Before I Became Careful With Films: On Old Movie Reviews, Fanhood and Film Criticism

After writing about literary festivals, badges and the strange little doors that brought me closer to books, I went back to another old doorway.

My film reviews.

This was a more dangerous archive.

Book reviewing had made me feel serious. Even when I was young and too emotional about stories, books gave me the illusion of control. You could sit with them, revisit a sentence, argue with a chapter, or pretend your thoughts had arrived in an orderly fashion because you had written them down in paragraphs.

Films were different.

Films did not give me that much time. At least not then.

They hit first. Thought came later. Sometimes much later or sometimes never properly. I would leave a theatre with a song still playing in my head, one actor’s face taking over the entire film, a dialogue repeating itself for no sensible reason, and I would think, yes, this needs to be written about.

Not always because the film deserved it.

Sometimes, because my body was still reacting.

That is what I found when I reread my older movie reviews. A version of myself who had not yet learned how to be careful with films. She used too many exclamation marks, she trusted goosebumps as evidence, she believed a strong performance could rescue almost anything, she confused being moved with being convinced, and she wrote about actors as if they had personally entered her bloodstream and refused to leave.

I wanted to edit her then and there.

Then, annoyingly, I realised that I missed her.

There is a strange cruelty in reading your old writing. You meet all the versions of yourself you have outgrown, but not fully escaped. The sentences are too eager, the feelings are too large, and the opinions arrive before the thought has settled, but beneath all that mess, there is also something clean. A kind of surrender I do not allow myself as easily anymore.

Back then, I did not watch films with caution. I watched them like anything could still happen.

A first-day-first-show could rearrange my mood, a song could follow me home, a close-up could become the whole film, a performance could make me forgive the screenplay. Sometimes, I did not review the film as much as I reviewed the state it left me in.

And that, I know now, is not always good criticism.

But it is not dishonest either.

When a film chooses you

I see that most clearly in my old review of Samantaral.

That review began, of course, with a song. I had opened it with “Bésame Mucho,” because apparently I was not interested in entering quietly. I wrote about discovering the trailer, wanting badly to watch the film, struggling to find someone to go with me, almost deciding to go alone, and finally reaching the theatre for a Bengali film show in Kolkata. I mentioned the full house, the terrible seats, and the push-back chairs that made the neck pain slightly less tragic.

The film had not even begun, and I was already writing about the act of reaching it.

That feels important now.

Because younger me understood something instinctively that older me sometimes tries to polish away. A film does not begin only when the lights go off; it begins with the decision to go. With the person you ask to come along, with the ticket you manage to get, with the city outside the hall, with the seat, with the mood, with the private expectation you pretend not to have.

In that Samantaral review, I wrote something I still cannot fully shake off.

You, as a viewer, don’t choose the film. The film chooses you.

When I wrote that, I meant it sincerely. Completely. Almost romantically.

I believed some films found you before you knew why. You did not arrive at them logically. You did not go because of ratings or marketing or because everyone was talking about them. You went because something in the trailer, a song, a face, a mood, a half-understood sadness, pulled you in. And by the time you sat in the theatre, the film had already done something to you.

Now, I still believe that. But with suspicion.

Because being chosen by a film is beautiful, yes. It is also dangerous. 

Once a film gets under your skin, you stop judging only the craft. You start protecting the feeling it gave you; you defend a weak screenplay because one scene broke you; you forgive loose subplots because one character felt real; you ignore indulgence because the music knew exactly where to hit; you let the film win because you liked who you were while watching it.

Maybe that is the real difference between how I wrote then and how I write now.

Earlier, if a film chose me, I let it.

Now, if a film chooses me, I ask why.

This does not mean I have become colder. At least, I hope not. I still want films to move me. I still want a performance to haunt me. I still want to walk out of a theatre feeling slightly ridiculous because a fictional person has ruined my evening in the best way.

But I no longer trust the first feeling completely.

I wait. I prod it. I ask what survived after the music stopped.

• Was it the film?
• Was it one actor?
• Was it the theatre experience?
• Was it my mood that day?
• Was I moved, or was I manipulated very efficiently?

These are not romantic questions. They are useful ones.

My older reviews did not always care for that separation.

Actor worship with paragraph breaks

In my Padmavat review, for example, I was not really reviewing Padmavat. I was writing a fever note to Ranveer Singh’s Khilji.

The film had a title, yes, but I had clearly chosen my own subject.

I wrote about the first glimpse of his eyes, the goosebumps, the madness, the hair, the hunger, the scars, and the beard. I wrote about the seductive brutality of a villain who should not have been seductive and yet had been built, shot and performed exactly that way. I wrote as if Khilji had taken over the film, the theatre and the review itself.

Maybe he had.

There is no point pretending otherwise now. That review is actor worship with paragraph breaks. It begins with the film and then abandons it almost immediately for the performance that swallowed it whole. Deepika is there, Shahid is there, Aditi Rao Hydari is there, and Sanjay Leela Bhansali is obviously there. But the review belongs to Ranveer. More specifically, it belongs to the version of Ranveer who made me feel that no sane person could have performed Khilji that way without being possessed by something.

Very dramatic, I know. Also, not entirely wrong.

That is what makes old writing complicated. The language may embarrass you, but the instinct is not always false.

That performance did dominate the film. It did tilt the balance. It did make the rest of Padmavat feel smaller in memory. Younger me noticed that, even if she did not have the most disciplined language for it. She understood that sometimes cinema works by imbalance. Sometimes one performance becomes so magnetic that the rest of the film turns into furniture.

Current me would ask more.

