meet. And yet, we keep talking—because stopping would mean giving up on connection altogether.

The frustration is knowing that understanding demands constant effort—and that it may still never be enough.”

PPPS. Have you hugged an embryo lately, or any half-formed thing? Tell me about it. I want to know!

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The year is ending, but you and I will continue beyond it, even after it ends. In that respect, you and I are - whether we know it or not - People in Progress (PIPs).

I like being a Person in Progress. Rather - I like reminding myself that I am one. It helps me look beyond the starts and stops that I’m conditioned to regard as points of reference; worse still - as the building blocks of my identity.

Did I end the year well? Will I make a good start next year?

Reminding myself that I am a Person in Progress stops me from getting entangled in questions like these. It helps me take a deep breath and simply put one foot in front of the other, like little Ananya and Aahana in the video below.

What a thrill they used to get from merely walking! Watching them experience such delight in their first steps delighted me afresh.

Dearest Yet Untitler, have you and I forgotten the delight that’s to be found in simply moving?

In remembering that I am a PIP, I felt my chest ease; as if a tightened spring had unwound behind my eyes. Did my words provide you the same ease, dearest YUer? If they did, then - hallelujah! They’ve fulfilled their purpose 🥳.

As a PIP, the year’s end feels more palatable. Rather than coming to a halt, it feels like I’m taking my foot off the accelerator to give my pistons some respite while still continuing to cruise forward.

It’s a good feeling.

I roll down my metaphorical windows and slide back my metaphorical sunroof while feeling the metaphorical wind on my real face as I write and imagine.

I think our hearts understand the concept of being a Person in Progress better than our minds do. All my heart knows is how to keep going. I should listen to it more.

(I cannot write that paragraph without evoking this song!)

Yet Untitled will continue as a Newsletter in Progress as it always has. I’m excited about what it promises to become, just as I’m excited about where my Progress will lead me. Dearest Yet Untitler, I’m excited about where we’re headed together, you and I. Are you? If yes, I want to hear about it. Hit me up you ol’ installment junkie you!

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I will be in some exciting places in the coming weeks. I will have my camera. I will have my words. Expect holiday dispatches full of photos!

Happy holidays dearest YUer. Thanks, always, for listening.

Lots of love

V

P.S. The title of this installment is inspired by the title of a wonderful screenplay written by a lovely Yet Untitler, one that I hope you all will see translated as a film on a screen near you very soon!

I met up with a bunch of friends the other day.

It’s been a while since I got together with this lot.

Just shy of two decades ago, we all worked on a film together in another city. Most of us felt displaced, staying for a month in a very different environment our own, but we held each other up and somehow made it through.

One of the things we did during the madness of making that film was to go for a hike in the hills a few hours outside the city where we were essentially exiled. It was no ordinary hike for me. Two decades before I started writing Yet Untitled, the experience caused me to write something that sounded remarkably akin to a YU instalment! So no gulab jamuns for guessing how the piece wound up in here!

I went through a lot of emotions while reading it. A part of me wanted to give notes to my 29 year old writer self, and I even considered breaking the flow of the text below to insert commentary, but I refrained. I think it’s the right decision, as is the decision not to edit the text apart from quashing the odd typo.

Perhaps I should say no more and allow you all to read it before saying anything else.

Here goes:

The River

Nagalapuram,

Andhra Pradesh

5^th April, 2009

I visited a river after a long time yesterday. It started off as a small stream that reached a small dam and then disappeared into channels, pipes and other man made things. But fortunately we walked upstream, towards the river’s life, towards its pulse, towards its heart.

We were a group of city people, young and diverse. Some us were married, some in college, some were quiet, some talkative. We walked along this river for some miles together, sharing a few things, keeping our secrets to ourselves, laughing, enjoying being away from it all.

The river had much to give us, and it was apparent from the start. After we had clambered over ankle-tearing stones for a few miles, reminded of how fragile our skin was by the sharpness of the thorns, the river suddenly swelled and cooled further the already cool shade. The unsteady, stony path opened into a dusty track that ran along the water. Looking up, one could see clusters dragonflies hanging in the air, as if trying to mimic the shape of something larger than themselves through their numbers. We met very few folk along the way, but human presence was resplendent in ugly graffiti upon some of the smooth, uncaring stones that bore no grudges. They just pointed out the absurdity of marking out an eternal love affair in a marking that was, when compared with rock it was written upon, just as impermanent as the love it advertised.

We came to a small fresh-water pool that was fed by a tiny waterfall. In that hot late-spring morning, it looked as inviting as bed of feathers to the utterly exhausted. We were quick to get in. The water was cool, sweet to taste and charged with life. Hundreds of tiny fish swam about our legs and nibbled at the dead skin at our feet. The rocks below were smooth, and some were large enough to sit upon.

