Musafir Cafe: The Promises No One Made

I finished Musafir Cafe crying, and with absolutely no desire to see Chander end up with either woman.

That may sound contradictory for a relationship drama. It is not.

A story can move you without persuading you. You can understand why people love each other, grieve what they lose, feel the weight of everything they could have been, and still believe they should remain very far away from each other until they have spent some serious time understanding themselves.

That is what Musafir Cafe did for me.

It moved slowly, sometimes almost indulgently, but I did not mind that. There is a lack of unhurried relationship dramas on streaming right now, stories willing to sit inside conversations, silences and lives that change without a murder, scam or criminal empire forcing them forward. The performances are lovely, the songs know when to enter, and the mountains are photographed with the tenderness of someone who understands why people keep going back to them.

I had also returned from Mussoorie quite recently, which made watching it a little stranger. Every road felt familiar. The turns, the mist, the hill shops, the sudden opening of a view where you were expecting another wall of green. The series did not have to convince me that Chander could love the mountains enough to organise a life around them. I may understand that love as much as he does.

But the mountains are also where Musafir Cafe temporarily disguises its central problem.

They make everything feel possible.

The relationship is far less certain.

Chander, played with a quiet, wounded sincerity by Vikrant Massey, meets Sudha at an arranged-marriage setup that turns into something else before either of them has decided what that something should be. Sudha, played by Vedika Pinto, is impulsive, ambitious, fiercely attached to her independence and immediately resistant to the kind of life Chander appears to want. He wants marriage, family and eventually a café in the hills. She wants Mumbai, a legal career and the certainty that loving someone will not make her disappear inside their expectations.

They know they are different.

That is partly why they are drawn to each other.

Chander sees in Sudha a person who belongs completely to herself. Sudha sees in Chander someone capable of placing love at the centre of his life. Each contains the emotional capacity the other has never properly developed.

He does not know how to love without slowly abandoning himself.

She does not know how to let love influence her life without experiencing that influence as a threat to who she is.

For a while, this looks like complementarity.

It may actually be borrowed wholeness.

Chander gets to live near someone whose sense of self appears immovable. Sudha gets to experience the security of being loved by someone willing to rearrange himself around her. They feel expanded by the relationship and mistake that expansion for evidence that they can build a life together.

But being changed by someone is not the same as growing through them.

Chander does not learn from Sudha how to preserve himself within a relationship. Sudha does not learn from Chander how to make room for another person without interpreting that room as something taken away from her.

They continue outsourcing those missing parts to each other.

He needs her to remain a person.

She needs him to experience belonging.

Neither learns how to become both.

That is where Musafir Cafe becomes more interesting than the romance it appears to be telling. Because Chander and Sudha do not simply have different dreams. They have different definitions of what love is supposed to do to a life.

Chander believes love proves itself through how completely it can reshape you.

Sudha believes love is only safe while it does not erase the shape you have fought to create.

He is willing to disappear into “us.”

She is willing to lose “us” to preserve “me.”

Neither understands the middle.

And the middle is where partnership lives.

The most revealing part of their relationship is not that they make different decisions. It is that they almost never make a decision together.

When Sudha postpones or cancels her Mumbai plan, an opportunity to go to Delhi appears before Chander. For a split second, we see him consider it. Then he remembers what Sudha has given up and appears to decide against it.

But we do not see him directly refuse the offer.

More importantly, we do not see him tell Sudha.

There is no calm conversation in which he says that Delhi interests him, that he knows she has postponed Mumbai, that he does not want either of them to build resentment around an unspoken sacrifice. He allows her decision to determine his and quietly moves on to planning a Mussoorie trip for her.

It looks loving.

It is also the beginning of a private contract.

Chander believes Sudha has chosen their relationship by postponing Mumbai. He responds by giving up Delhi for the same relationship. In his mind, perhaps, they have now chosen each other.

Sudha does not know the full terms of that choice.

A sacrifice made without the other person’s knowledge cannot become a shared commitment. It remains a private decision, however loving its intention. And private sacrifices have a dangerous habit of becoming emotional debts the other person never agreed to incur.

Chander does not demand repayment consciously. I am not sure he would even describe what he has done as a debt. But when Mumbai returns, it does not arrive for him as an ordinary career decision. It collapses an agreement he believed they had already made.

The problem is that the agreement may only ever have existed inside his head.

Sudha does the same thing from the opposite direction.