• What did the film gain by giving Khilji that much charge? 
• What did it flatten? 
• What did it turn into spectacle? 
• What did my own fascination allow me to overlook? 
• Was I responding to the performance, the writing, the styling, the danger, or the forbidden thrill of finding the villain more alive than everyone else?

Younger me had no interest in those questions. She saw fire and walked towards it, and there is something embarrassing about that.

There is also something alive.

Pleasure as an argument

The Befikre review is even more revealing, but in a different way.

It does not begin with Ranveer. It begins with the National Anthem.

A 9 AM show, a packed theatre, young people, couples, cinegoers who had come for a fun YRF film, all standing in silence. I had written about having a lump in my throat. I had gone to watch a glossy romance in Paris, and the first thing I wanted to capture was a shared theatre moment in Kolkata.

Then the trance broke, Labon Ka Karobar began, Paris appeared, Ranveer arrived, and all critical distance quietly left the premises.

I called myself biased. I admitted it openly. I kinda sorta still do.

I wrote about the dancing, the clothes, the songs, the chemistry, the paisa-vasool feeling. I knew the story was predictable and said so, but I also said that if a predictable story was presented well enough, it worked for me.

That line is important too.

Because younger me was not completely blind. She recognised cliché, she saw predictability, she saw Vaani’s weaker emotional portions, but she did not treat those as deal-breakers because the experience had already won her over. The film gave her movement, beauty, songs, Paris, Ranveer in carefree mode after serious roles, and enough emotion to make her leave satisfied.

So she let it pass.

I don’t think current me would be that generous.

Or maybe I would, but I would make the generosity answerable.

• I would ask why the lightness worked. 
• I would ask if the film understood freedom or merely styled it. 
• I would ask if the romance had texture beyond dares, bodies and location beauty. 

I would probably be more annoying about the whole thing.

But I also know this: younger me knew how to enjoy a film without immediately apologising for it.

That is not nothing.

There is a type of viewer who becomes so careful, so trained in suspicion, that pleasure itself starts needing a defence. I do not want to become that viewer. I do not want every film to enter my head like a case file. Sometimes a song is allowed to work. Sometimes an actor is allowed to charm you. Sometimes a predictable thing, done with energy, still has value.

The problem begins when pleasure becomes the only argument.

That is where I have changed.

Then there was Zulfiqar.

That review belongs to another version of me altogether. The literature girl. The Shakespeare girl. The girl whose whole career, according to her own dramatic but not entirely inaccurate claim, had been shaped by Shakespeare.

I had gone on a rainy Shoshti morning, sad about not being able to wear the saree I had planned, and still determined to watch the film. Very Kolkata. Very me. Very festival-season chaos.

The review is full of love. For the cast, for the idea, for Srijit Mukherjee, for Shakespeare being translated into a Bengali cinematic world. I wrote that the mix of Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra was seamless. I said there were no cons. None. Capital certainty. I ended by calling Srijit Mukherjee “Kolkata’s Shakespeare.”

Today, I would never write that sentence without immediately wanting to cross-examine myself.

But I understand why I wrote it.

That review was not only about Zulfiqar. It was about the joy of seeing something I had studied, loved and carried for years being reimagined in a world that felt closer to home. It was about recognition. Shakespeare was not sitting in an old textbook anymore. He was in Kolkata’s film language. In familiar actors. In songs. In audience hoots. In Puja weather. In the strange thrill of seeing old tragedy wear a new city’s clothes.

Was I too generous? Almost certainly.

Would I now find flaws? Without question. I am older. I have sharper knives and fewer excuses.

But I do not want to mock that excitement. There is something precious about encountering adaptation before you become too aware of adaptation theory. Before you start measuring fidelity, politics, staging, form, ambition, compromise. Before you ask whether the film has done enough to earn its inheritance. Before you realise that being moved by a reference is not the same as being convinced by a retelling.

Young me did not care.

Young me heard Shakespeare echo in Bengali cinema and called it treasure.

And maybe, in that moment, it was.

This is where rereading old reviews becomes less about embarrassment and more about grief.

Not big grief. Not even tragic grief. Just the small, irritating grief of realising that you cannot return to your earlier ways of loving things.

You can revisit the review, remember the theatre, play the song, and even understand why you felt what you felt. But you cannot unknow what you now know.

You cannot unknow lazy writing. You cannot unknow manipulative background music. You cannot unknow when a director is hiding emptiness behind scale. You cannot unknow when an actor is doing more work than the screenplay. You cannot unknow when a film is asking you to feel instead of giving you a reason to.

Once you learn to see the machinery, the magic does not disappear.

But it changes.

In recent years, when I write about films or series, I find myself much less interested in whether something is simply good or bad. That binary bores me now. I am more interested in what the thing reveals about itself. Where it bends, where it compromises, where it accidentally tells the truth, or where it becomes more interesting than it meant to be.

The newer reviews come from that changed place.

When I wrote about Matka King, for instance, I was not writing from the old “I loved this, therefore it matters” place. I was looking at the image, the rot, the performance, the construction of power, the way a white suit can become more than costume if the film knows what it is doing with it.

That is current me.

When I wrote about O’ Romeo, the frustration was different. The most frustrating films are rarely the incompetent ones. They are the films made by people clearly capable of better. That kind of disappointment needs a different language from fan heartbreak. It is not “this did not move me.” It is “this had the tools to move me properly and chose something weaker.”

Older me might have written around that disappointment. She might have held on to one good scene, one performance, one song, one visual flourish, and tried to save the film through it.

Current me is less charitable.