It was like a scene from an HBO made-for-TV film – either on the subject of man’s expulsion from paradise (the scene just before the transgression); or about a group of tourists stranded on a deserted tropical island (the scene before they are attacked by man eating savages). Either way, I think the reason why I associate the scene with impending doom is because it was after a very long time that I had enjoyed something’s abundance without paying some sort of price for it. It was hard to believe that whatever had given us this gift wasn’t asking for something in return. A great Silence stood there and absorbed our jocund voices into itself, like a compassionate Monk listening to a confession with his eyes closed. The same silence watched us from the topmost leaf of the topmost tree of the highest hill looming over us. The same silence swam with the fish that nibbled at our feet.

After some hours of splashing about in that pool, we grew restless. We decided to proceed further up the river and see what lay ahead. Nature opened up. The river widened and started looking like it’s own elder sibling – more assured and more experienced in the ways of its world. In that line of thought, the river would be old at its mouth in the snowy mountains. Somehow, the thought of the river thawing itself out from the clear white ice affirmed this image. The little stream we saw at the dam was definitely the river in its infancy crawling back into its womb within the bowels of the Earth, having lived its life like Fitzgerald’s curious character Benjamin Button.

We were higher up in the hills now. The afternoon sun was harsh but there was a gentle breeze that made things bearable. We were on an incline that led us higher and higher up, and then suddenly the trail dipped and we made our way down into a valley of shade and green.

There was a pool there as well. From the hill, it looked placid and green, circular in its symmetry with a very large rock at its centre. Two steep cliffs rose along its circumference, one facing us and one that was joined to the ridge that brought us to it. At first, it did not make much of an impression. We were still full of the last pool’s memory, still feeling its coolness somewhere inside. Nobody imagined that that experience could be bested.

So we settled down a little further off and got busy eating. The food made everyone drowsy. So while they let their eyelids drop, I walked to this pool, shed my clothes and walked in.

The water was far cooler than the first pool’s, and there were many small rocks on the bottom that made it very difficult to walk in. The pool was very shallow at the edges and the water was crystal clear. The sun was still high in the shy and despite the shade from the cliffs and trees, the sunlight penetrated easily till the rocks on its floor, illuminating the little fish that were weaving between my feet. The thorn scratches on my legs first burned and then were soothed by the water.

I was still alone in there. A few meters further in, the water grew darker. A submerged rock, made yellow by the penetrating sunlight peered out silently some distance away from me. Refracted, it looked misshapen and oblong, yet, it was visible as sharply as it would have been were it on the surface. The huge, monolithic rock at the pool’s centre rose ten feet above the surface. The water around it was also black.

The character of this pool was very different from the first one. If it were to be personified, it would take the form of an old sage. The first pool was nothing more than a teenage girl in comparison. This one had the gravity of an entity that had done some sort of severe penance and had attained a profound realization thereafter. Serenity lined its depth and was reflected in its coolness. Stepping into it, you felt the vibration of a great breakthrough that had happened aeons ago.

And yet, I was not at ease inside that pool. The silence was too much for my ears. I was reluctant to stray too far from the shore. I was suspicious of the dark areas round the rock and the cliff. The sounds of my own movements were too loud. The sound of my own breathing had quickened in the silence. It was making me nervous.

So, there I was, in the cradle of the Earth, almost naked and as ill at ease as if peeing in a public toilet with glass walls. How suspicious I was of my own Mother, I thought. Have we all become so alienated from the Earth that our first reaction is to fear it so?

What did I fear, I wondered.

That which you cannot see, something answered.

Thinking about that, it is not all that difficult to comprehend. Of course we fear that which we cannot see – and it extends beyond things like dark water. We fear relationships we cannot dominate, we fear dealings with strangers, we fear going for holidays in countries whose customs we do not know. But the Earth – something so basic, so elemental – how could we fear it so easily, if at all?

Silence. That was all that came in the face of all these questions. The same silence unchanging. Seamless. Never having ceased, never having begun.

The others came. There were complaints about the pond and how the other one was better, but they ceased when a few of them entered the water. In their presence, I suddenly felt an ease. I was in the familiar again. I swam to the golden submerged rock and sat on it. One of the others swam far into the shadows of the cliff. She did not seem to have any fear of the dark.

After while, I too decided to explore the far side of the pool. I’m a confident swimmer, and in swimming pools, I usually keep my eyes open under water. As I swam, I saw shafts of sunlight penetrating the clear water like the fiery blades of swords. But as soon as I swam into the rock’s shadow, the sunlight disappeared as if someone had flicked a switch, and suddenly it was as if one was swimming in ink. At the very instance, air flew out of my lungs and I thrashed my feet to get back to the safety of the light.