In a conversation with her mother, she says that she wants to ask Chander to move to Mumbai with her. The possibility exists. She can imagine a future in which she does not have to choose between her career and the relationship.

Then she reaches Mussoorie and sees how happy Chander is there.

When Chander himself says that he will move to Mumbai, Sudha refuses.

Again, it looks loving. She sees the mountains in him. She understands that the café is not a passing fantasy but a life in which he appears fully himself. She does not want to become the reason he abandons it.

But she also makes that decision for him.

Chander chooses for Sudha by sacrificing himself.

Sudha chooses for Chander by refusing his sacrifice.

Both believe they are protecting the person they love. Both deny that person the right to participate in the choice.

That is one of the quieter dangers Musafir Cafe keeps circling. Sometimes deciding what is best for another person is an act of care. Sometimes it is how we escape the discomfort of letting them choose.

If Chander chooses Mumbai and regrets it, Sudha will have to live with the possibility that he diminished himself for her. If they discuss it properly, she will also have to admit what she wants from him and what she is prepared to give in return. It is safer to look at his happiness in Mussoorie, call it certainty and close the question herself.

She preserves his life, perhaps.

She also preserves herself from the responsibility of sharing it.

That is why their relationship begins breaking in Mussoorie but truly erupts later in Bhopal.

Mussoorie is still suspended reality. There are hills to look at, café locations to imagine and an older couple who see them as two people in love. Chander speaks about marriage and family. Sudha is visibly sad. From the outside, the story is easy to read: the man wants a future, the woman loves him but is frightened, and surely love this obvious must eventually find a way.

The older couple, Mark and Nilima, played by Adil Hussain and Sadiya Siddiqui, see feelings and assume infrastructure.

So do we.

Bhopal removes the scenery.

The pregnancy alarm introduces the body, the household and the possibility of an irreversible future. Suddenly, marriage is no longer something Chander vaguely wants one day. It becomes an immediate answer to a life that may already be forming. For Sudha, that same possibility threatens to turn her deepest fear into fact.

Chander sees a family taking shape.

Sudha sees her own shape disappearing inside it.

The “let us get married” conversation therefore amplifies everything they have avoided. Chander is not reacting only to a possible pregnancy. Sudha is not reacting only to a proposal. They are confronting the private futures each has been carrying while pretending they are moving towards the same one.

They are not.

The fight becomes loud, heated and ugly because it is carrying every conversation they never had calmly.

Chander’s silent sacrifices are there.

Sudha’s fear of being consumed by them is there.

His assumption that her postponed Mumbai plan meant she had chosen him is there.

Her suspicion that he will keep surrendering his life and eventually make her responsible for what he has lost is there.

His anger that he is always prepared to reorganise himself is there.

Her anger that his idea of love seems to require reorganisation from her too is there.

All of it has been waiting.

Then, for a few seconds, it escapes.

The dialogues tell us as much. They say to each other the very things the relationship has been avoiding. And almost immediately, they apologise. They say they did not mean it.

But what exactly did they not mean?

They may not have meant the cruelty. They may not have meant to cause that degree of pain. They may not have meant to say those things aloud.

That is different from never having felt them.

Anger is not a truth serum. It is an amplifier. It distorts, but it needs something already present to amplify.

Their accusations may be unfair in fact and still honest in feeling. The problem is that neither knows what to do with that honesty once the anger passes. To own it would mean admitting that their relationship cannot return to the romantic uncertainty in which it has survived until now.

So they apologise.

The apology repairs the violence of the delivery. It does not resolve the truth of the grievance.

In fact, their apology may be another act of avoidance. It allows them to categorise the fight as an unfortunate loss of control rather than evidence about the relationship itself.

Their fight may be their first entirely truthful conversation.

Their apology helps them pretend it was an aberration.

This is what the series understands about relationships, intentionally or otherwise. People do not always remain unclear because they lack communication skills. Sometimes clarity threatens the arrangement from which everyone is still receiving something.

As long as nothing is defined, Chander can imagine marriage.

Sudha can imagine freedom.

Both can continue loving the other without admitting that the life each imagines would require the other person to become someone else.

Ambiguity is not simply their problem.

It is the relationship’s survival mechanism.

And then there is Preeti.

Mahima Makwana plays her with such restraint that it becomes easy to call her the mature one. She knows about Sudha. She knows that Chander’s past is not fully past. She understands that there is a part of his heart she has not been allowed to inhabit, and still chooses to build a café, a home and five years of companionship beside him.