Not because I enjoy being harsh. I don’t. I actually hate when films by people I admire disappoint me. It feels personal in a way it has no right to feel. But admiration cannot be allowed to do all the work. At some point, you have to ask what the film actually made, not what you wanted it to be.

When love is not what makes me write

I have also realised that I do not always write about the films I love.

That sounds strange, because love is supposed to be the easiest thing to write from. But it rarely is. At least not for me anymore.

The films I return to again and again often become too private to review. They become rooms. I know where the light falls, I know which scene will calm me down, which line will arrive before I am ready for it, which song will make me softer than I intended to be that day. I do not always want to take those films apart. Some loves survive better without an essay standing over them with a torch.

So I do not always write about what I love most.

I write about what refuses to settle.

A film that disappoints me in an interesting way. A performance that survives a weak script. A beautiful scene trapped inside an uneven film. A director I admire, making a choice I cannot forgive. A series that gets under my skin for reasons I do not immediately understand. Those are the things that pull me back to the page now.

Maybe that is why I rarely review books anymore.

I still read. Slowly. Less than I would like. Mostly classics, sometimes international writers, sometimes books I do not yet feel equipped to write about. Books have become private again in a way they were not when I was younger, and reviewing them made me feel serious. I do not feel the same need to turn every reading experience into a response.

Films and series still provoke me faster.

Maybe because they arrive with image, sound, performance, music, bodies, pauses, bad choices, brilliant choices, and all the things that make me react before I can organise myself. Maybe because even now, after all this carefulness, cinema still knows how to get past the door.

But love alone does not always make me write.

Restlessness does.

That is the carefulness I mean.

Not cynicism.

Carefulness.

The difference matters.

Cynicism decides early. Carefulness waits and then decides with more evidence. Cynicism stands outside the film, arms folded, proud of not being fooled. Carefulness enters the film, lets it try, and then asks what it did with the trust it was given.

I do not want to be cynical with films.

I still want to be reached.

But I also want to know how I was reached.

That is why Samantaral remains the bridge review for me. Even inside all that emotion, I can see the critic beginning to form. I praised the feeling, the performances, the innocence of certain moments, the songs that stayed. But I also called out the weak screenplay, the loose subplots, the excessive close-ups, and the fact that the film may have had more weight as a book than as a film.

That review was not fully careful yet. But it was trying.

It was the beginning of a split that defines how I write now. One part of me wants to surrender. Another part sits beside her, taking notes.

This can be inconvenient.

It can make watching films less pure, whatever pure means. It can make me pause before praising something that has already moved me. It can make me suspicious of my own tears. It can make me ask whether an actor was brilliant or whether the film simply gave them all the oxygen. It can make me walk out of a film feeling two things at once, which is exhausting and usually more honest.

But maybe that is what I want from writing now.

Not certainty.

Aftertaste.

I want to know what remained after the obvious feeling left. 

• Did the film deepen in memory, or did it shrink? 
• Did one scene keep glowing while the rest vanished? 
• Did the performance survive the film? 
• Did the film survive its own ambition? 
• Did I keep thinking about it because it was rich, or because something about its failure bothered me?

This is also why I no longer write reviews like verdicts.

I do not want to stand at the end of a film with a stamp. Worth watching or not worth watching. Three stars. Four stars. Skip it. Stream it. Theatre experience. These things have their place, I suppose, but they do not interest me as much as the private weather a film creates.

Some films are excellent and leave nothing behind.

Some films are flawed and refuse to leave.

Some films are not good enough, but one image keeps returning like an unpaid debt.

Some films fail in a way that tells you more about the filmmaker than their successful work.

Some films choose you for reasons you only understand years later.

That last one still gets me.

Because I still believe in being chosen by a film. I just no longer think that is the end of the conversation.

A film choosing you is not proof of its greatness. It is proof of contact. Something touched something. That matters. But then the writing begins. Not the immediate post-show gush, though there is a place for that too. I mean the real writing. The kind that asks what happened in that contact. What you brought into the hall. What the film used. What it earned. What it stole. What it left.

Older me wrote before the feeling had cooled.

Current me waits for the burn mark.

That sounds better than it feels.

Because sometimes I miss the immediacy. I miss the girl who could come home from a film, sit down and write like she was still half inside it. I miss her lack of embarrassment. I miss her willingness to say, “This actor has a fan in me,” and mean it with zero irony. I miss the way songs entered her reviews without permission. I miss the way she could quote lyrics at the end because the film had not ended for her yet.

But I do not miss the over-forgiveness.

I do not miss mistaking mood for merit. I do not miss calling everything brave because it had one sincere idea. I do not miss giving a film credit for what I wished it had done. I do not miss writing around a weakness because admitting it would disturb my affection.

The pulse and the question

So here I am, somewhere between the two.

More careful than I was.

Still not careful enough to be safe.

That may be the right place.

Because safe writing about films is usually dead writing. It has no pulse. It knows the correct words. It understands craft. It can identify themes, performances, pacing, music, cinematography, politics, all of it. But it does not let anything happen to it.

I don’t want that either.

I want the pulse and the question.

I want to admit that Ranveer’s Khilji once hijacked my entire Padmavat review and still ask what that hijacking meant. I want to remember that Befikre gave me uncomplicated theatre pleasure and still wonder what I was willing to ignore for charm. I want to keep the sweetness of my Zulfiqar excitement while knowing that no filmmaker becomes “Kolkata’s Shakespeare” just because I had a good Puja morning. I want to honour the Samantaral line about films choosing us while adding the adult clause: yes, but what did the film do after it chose you?

That adult clause is basically my current voice.

Not rejection.

Revision.