The girl who had swum into the shadows with ease looked puzzled at my reaction. She told me to try again, but I couldn’t. The darkness scared me too much.

I sat on the submerged boulder and stared at the murky water for a long time. What lay in there that scared me? Could it be the colour black? I was not scared of the night, but then again, I spent my nights in the familiar. Perhaps the night would be different for me if I was cold and alone in a blackness I did not know. I had known this fear when I was a child – when sleeping in unfamiliar rooms exposed one to countless creatures of the dark. They all had fearful names and shapes and were easy to fear.

It was a little different now. Whatever I feared did not have any shape or form anymore. Over the years, my thinking had become more sophisticated so perhaps the mind had put simple things like monsters aside and invested its fears in concepts – like death and annihilation. Yes, it was true. I feared that something that could take my life, that could annihilate me, lay in that darkness. I was not prepared for my own death.

If I had faith, I would not have this fear.

Silence.

Was I a coward?

An unforgiving Silence.

Will I ever be free of this fear?

An indifferent Silence.

The afternoon wore on. My fears remained, and I felt embarrassed for them. I tried some tricks: I took a few deep breaths and swam across the dark water a few times, keeping my eyes open. Soon, the darkness became familiar, and it was easy to even remain in the shadows without panicking. But I knew that if a large hand came, lifted me and set me in another dark pool somewhere else, the same fear would return afresh.

If I had faith, I would not have this fear?

Faith in what?

In God.

There was something wrong in this statement. This pool did not seem separate from God, whatever God was. Whatever God was, this pool and all its mysteries weren’t at odds with it/him/her. Even if it resulted in my annihilation, it still wasn’t separate from God. This much I knew. Having faith in God to protect me from it was thus wrong.

My shoulders were burned from the sun, but I did not feel the sting yet. I feel it now as I’m writing. So, how different was I from the rock that was also weathered by the sun? How different was I from the water that was evaporated by it. The only difference was that I had a consciousness, and that too was a presumption. Perhaps the rock and the water also had a consciousness, but it was too evolved to make them get up, yawn and feel the need to walk down the street and get a cappuccino.

Jokes aside, it was obvious that my restless, bubbling, bouncing consciousness was creating the problem. Instinct was leading it to preserve itself, to stay in the safe where the light let you see the rocks below.

I left it at that. I think that it was sufficient to see the things I saw that afternoon and feel the things I felt. Where would I feel them in the big, bad city? Definitely not at my work desk. Definitely not while sipping a cappuccino down the street.

We were drunk from the experience. The water had cleansed us of many a woe and knot that our lives had rubbed in like a cunning poison.

While we were walking back, one of our friends slipped and twisted her ankle badly. It was a nasty, painful injury. Tears welled in her eyes and her foot swelled up like a healthy cucumber in a matter of minutes.

Silence answered her cries. The same silence that had answered her laughter.

Dearest YUer,

I declare: Friends and Writing are footsteps in the sand! Both show me where all I’ve been. They are living snapshots of who I was once and what I once felt.

All those years ago - I was walking a lonely road in the direction of Faith, but I didn’t know it. My friends witnessed me. My words witnessed me.

I so glad and grateful that both my friends and my words accompanied me into the future where I am now. I so happy to be writing, knowing that these very words will accompany me into the future still.

Words are my friends. I work hard to carry my friends with me into the future.

Dearest Yet Untitler, take my hand and walk with me!

Thanks, always, for listening!

Lots of love

V

PS

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It would be a big lie to say that nobody sees me. So many do. You do. As do my friends. And my family. Appreciation and validation comes to me from all quarters. Regularly.

Yet. There are days when I feel…

…invisible.

I promise you - I do not write this to invite validation. I’m just curious about the human condition that can make a much-seen, loved and supported person feel this way.

Is it Greed? Is it Stupidity?

Perhaps it’s Doubt.

It’s been a while since I’ve consciously written about Doubt.

Maybe it’s because I’m so busy writing about Faith all the time that, in the process, I’ve forgotten the shape of the adversary against whom I’ve been strengthening my ramparts all this time.

But Doubt is the foundation to those ramparts. Without Doubt, this castle does not stand.

So here we are.

Doubt and Faith run my engine very differently

I still move forward, but I steer differently. And, bloody hell, I see the road differently. The sense of the journey is very different on either kind of fuel.

Doubt as a propellent sounds novel. I would have, on first impulse, set it down as something that arrested movement, froze me in my tracks. But I have known Doubt to keep me going towards…somewhere…feeling like I’m not coming back home.

Doubt makes me negate my own story by causing me to believe in another one. It causes me to string disjointed sentences heard from here and there and form a narrative that would make no sense on a better day.