But knowing that someone has not fully chosen you does not automatically make staying with them an act of maturity.

Sometimes it only makes the hope more conscious.

Preeti gives Chander what he needed, or perhaps what he had once hoped to receive from Sudha. She stays. She supports his café. She shares his mountain life. She offers steadiness where Sudha brought uncertainty and companionship where Sudha’s ambitions repeatedly pulled her elsewhere.

Given Chander’s emotional state, it makes sense that he would believe he had fallen in love.

But Preeti is also his rebound.

Not because everything between them is false. Rebound relationships can contain real tenderness, shared work, genuine care and years of life. What makes a person a rebound is not the absence of feeling. It is the function the relationship is asked to perform.

Preeti helps Chander survive the person he could not have.

That does not necessarily mean he has stopped organising himself around her.

And this is where Chander’s hypocrisy becomes impossible to ignore.

This is a man who wanted marriage. He wanted a family. He wanted Sudha to choose the settled future he could see so clearly.

Then he spends five years with Preeti and does not marry her.

Why?

The uncomfortable answer may be that Chander did not want marriage in the abstract. He wanted Sudha to want marriage with him.

Her agreement would have proved something. That he was worth choosing. That their relationship mattered more than the freedom she guarded so fiercely. That the woman who had once kept one foot outside their shared life had finally placed both feet inside it.

Preeti’s love cannot repair that wound because Preeti did not create it.

He wanted a life with Sudha more than he wanted a life.

That is why seeing Sudha again can destabilise five years with Preeti so quickly. The years do not disappear. Their meaning becomes visible. Chander has built the life he claimed to want, in the place he always wanted it, with a woman willing to stay.

And still, some part of him is waiting for Sudha to reverse an old rejection.

Chander knows what it feels like to love someone who will not fully choose him.

Then he allows Preeti to live in precisely that position.

He wants to be chosen by the woman who could not choose him while refusing to fully choose the woman who did.

Preeti is not unaware of this. That is where her own responsibility begins.

She stays beside a man whose unresolved love is not hidden from her. She may believe that shared years will eventually weigh more than unfinished history. That steadiness will become more important than intensity. That if she gives Chander everything Sudha could not, he will one day stop distinguishing between the love he lost and the love that remained.

Preeti has written a private contract too.

If I stay, one day I will be chosen completely.

The ring she discovers near the end is almost painfully perfect in that context. It has not yet been offered to her. It was handed to Chander by someone else. He has made no proposal. Yet the sight of it fills her with relief because she immediately turns the object into confirmation.

The ring appears to tell her that the waiting meant something.

That five years were leading somewhere.

That patience has finally become permanence.

But once again, the promise exists before the conversation.

Preeti sees a ring and imagines a proposal. Chander sees Sudha and returns to an unfinished life. Sudha arrives carrying a departure she has already decided.

Everyone is living inside a different ending.

Rajeev Siddhartha as Rahil, the author who drifts into the café, could have complicated this beautifully if the series had given him more space. He sees Preeti beyond her role in Chander’s life. He sees the writer and traveller in her, the person whose own restlessness has been disciplined into supporting someone else’s dream. He is not necessarily a better romantic answer. That would only move Preeti from one man’s unfinished story into another.

But he reminds us that Preeti had a self before she became the woman who stayed.

The series does not give that self enough time.

It does not give Chander and Preeti’s five years enough time either. We are told and shown the ease of their companionship, but not enough of how it was built, what was promised, why marriage remained suspended or how Preeti kept negotiating with the knowledge that Sudha still existed between them.

Perhaps that is what a second season intends to explain.

That predictability is precisely why I do not want one.

Because the emotional question is already clear. More plot will not necessarily deepen it. It may only turn a relationship drama into a selection exercise.

Sudha’s final return makes that risk worse.

She has already visited Musafir Cafe once in secret and seen Chander with Preeti. She sees, or imagines, that he is happy. She has no life to offer him. She is moving forward with her own partner. By her own logic, the loving thing would be to leave Chander undisturbed.

Yet she comes back to meet him one last time.

There is no practical need for it.

There is an emotional one.

Perhaps Sudha wants closure. Perhaps she needs forgiveness. Perhaps she wants to see whether she still matters. Perhaps a part of her wants Chander to interrupt her departure without requiring her to ask him to.