I do not want to write like that girl anymore. Not fully. She was too generous. Too dramatic. Too willing to be taken in by eyes, music, madness, charm. She gave actors too much power and screenplays too many second chances. She wrote sentences that now make me want to look away and protect her at the same time.

But I do not want to lose her either.

She knew how to be claimed by cinema. She knew that a film is not only its structure, not only its politics, not only its craft, not only its flaws. It is also the strange private weather it creates inside you. It is the song you play for three days. The scene you keep explaining to people who did not ask. The actor you defend with the moral seriousness of a court proceeding. The line you quote, because it made sense once in the dark.

I am more careful with films now.

But every once in a while, when a film slips past the critic and goes straight for the pulse, I hope that older version of me is still somewhere nearby.

Uncareful. Embarrassing. Open.

Right before she has the language for it.

The Front Row Was Never Just a Seat

Every Rabindra Jayanti, Kolkata finds a way to remember Rabindranath Tagore in public.

There are songs, flowers, old photographs, school memories, familiar lines, newer captions. A lot of it is moving, almost like a routine. A lot of it is exactly the kind of reverence that makes you stand a little awkwardly because you know the feeling is real, but the language around it has become too rehearsed.

I do not always know how to write about Tagore directly. He is too large, and I have a deep fear of sounding like a school assembly.

But today, I found myself thinking of him through a place.

Jorasanko.

And through a version of myself who once spent winter days volunteering at literary festivals in Kolkata, wearing a badge that made me feel more important than I probably was.

The first front row

It began before Jorasanko, though.

It began at the Kolkata Literary Festival, the one held in conjunction with the International Kolkata Book Fair. I had gone there as a reader, the most ordinary kind. I wanted to attend a session by one of my favourite authors, and like most ordinary readers, I was mostly concerned with getting a decent seat. I didn't get any!

Then I saw them.

People my age, sitting in the front rows, moving around with the ease of people who belonged there. They had access. Not glamorous access, not the kind that comes with tinted cars and handlers, but something more fascinating to me then. They could enter spaces I could only look at from a distance. They knew where to stand, whom to ask, when to move, what to do.

I remember wondering what it took to be there, and I started my research.

The next year, I was there.

Not permanently or dramatically. Not in a life-changing montage with a Rabindra Sangeet playing in the background, though Kolkata would probably allow it.

I was part of the social media team for that festival for one year. That was my first small crossing over. From audience to access, from watching the literary world happen to trying, in a very tiny way, to help document it as it happened.

And like most things you admire from a distance, it became both more magical and less glamorous the closer I got.

By then, I was already writing about books. I had been a book reviewer for a long while, which is a strange identity to carry when you are young and very serious about stories. It gives you a kind of private confidence. You begin to think you understand books because you can write about them. Then you enter a literary festival and realise books are only one part of the ecosystem.

There are authors, publishers, moderators, organisers, volunteers, journalists, publicists, and celebrities who have written books; authors who have become celebrities; and people who are both but pretend to be neither. There are green rooms and authors’ lounges. There are schedules that look perfect on paper and collapse beautifully by lunch. There are delayed flights, missing cars, confused delegates, overexcited audiences, dead phone batteries, dead laptops, printed notes, half-working mics, camera batteries, signing queues, and someone always asking where the next session is.

A literary festival looks elegant from the audience.

Behind the scenes, it is controlled chaos wearing a nice kurta.

The badge and what it taught me

After that first year, my real volunteering chapter began with the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival and Apeejay Bangla Sahitya Utsab.

AKLF and ABSU became the places where I learned that access is not just about being allowed into a room. Sometimes access means becoming responsible for what happens inside and around that room.

In my first year at AKLF, I was the city point of contact for a delegate from outside Kolkata. That meant airport pickups, coordination, schedules, movement, calls, messages, and generally functioning like a temporary personal assistant while pretending I knew exactly what I was doing.

Truth be told, I did not always know.

But I learned.

I learned how to keep track of someone else’s day. I learned how to be calm when things were not calm. I learned how to solve problems before they became visible. I learned that festivals run on planning, yes, but also on instinct, jugaad, politeness, and volunteers who can look composed while mentally screaming.

From ABSU year one and AKLF year two onwards, I moved into the social media side of things. Not in the sense of deciding what post would go up and when. No, that was not my job. My part was closer to the ground. Interviews, author bytes, quick questions, photos, notes, cameras, and mics; running between sessions, figuring out who would speak to which author, making sure the question was not lazy, making sure we were ready when the author was.

That brought a different kind of access.

The Authors’ Lounge.

Even now, the phrase feels slightly unreal.

Being part of that team meant you had to be presentable. Not in a superficial way, though that mattered too. It meant knowing when to speak and when to shut up. When to approach someone and when to let them breathe. When to ask a question, when to step back, and when to take charge quietly without making the management feel like you had become another problem to solve.

That was the real skill.

Not access. Conduct.

We would interview authors and celebrities there. We would catch people between sessions, request quick bytes, get signatures, take photos, check names, confirm titles, compare notes, and try to make the festival feel as alive on camera as it did around us.

There were people I met there whom I had never imagined I could ever get close to. Authors I had read. Names I had seen printed on book covers. People who had existed, until then, as acknowledgements, bios, interviews and distant literary figures. Suddenly, they were sitting across from us, answering questions, asking for tea, checking the time, laughing, waiting for their next session.

It is very difficult to explain what that does to a young person who loves books.

It does not make you cynical exactly. But it does humanise the mythology.

You realise authors are people. Some are warm, some are tired, some are generous, some are difficult. Some are exactly how you imagined, and some are not. Some give you one good sentence and leave. Some stay in your memory because of the way they spoke when the camera was off.