Hmmm. I just wrote that. That’s quite telling.

To my understanding, Belief is the currency used by both Doubt and Faith. It’s a currency I always have in my pocket to spend. What I spend on is my choice.

One of the things I keep at the forefront while writing a film is this:

But this desire is fragile, gullible and is quickly commandeered by either Faith or Doubt. Faith and Doubt are fighting to get into the audience’s gas tank. Yours. Mine.

I wrote this limerick👇🏼to fortify my faith. I have many other strategies that I deployed as well, but I write about those all the time and write too few limericks!

I ran into doubt and felt invisible 
I didn't know that life was thus divisible
I thought I would cry
Then Faith called out the lie
So now I feel the opposite of missable 😁

I write this installment mostly to tell myself to chill out when shuttling between Doubt and Faith. I’m braced to fight the good fight however many times it takes, and to also try to draw whatever I can from it - even low-brow entertainment gained from producing weekly newsletters.

If you gained even the minutest value from this, well, we’re both winners then.

Be sure to tell me if you did:

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Thanks, always, for listening.

Lots of love

V

I’ve been thinking about Yet Untitled and its place in my life; and in yours. I’ve been questioning its relevance. This is not a crisis. Every now and then I find it healthy to ask myself -

What purpose does this weekly thingamajig serve anyway?

Everything has its ups and downs. I too have seasons of high and low engagement from you and your five hundred or so fellow YU-ers. Sometimes you respond to my dispatches and sometimes you do not.

I feel a thrill when a response comes in from the ether: Major Tom hearing from Ground Control; thanking the stars that he’s not alone in the void.

I also feel the bite of doubt when the yonder sends me silence.

I acknowledge and experience both these extremes…

…but, thankfully, I feel bound to neither. They’re both islands that I navigate as I pilot Yet Untitled past them, avoiding the sharp reefs of their dangers.

What keeps my outboard motor going?

Am I simply stubborn?

Maybe.

But I don’t think that’s quite it.

There’s a filmmaker I’ve been working with…

…who I watch - with no small amount of awe - as he reaches in and sifts through a rolodex of ideas every time we get stuck in our creative endeavours. What’s interesting is that his insights and observations aren’t picked away in raw form, they’re stored as artefacts - poems, stories and other things (even social media posts) that he’s written and accumulated over a lifetime.

Let’s call these transformed, pickled ideas ‘artefacts’.

He not only carries these artefacts around in his head; he has the uncanny ability to bring them out at will. And even thought I’ve seen him reference the same artefact multiple times on separate occasions, it always feels fresh, flexible and infinitely adaptable.

It feels alive.

I think this is so because in turning his inspirations into artefacts, he has made them his own.

I think I’ve been doing something similar each time I take a photograph.

An alchemy takes place when I press the shutter - my inspiration sparks against the present and then, after a dance of refracted light upon a photographic sensor, the present is preserved for me as a singularity of image, memory and feeling - an artefact.

I also think I’ve been doing something similar on this page.

Each YU instalment is like one of my filmmakers’ artefacts. A weekly insight galvanises memory and effort, magnetically pulling in images and words from my storehouse, pushing them through the mill of craft. Therein emerges the artefact of a weekly instalment.

I think this act of transformation is the key - receiving something from the ether and then giving it a form inside my head.

I believe that there is much that comes to me from the ether, but when it’s received, it still exists in the language of the ether. I believe that it’s up to me to translate it - as much for myself as for others.

With Yet Untitled - as I always begin by addressing you, my first impulse is to translate for you. What’s really happening is that I’m translating for both you and for myself!

When I realised this, it made me reconsider my feelings - the ones I have started this instalment upon.

This instalment was born out of a disturbance…

…felt after not getting a response from the ether after sending so many transmissions into it.

The thing I realise is that I had it all wrong. I have indeed been getting a response.

The ether has been sending me signal after signal to transform into artefact upon artefact. I’ve simply not appreciated this enough.

Dearest Yet Untitler,

…please don’t take this as me complaining to you about you. You’re an indelible part of the equation, whether silent or not. None of this was ever possible without you.

I think what I ran up against was my own lack of belief.

Thankfully, I’ve had a chance to observe my filmmaker friend a lot. The man’s belief is colossal! His museum of artefacts has no cobwebs, no dust. That’s because he treats each one of them as treasure. Not as a trophy, mind you, but as bounty.

In short, dearest YUer…

Gotta run. I have a museum to fill with artefacts.

Thanks again and always for listening.

You are my museum’s biggest patron and your invaluable contribution is your presence!

Lots of love,

V

PS. What’s the biggest treasure of your storehouse? Take a moment to tell me. I really would like to know.

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