Whatever the motivation, the contradiction remains.

Sudha wants to leave Chander, but she does not want to leave without witnessing what she still means to him.

She rejects his offer to move because she believes she knows where he belongs. Years later, she enters the life in which she imagines he has found that belonging and asks for emotional access to him again.

She cannot offer Chander the life he wants.

She cannot entirely surrender her place as the person he wanted it with.

That does not make her cruel. Sudha can be independent and selfish at the same time. Chander can be loving and emotionally unavailable at the same time. Preeti can be perceptive and still participate in her own prolonged heartbreak.

Every character is grey.

The problem begins when we turn greyness into goodness simply because a character articulates it beautifully.

The final Chander and Sudha conversation is moving. It is graceful in places, grateful in others, and the dialogue lands because both people finally possess enough distance to understand what the relationship gave them.

But understanding a pattern is not the same as outgrowing it.

They still meet after Sudha has already decided to leave. Chander still reacts to her decision after the decision exists. Sudha still enters his life seeking something she cannot clearly name. He still measures his agency against whether she stays.

Eight years have passed, but the emotional structure of the conversation remains painfully familiar.

Sometimes people learn to explain their patterns long before they learn to stop repeating them.

Chander’s insistence that this time he gets to decide is therefore not automatically evidence of growth. He has been deciding all along.

Not telling Sudha about Delhi was a decision.

Giving up his own wants according to hers was a decision.

Building five years with Preeti without marrying her was a decision.

Accepting the emotional privileges of being her partner while remaining attached to Sudha was a decision.

He only recognises his power to choose when Sudha returns because hers is the choice around which his identity remains organised.

The show seems to want us to wonder which woman Chander will choose.

I do not care.

More than that, I am not convinced the question deserves to be asked in the form the finale gives it.

Suppose Chander decides to remain at Musafir Cafe and asks Sudha to stay. Suppose she agrees. Would that be growth, or would the series simply have moved the sacrifice from one person to the other?

Eight years ago, Chander was prepared to move to Mumbai and allow his life to take the shape of Sudha’s ambition. Sudha refused because she believed he would lose himself.

If she now stays in Mussoorie because Chander has finally “decided,” the geography changes. The psychological arrangement may not.

Chander would still determine the destination.

Sudha would still be asked to prove love by reorganising her life around it.

A relationship does not become equal merely because the person making the sacrifice changes.

Relationships are built through compromise, but compromise requires two people to remain present in the conversation. It is not the same as sacrifice. Sacrifice allows one person to disappear and the other to inherit responsibility for the disappearance.

Chander sacrifices before Sudha can choose with him.

Sudha chooses herself before Chander can matter within the choice.

Preeti waits for Chander’s eventual choice to justify everything she has already sacrificed.

None of them is entirely dishonest. That may be the saddest part.

They are simply more honest about what they feel than about what those feelings are doing to the people around them.

Yes, Sudha is allowed to change. Living on your own terms does not mean remaining loyal forever to the ambitions of your younger self. Mumbai does not have to remain sacred simply because it once represented freedom. A person may choose love, partnership or even a quieter life without betraying her independence.

But the choice has to emerge from self-knowledge.

The series has not yet shown that.

It has shown Sudha arriving after already deciding to leave for Singapore with Vineet. It has shown her reopening an old relationship she claims she came to close. It has shown Chander admit that she still occupies a place in him that five years with Preeti have not displaced.

What it has not shown is either person doing the internal work required to build together what they could not build before.

Time has passed.

That is not the same as growth having occurred.

A second chance does not become mature merely because it arrives eight years later.

If Sudha stays now, the series will have to prove that she is choosing a life rather than surrendering to an unfinished emotion. Otherwise, the independent woman’s entire journey will be reduced to a delay before she finally accepts the romantic future Chander always wanted.

And what happens to Preeti in that ending?

Does five years of companionship become negligible the moment first love walks through the café door?

Preeti built Musafir Cafe with Chander. She participated in the ordinary, uncinematic labour of his life. She stayed through the memory of Sudha, supported the dream he once kept postponing and loved him with full knowledge that a part of him remained unavailable.

None of that means Chander owes her marriage.

But it does mean he owes those years moral weight.

If he chooses Sudha and the series frames that choice as courage, Preeti becomes collateral in another person’s grand love story. Her patience, work and emotional investment become a waiting room Chander occupied until the woman he truly wanted returned.