For someone who had once stood outside the front row, trying to understand how people got in, this was a lot.

And yes, other volunteers noticed.

Our group had access to the authors, the lounge, the interviews, and the spaces that were not open to everyone. That made us visible in a way I did not fully understand then. Other volunteers would look at us as if we knew more, had more, were closer to the centre of things. We were the cool seniors!

Maybe we were, practically speaking.

But mostly, we were problem solvers.

That is what the badge really meant.

Not importance. Responsibility.

If someone had to be found, we found them. If a schedule changed, we adjusted. If an author had to be moved, briefed, seated, recorded or rescued from an awkward delay, someone from the team handled it. If a question had to be prepared before a session, we sat together and worked it out. If the camera had to be ready, someone checked it. If the mic had to be tested, someone did it. If we had to run from one venue to another, we ran. And literally, WE RAN in the middle of the heavy traffic!

The front row had looked glamorous from the outside.

From the inside, it was logistics.

But I loved it.

I loved the rush of it. I loved being useful, the backstage friendships that formed without announcement. The kind built over shared snacks, rushed lunches, long days, bad jokes, tired feet, water breaks, phone chargers, quick gossip, group photos, and the collective panic of realising an author was available now, and we had exactly two minutes to get the question right.

Those friendships belonged to the pre-COVID world in a way I cannot fully explain. And even today, that group means the whole world to me.

Mornings began early for us. Days stretched into late evenings. You ate when you could, you sat when no one needed you, you looked for your team between venues, you checked schedules like they were exam papers. You discussed who would take which author, who knew which book, who could ask what, who had better camera hands, who was less likely to freeze.

And all of it, mostly, for free.

For a certificate. For access. For the thrill. For the story. For the feeling that you were briefly part of something larger than yourself.

That sounds foolish when written plainly.

It did not feel foolish then.

It felt like possibility.

I loved being close to literature, not as an idea, but as a living, sweating, time-bound event. I loved that books were no longer private objects on my shelf. They had become public, crowded, chaotic and alive.

That was the real shift.

As a reader, books had always been intimate. They belonged to my room, my bag, my commute, my badly lit late nights, my reviews, my opinions that felt extremely important at the time.

At the festivals, books became communal.

They became queues outside sessions, audience questions that were not always questions, applause, debates, signing lines, stage lights, camera angles, rushed interviews, and volunteers whispering into phones because someone was running late.

At Jorasanko

And then there was Jorasanko.

Apeejay Bangla Sahitya Utsab had a different charge because of where it happened. Jorasanko Thakurbari is not a neutral venue. You cannot treat it like just another festival location, even if you are there with a schedule in hand and three tasks waiting.

It is Rabindranath Tagore’s home.

That sentence is too simple for what the place does.

There is a weight to Jorasanko, but not in a suffocating way. More like a reminder. You walk through it knowing that language has lived there before you arrived. Music, literature, theatre, thought, argument, inheritance, all of it seems to sit in the walls.

And then there you are, sitting in the library before a session, figuring out questions for panellists with your fellow volunteers.

That memory has stayed with me more than many of the big ones.

Not because it was dramatic. It was not. We were probably tired. We were probably checking names and topics and trying to make sure the questions sounded intelligent but not pretentious. But there was something absurdly moving about doing that work there, inside that house, at that library.

Maybe it was the old quiet of the library, or the way the house made everyone lower their voice without being told.

It made the ordinary task feel slightly unreal.

We were not writing history.

We were preparing questions.

But the place made even preparation feel like an act of respect.

Maybe that is why I am thinking about all this today. Not because I have a grand Rabindra Jayanti tribute to offer. I don’t. But because some of my strongest memories of literary volunteering are tied to the house where Tagore is no longer present and somehow always present.

At Jorasanko, even the mundane felt borrowed from history.

I have volunteered at other festivals and events too, not all literary. Music festivals have been part of my life as well, but that is a different story. A louder one. A more electric one. A story with stages, soundchecks, crowds, performers, lights and a different kind of backstage pulse.

I have also worked around theatre festivals, where the energy is different again. Theatre has its own backstage grammar. People speak in cues, props, entrances, exits, timing, and silence. A performer waiting in the wings carries a very different kind of tension from an author waiting for a panel or a musician waiting for soundcheck. But the core feeling is similar. You are close to the making of something. You are not the reason people have gathered, but you are part of the invisible structure that lets the gathering happen.

That kind of work teaches you things no classroom can. How to read a room, how to not panic visibly, how to move quickly without looking rushed, how to speak to people who are important without becoming strange about it. How to understand that backstage is not glamour, it is labour with better stories.

But the literary festivals stayed with me differently.

Maybe because I had entered them first as a reader. Maybe because I had already been a book reviewer and wanted, secretly, to belong to the world that produced the things I wrote about. Maybe because Kolkata makes literature feel less like a niche interest and more like weather. It is just around. In book fairs, street stalls, college festivals, old houses, coffee shops, long arguments and people who quote things even when no one asked.

The years since COVID have been different.

I have not volunteered in the same way since then. It has been six years since my last proper volunteering activity, which is a strange thing to write because it does not feel that far away in memory. The rhythm broke. Public life stopped, then returned, but I did not return to that particular version of myself.

By then, life had shifted too. I had joined a day job. Digital marketing. Content writing. Responsibility, but of a different kind. The kind that comes with deadlines, clients, calendars, edits, strategy, performance, and the quiet adult realisation that time is not as elastic as it once felt.

For a while, I still tried. I would take breaks from work during lit fest days and go back to that old rhythm. The badge, the venue, the running around, the quick lunch, the interviews, the author lounge, the team. I was already becoming someone else professionally, but for those few days, I could still return to the version of me who knew how to move through a festival without needing a map.

Then COVID hit.

And after that, everything changed in ways that were both obvious and not. The festivals still happen. Sometimes shorter. Sometimes not at the same scale, or maybe I am the one who no longer has the same scale of time to give them. These days, I barely have time to look at myself in the mirror, forget spending entire days running between venues with a camera, a notebook and three unanswered calls.

That sounds dramatic. It is also accurate.

The event instinct

But the strange thing is, I did not leave that world completely. It followed me into work.

And yet, the event instinct never really left.

Even now, in my day job, when I have to help plan an event, build the marketing around it, think through speaker questions, shape a conference flow, or write the content that sits around it, something in me switches on. A younger version of me recognises the room before I enter it.

I used to think those festival years were a detour from real work. Now I think they were one of the first places where I learned how real work actually moves.

There was a time, years later, when a company I used to work at was participating in a global event, and I was responsible for curating the conference from offshore. Not just one neat piece of it. The whole messy, moving thing. Speakers, questions, sessions, delegates, time zones, hotel check-ins, coordination. Then the marketing around it. Pre-event posts, live or during-event updates, post-event articles, follow-up content, collaterals, design inputs, standee planning, conversations with printers, checking what would go where, and making sure the story of the event did not fall apart before, during or after the actual event.

I barely slept.

My body ran on adrenaline and bad timing. There were different time zones to keep in mind, different people to follow up with, and different things that could go wrong if one email was missed or one asset was delayed. It was not glamorous. It was not poetic. It was a lot of tabs open, a lot of “just checking in,” and the quiet terror of knowing that something live has no real undo button.

But I knew that rush.

I had known it in another form before. At literary festivals, running between venues, checking schedules, preparing questions, speaking to authors, handling cameras and mics, trying to look calm while three things needed attention at once.

The scale had changed. The language had changed. The stakes had changed.

The instinct had not.

The event ended, and then I fell sick for a week, as if my body had politely waited for permission to collapse.

That is the thing about events. They take from you in ways you do not always notice while they are happening. While the thing is live, you keep moving. You solve. You adjust. You respond. You do not have the luxury of being tired because the day has not ended yet. Then the lights go off, the final post goes out, the last email is sent, post-event analysis is shared with the team, and suddenly your body remembers it has been keeping score.

Still, even after all that, I understand the pull.

There is something about events that brings the rush back. The urgency. The people. The invisible work. The knowledge that, for a short while, everyone is building toward the same moment. Maybe that is why the festival years stayed with me. They did not just give me access; they trained a part of me that still wakes up when there is a live thing to hold together.

Maybe that is why Jaipur still sits somewhere in the back of my mind.

Because some dreams are stubborn. A part of me still thinks about working at the Jaipur Literature Festival someday. Not as a wide-eyed volunteer trying to enter the front row anymore, but as someone who has already known the rush, the discipline, the backstage logic, the author handling, the questions, the chaos, the conduct. I wonder what I would be like there now. More composed, surely. Less easily impressed, maybe. Better at reading people. Better at solving problems before they become public.

But I hope I would still feel something.

Because if I ever stand inside one of the largest literary festivals in the country, I do not want to be so grown-up that I forget what the first front row meant.

What I was really looking at

I think often about the girl at the Kolkata Literary Festival, trying to get a seat for her favourite author’s session and looking at people her age in the front row.

She thought she wanted access to writers.

She did. Of course she did.

But now I think she wanted something more than that. She wanted access to a life where literature was not just something she consumed privately. She wanted to stand close to the machinery of it, to see how books left pages and entered rooms, to see how writers became voices, how readers became audiences, how a city gathered around language and called it a festival.

The front row was never just a seat.

It was a symbol. A childish one, maybe, but not a false one.

It meant there was a door somewhere.

And for a few years, I got to walk through it.

Not as an author. Not as someone important. Not as the person people had come to see.

As a volunteer. A coordinator. A social media team member. A temporary PA. A problem solver. A book reviewer with a badge. A young woman trying to look like she belonged in rooms she had once only watched from outside.

That is enough.

In fact, that may be the more honest kind of belonging.

The kind where no one hands you the centre, but you learn how to move around it. The kind where access comes with work attached. The kind where you are close enough to see the magic and the mess, and lucky enough to understand that both are part of the same thing.

Today, on Rabindra Jayanti, I am thinking of Jorasanko. Of winter festivals. Of author interviews. Of airport pickups. Of front rows. Of the Authors’ Lounge. Of cameras and mics. Of notes scribbled before sessions. Of autographs. Of running between venues. Of food breaks with the team and the management. Of volunteers who looked at us the way I had once looked at others. Of the strange little ladder by which a reader became a reviewer, then a volunteer, then someone briefly trusted with proximity.

I do not know if I will volunteer like that again.

Maybe I don’t need to. Or maybe the next version of that life will look different. Less like volunteering, more like work. Less like access, more like experience finally finding the right room.

Some experiences do not ask to be repeated in the same form. They ask to be understood later.

And today, years after that first front row, I think I finally understand what I was really looking at.

Not access.

Possibility.

I Guess I am Still Not Over Him

You know that feeling when you want to grab the one you love but have broken up with and just hug it all off? Well, the quarantine is making me feel so. He was all that I had. After years of being told what to do and fighting for my own rights, I had finally found my oxygen in him.