That would not make Chander a romantic hero.

It would make him a man who accepted the privileges of Preeti’s commitment while quietly reserving the right to leave when his unresolved past became available again.

He knows what it is to love someone who will not fully choose him.

There would be particular cruelty in making Preeti inherit the same wound.

And then there is Vineet.

He may barely be visible in this season, but invisibility does not make him disposable. Sudha is preparing to move to Singapore with him. He has presumably built a relationship with the woman Chander still experiences as unfinished business.

If Sudha abandons that life the moment Chander asks her to stay, Vineet becomes another Preeti: a present partner reduced to an obstacle between two people and the mythology of their first love.

That would reveal an unpleasant pattern.

Chander uses Preeti to survive Sudha.

Sudha uses Vineet to build a life beyond Chander.

Then Chander and Sudha return to each other, leaving the people who helped them live through the separation to absorb the consequences.

First love would become sovereign.

Everyone who came afterwards would become temporary.

There is nothing mature about that unless the series is willing to examine the damage honestly.

This is why the novel’s decision to keep Chander and Sudha apart feels more truthful to what their relationship actually taught them. Their love matters. They change each other. They remain emotionally significant. But significance does not have to culminate in possession.

Perhaps the most grown-up thing two people can do with a formative love is refuse to make it responsible for a future it was never capable of carrying.

Keeping them apart does not diminish what they had.

It respects what they learnt from losing it.

The book appears to understand that Chander and Sudha can remain part of each other’s emotional history without becoming each other’s final destination. The series had the opportunity to make that understanding its conclusion. One season was enough. The arc was already there.

Instead, it turns clarity back into suspense.

The cliffhanger asks whether Chander will choose Sudha or Preeti. But that question quietly restores him as the centre of three lives. Sudha’s growth, Preeti’s patience and Vineet’s relationship are all made to wait for his verdict.

“This time, I get to decide” may sound like Chander reclaiming agency.

It may also be the first time the series mistakes his need for control for character growth.

Because Chander has always been deciding.

He decided not to discuss Delhi.

He decided that Sudha’s postponed Mumbai plan represented a shared promise.

He decided to build five years with Preeti without marrying her.

He decided to accept her devotion while keeping his old love emotionally intact.

The problem was never that Chander lacked the power to choose.

The problem was that his choices kept being organised around whether another person stayed.

So no, I do not need to know which woman he chooses.

I need to know whether Sudha can choose a relationship without disappearing inside it.

Whether Preeti can stop treating patience as a path towards being chosen.

Whether Chander can build an identity that does not depend upon a woman confirming it.

And whether the series understands that love is not always honoured by reunion.

Sometimes love has already done everything it came to do.

The mature ending is knowing not to ask it for a life it was never equipped to build.

And yet, I cried.

I cried for Chander, because loving deeply does not teach a person how to love well.

I cried for Sudha, because choosing yourself can still require grieving every life that choice makes impossible.

I cried for Preeti, because patience can become a beautiful name for waiting in a place where you were never fully chosen.

I cried because the dialogues hit home, because the performances made every contradiction feel lived rather than theoretical, and because the last episode understood how much pain can remain even when everyone can finally explain what happened.

I did not cry because I wanted Chander and Sudha together.

I cried because the storytelling was good enough to make me mourn a relationship I still believe should have ended.

Cinema can earn your tears without earning your agreement.

Perhaps that is why the series stayed with me despite the cliffhanger, and why I do not particularly want to know what happens next. The person Chander chooses is the least interesting answer available. Sudha has already built a life. Preeti deserves one that is not organised around whether another woman returns. Chander has spent too long locating himself inside the decisions of the women he loves.

All three need clarity.

Possibly therapy.

Definitely time alone with the parts of themselves they keep asking relationships to carry.

Because that is what Musafir Cafe is ultimately about for me. Not soulmates, missed timing or the one person who changes you forever.

It is about people who privately imagine different futures, assign meaning to sacrifices and silences, and call the resulting intensity love.

Every one of them is honouring a relationship contract the other person never signed.

And perhaps these relationships did not begin ending in Mumbai, Mussoorie or Bhopal.

They began ending much earlier.

In the opportunity never mentioned.

In the question never asked.

In the future imagined alone.

In every silent sacrifice that became a promise, without ever asking the other person to make it. 

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.