I could hold on to him and be myself. I could be his strength when I wanted to and be a child to him all at the same time. He was to me what you could only imagine from those fairy tales, a knight in shining armour. He was everything that I was not and yet so freakishly me that I cannot even start to explain. But then every good thing has to end sometime, right? It did with us too. 

No amount of tears, pain, or justification could ever get us back together because he just didn’t feel that love anymore. Do you know what I am saying? And after a certain point of time, I gave up and I moved on. But did I ever stop loving him?

Cut to, that feeling when I saw him with other girls. It made me enraged and I stalked each one of them (you know who you are!). I kept thinking for days at an end if I have ever heard of them from him or are they just new additions to his life post our relationship? I shudder to think today what my reactions were when I imagined the latter, and I chose to think otherwise. 

You know this alarming rise in the heartbeat level when you see something that you do not want to? 

Well, that was me when I first came face to face with him post the breakup over the phone. For a moment there, everything was back again like it were when we were together. I guess both of us felt that there was nothing wrong and the months had never passed. 

But the moment I dragged a puff of my cigarette and got back to work, I died a little trying to stop the tears from rolling down my eyes. However, I realized my surroundings and knew I had to keep my shit together, anyhow. That’s what I did, you know?

I spent the night taking rapid puffs of my cigarette, dying for that one alone time with him where I could just ask what went wrong! That apart, I could not stop having my whiskey, even when I knew I was way past my limits. Days from that one moment passed by in a blur and it was just getting heavier by time. Nights? Oh, don’t get me started there. I could not concentrate and would go back to his thoughts, time and again. 

You know the feeling when you feel a piece of your heart, breaking, physically? Well, that happened with me and I knew I was not in good shape. But I also knew I had to somehow hold myself back and keep moving on if I really loved him cause that is where his happiness lay. I couldn’t have had months of progress down the drain. Could you have done so, had you been there in my place?

So, I immersed myself in work, nights at end, and channelled my hurt into passion. So, one fine day I woke up and did the needful. I pulled my hair back and put on the darkest red that I had. 

It has been a long time since and yet, whenever I get past anything even remotely related to him, I take a single moment and savour it. I still find myself checking out our pictures together while our song is still running in the background and I smile. But I don't have it in me to just run back to him and hug him and kiss him. You know why?

That was the first and last thing he asked of me.

The heart doesn't yearn anymore...

A Woman’s Guide to Being Judged for Loving Two People at the Same Time

Love is tough. Loving two people at the same time? Tougher! But here I am, penning my heart out to all those people who are in love with two people who can never be theirs but fail to identify the same. Let me know if you can relate, okay?

I have heard this from several people and been judged for the same, for the past n number of years that I have been loving two men at the same time. It took a lot from me to get myself to type this out but I guess the quarantine and weekend away from work-from-home played a huge part in this. 

I would like to first ask you – have you ever loved two people at the same time? My answer would be yes. Irrespective of the fact that I know they would never be mine, I love the camaraderie I share with both of them but somehow have always been unable to make people closest to me understand the same. Why does this happen that in Indian society, loving two people is still a taboo?

I am, to be honest; tired of explaining to my friends how I feel about both of them and so, do not tell anyone at all these days. This fear of being judged has turned me into a closet introvert who doesn’t share her feelings with the world, whereas to the very same world, I am the most extrovert person they have ever met. So, today I finally gathered enough courage to let you, if there is anyone suffering from the same problem, know what I have been going through. If you are someone still reading this, I know where you are in life right now, and I’m always there to listen to you.

Let me get this straight, it is not that I have not been in a relationship since the time I have fallen for those men, I have, and trust me, they were the best in their sweet way and I have loved them with all my heart as well. But I guess the intensity that I felt for those two special people was not present there and that is why, even after spending endless nights after breaking up, crying or begging for them to return, I could still move on. I know you would too.

Coming to my daily life, I am not a relationship person. It takes a lot for me to fall in love with someone and it is not the fluttering of butterflies then. For me, love is like a habit. Loving both these men from a distance almost feels like me taking control of my life. It gives me a freedom and a power that I didn’t know I possessed, making me feel stronger by the day. 

Do you know what the most interesting part is? They both are happy in their lives with the women they love but yet are not oblivious to my love. That is why maybe I love them with every ounce of energy I own. They understand my position and respect my love, just the way I respect their decision, and do not want to come in between their love lives.

Love, as most people I know say, is one of the most beautiful things ever. But, have you ever felt yourself getting lost in time, listening to someone’s voice on the phone and knowing everything they are going to say next? Or, reading every single word of what they have written and understood what their mental state is, without even speaking for months? If you have, you would know where I am coming from. 

In every guy I meet, I try to find some or the other trait that is there in either one of them, to be a little closer to them, even in a metaphorical way. At times, in a fit of rage, I even try to dismiss all those eligible men who have the exact features, to not fall in the same trap again. It is like this never-ending dilemma where I feel committed to both of them in this invisible thread which I would never be able to explain. There is this tightness that makes me cry for nothing, and yet not shed a drop of tear even when the biggest things happen. 

I have had people coming up to me, trying to explain their versions of loving two people at the same time. Some define the feelings as a crush, some call these a rebound, and some even call me insane and illogical. 

This is for all those people out there – I am not insane! This is for all those guys who ask me to let these two men go from my lives because they are not “interested” in me. Sorry, man! When I did, I never fell for them for falling out of it one day because some random guy said so. Yes, loving two people at the same time is exhausting, and if I am not encouraging you when you are whining about your silly relationship woes, for a second please place yourself in my shoes.

I am sure like me many of you are facing a similar situation, but trust me, girl, you need to love yourself and be confident that no-one would be able to take this strength or love away from you. It is yours and solely yours. Always know that you are not alone and love is the purest form of everything there is!

My advice? Do not over-think the situation and let it freely flow. But above all, accept the fact that there is nothing wrong with loving one or maybe more people at the same time if you are sure of your feelings. I may not be a relationship counsellor, but what I would ask you to do is hold on to your tiara and explore the happiness that love brings to you. 

The photo that captured me!

I am essentially a storyteller and not a photographer. Neither do I own a DSLR or for that matter any kind of fancy camera. I see the world through the 13 megapixels of my smart phone. I love travelling but I do not travel. It is partly because of the fact that I am a full time freelancer so my work is home based and also because of the fact that I cannot leave my mum alone and go out travelling. Having said all that, whenever I am out I try to take pictures of things, of people, of nature and yes, Selfies. People who know me tell me that I click decent pictures but I would not really go to tread that line as of now.

In my recent trip to a sea side (interestingly my first visit to a sea side) I realized a lot of things. Especially since it was early morning and I was there staring at the rising sun and the waves crashing at a distance, it made me ponder over life. I have to give it to the fact that I have been told by many people that their favourite place to visit is the sea side while I always countered that mountains were the best. Now that I had firsthand experience, I could tell them why I haven’t changed my take, why still mountains hold a special place in my heart.

You know, this is the first time I am writing it out for the world to see. That December morning when I was 2 glasses of fresh date palm juice down and watching the sun rise, I somehow was unable to calm myself. The inner turmoil was eating me. I missed mountains so much and the peace that the sight of snow brought me. I touched the water and suddenly it came into my mind how dangerous it can be. If you lose balance even a bit, you might drown. The waves come crashing and touch your feet and when you are standing on top of the sand and the waves go back, you feel that you are going down. It unsettles you and you need a lot of concentration there.

I was somehow not attracted towards the water. I saw people going in, taking a dip, coming out. I saw them fighting, have fun, enjoying. But I preferred sitting back on the rocks (nah! Not the drink) and enjoying the view. I couldn’t enjoy. The water, so vast and endless only reminded me of my life. The past, the present and to an extent the future. The coming forth and going back of the waves taking away a part of the coast with it reminded me how so many people come in our lives and go from our lives taking away a part of us with them.

I don’t get that part of me back from them; the coast doesn’t get that part of it back from the water either. That part of me will either forever be lost or be dumped somewhere else. Replacements would come but the emptiness would remain. A line of waves coming one by one to the shore almost as if racing their way. Just like us, racing our way to the finish line. What happens in both the races? The waves crash and they all meet at the coast to be one. In life, we all die and are one with the soil, with each other. The mountains help me solve my queries; the sea on the other hand told me that we are all going to die, no matter what. The mountains are the way, the sea being the destination.

There is a part of me now that would love to go back to the sea. But I am sure, this time if I ever go to the sea; it will be the day that I am out of options. I did nothing that day, rather than contemplating my life and clicking a few pictures mostly of myself and of people with me but only one special picture of the rising sun and the water. Today, if I look back to that picture I feel the same strange turmoil and realize that I hadn’t captured the photo, the photo had captured me. The photo doesn’t belong to me any longer, I belong to the photo. As I type this, I am listening to a song that motivates me to live on “Kehta ye pal, khud se nikal, Jeetey hai chal!”and attaching the picture here. I just hope that someone, someday stumbles upon this picture and expresses to me what the sea sings to them. 

Oh by the way, I'm not hydrophobic!

Love,

Vanya

PS- This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda.

Bengaluru Poetry Festival 2016: bringing poetry to the world!

They say that poetry is the essence of life and that without poetry life cannot be explained. There was once this time when poetry used to be the soul of every being but then books took over and poetry somewhere fizzed out. I feel glad to be in this industry during a time when poetry is coming back in form and that too in a way, never to go back again.

Media Coverage

The Bengaluru PoetryFestival 2016 was a celebration on poetry, for poets, of poets. Held in one of the finest places of the city, Leela Palace over the first weekend of August (6^th and 7^th August), Bengaluru saw the best of what the world of poetry had to offer. With the likes of Javed Akhtar and Piyush Mishra gracing the event on Day 1 and Day 2 respectively, there couldn’t have been a better place for all the poetry to be together as one.

The Bengaluru poetry festival 2016 was about all forms of art and not just limited to poetry. The festival had Poornima Kaushik who is an exponent of the Vazhuvoor styles of Bharatnatyam perform for the audience who was enchanted with the performance.

The audience also got to see Padma Bhushan Teejan Bai performing what she does best-Pandawani, which is basically a traditional form of performing art. With musical accompaniments by her side, age is not a matter for her because it is art that she lives for.

Since the festival was essentially a poetic affair, RainDrops Company (the publishing partner for the festival) launched its anthology titled Po’try. The best part about this particular collection of poems is that this collection was commissioned specially for the festival by the makers and the published poems a part of a competition held by the association and the publishing house across different social media channels. A total of 157 poets carefully chosen from different parts of the world and from different professions were introduced with this particular collection. A well critiqued actress and poetess, Kamalinee Mukherjee graced the occasion and launched the book.

The release of the poetry collection- Po'try

Kamalinee Mukherjee launching the book

Apart from so many activities happening in and around the festival, there were many workshops that were taking place for both the kids and the adults. These were specially conducted by various well known poets from the industry. Since the release of the collection of short poems by Bengaluru Poetry Festival 2016 and RainDrops Company happened at the venue, there has been a huge rise in the sales of the book, making the venture a huge success. After the festival wrapped up, the collaborators are looking forward to a new year full of new poetry to fill the soul.