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.

O’Romeo: A Filmmaker Second-guessing His Own Instincts

The most frustrating films are rarely the incompetent ones.

They are the films made by people clearly capable of better.

Because a bad film can be dismissed. You shrug, move on, and file it away as something that simply did not work. But a film made by someone whose brilliance you have already witnessed, someone who has previously trusted darkness, ambiguity, and tragedy in ways very few mainstream filmmakers do, carries a different kind of disappointment when it falters.

It does not merely fail.

It leaves you wondering why it chose to.

That is what O’Romeo felt like to me.

Not like a bad film. Not even like a failed one, entirely. More like a film made by someone standing at war with his own instincts, repeatedly pulling back just as his better sensibilities begin to surface. 

Whatever liberties it may take with the history or source material behind it, the film in front of us still has to stand on its own terms.

And the most interesting part is that Vishal Bhardwaj, who made Omkara and Haider, is still visible here. You can hear him in the music, you can feel him in the quieter, stranger moments. In the pauses, in the wounded silences, and in the stretches where the film briefly stops trying to impress you and simply allows itself to exist.

The problem is that O’Romeo keeps interrupting that version of itself.

It keeps choosing scale over depth, heroism over ambiguity, spectacle over tragedy. It keeps behaving like a film afraid of not being entertaining enough, even when everything interesting about it lies in the moments where it stops trying so hard to entertain.

That tension defines the entire experience.

Because on paper, this should have worked.

Shahid Kapoor, reunited with the filmmaker who has drawn some of the most compelling performances of his career from him, plays Ustara with enough early unpredictability to suggest another layered Bhardwaj protagonist may be on the horizon. There is a strange stillness to him at first. Something off-centre, almost like a sharpness under the skin. He enters the film carrying the kind of uneasy charisma that makes you pay attention.

And then the writing begins sanding him down.

The issue with Ustara is not performance. Shahid Kapoor does what he can. The issue is that the film cannot decide whether he is meant to be a psychologically volatile man shaped by violence and institutional rot, or a star vehicle protagonist who periodically requires applause-worthy hero moments.

And once the latter instinct begins taking over, the character loses gravitas.

He starts as someone you watch carefully, and then he gradually becomes someone the film wants you to cheer for too easily.

That shift hurts him more than anything else.

Because Vishal Bhardwaj’s best protagonists are rarely heroic in conventional ways. They are fractured, petty, brilliant, weak, and dangerous in ways that make you uncomfortable to align with them. Ustara could have belonged to that lineage.

Instead, O’Romeo often treats him like it is afraid of making him too difficult to love.

And in softening him, it makes him less interesting.

That same problem extends to Avinash Tiwary’s character, perhaps even more severely.

The film spends an extraordinary amount of time building him up before he ever appears. He is spoken of in mythic terms. The kind of off-screen mythology that should create dread. Add to that Avinash Tiwary’s striking physical transformation, which renders him nearly unrecognisable, and the expectation becomes obvious: this is meant to be a seismic arrival.

But the film mistakes anticipation for payoff.

He arrives, yes. He occupies the frame well enough. But the narrative never actually builds the character beneath the image. We are told he matters, told he is feared, told he and Ustara share a bond so deep that one can feel the other in danger.

But told is all we ever are.

At one point, when the film gestures toward a brotherhood between them, it should land like history.

Instead, it lands like exposition.

Because shared history only works when the film does the labour of making us believe it.

O’Romeo often seems to think that saying something is enough to make it true.

The film wants weight without construction. It wants emotional shorthand where emotional architecture is required. It wants us to feel the force of relationships, histories, betrayals, and rivalries that have not actually been built with sufficient care.

And nowhere is that more frustrating than in how it handles Tripti Dimri’s character.

Because unlike many female leads in male-led action dramas, she begins with promise. There is enough substance in her early writing to suggest she may become central in a way that matters. Her recovery phase in Ustara’s den, in particular, contains some of the film’s most restrained and effective emotional beats. There, briefly, O’Romeo quietens down enough to remember that intimacy can be more compelling than spectacle.

You begin to think the film may trust that instinct.

It does not.

From roughly the Ganesh visarjan sequence onward, her character begins losing shape. Agency recedes. The complexity implied earlier starts thinning out. By the time the climax arrives, she has largely been repositioned into a more passive narrative function, waiting for the men around her to complete the story.

And when she finally acts, it feels less like a culmination and more like an obligation.

What should have been an earned confrontation becomes a hurried insertion into a climax that has already emotionally resolved itself elsewhere.

It is one of many moments where the film chooses expedience over emotional truth.

Even the supporting cast reflects this excess. Actors like Nana Patekar, Farida Jalal, Tamannaah Bhatia, and Disha Patani are present enough to suggest significance, but are rarely used with enough narrative purpose to justify their presence. They add texture to the frame, not weight to the story.

Which leaves O’Romeo in an odd position.

It is not empty.

There is too much talent, too much craft, too much residual instinct for it to be empty.

But it is compromised.

Because you can see the film it might have been if it had trusted itself more.

A darker one, a slower one. One less interested in applause and more interested in consequence. One willing to let its characters remain morally difficult. One willing to end in tragedy rather than resolution. One less concerned with mass spectacle and more willing to embrace the Shakespearean weight its title seems to promise.

Instead, what we get feels like a filmmaker trying to split the difference.

Trying to make a Vishal Bhardwaj film and a broad-appeal commercial entertainer at the same time.

And in doing so, fully becoming neither.

That may ultimately be what disappoints most.

Not that O’Romeo is bad.

It isn’t.

It is watchable. Occasionally compelling. At times, even briefly excellent.

But the flashes of excellence only make the surrounding compromises more visible.

Because every time the music swells in that unmistakably Bhardwaj way, every time a quieter scene lingers long enough to breathe, every time the film briefly stops trying to be larger than life and allows itself to become stranger, sadder, more intimate, you are reminded of the filmmaker this could have belonged to.

And then the film pulls away from him again.

O’Romeo does not feel like a director losing his voice.

It feels like a director hearing it clearly and choosing, repeatedly, not to trust it.

And that, more than failure, is what lingers.

Not the sense that this film did not work.

But the sense that somewhere beneath it was a much better one.

And that Vishal Bhardwaj knew it too.

Matka King: The White Suit and the Rot Beneath It

I started Matka King very reluctantly and randomly, expecting a gangster story, thinking I was watching a rise.

Not because the show promised anything simplistic, but because the Indian streaming ecosystem has trained us well by now. Put a morally grey man in period clothing, hand him an empire to build, and somewhere along the way, the camera will ask you to admire the violence it takes to get there.

That is usually how these stories announce themselves. A man begins with nothing, a city is larger than him, and the system is older than him. Then slowly, through instinct, hunger, luck, and a little moral compromise, he builds something that becomes impossible to ignore.

For a while, Matka King lets you believe that it is that story too.

Brij Bhatti begins as someone you want to root for. There is something deeply attractive about his certainty in those early episodes. There is not an ounce of arrogance yet. Just a kind of clean confidence where he believes in work, in fairness, and in integrity amidst the corrupt power surrounding him. He has that rare quality of a man who still thinks principles can survive contact with ambition.

And because Vijay Varma plays him with such ease, you believe him.

That is the trap.

You do not watch Brij become corrupt in one dramatic moment. There is no single scene where the man you admired disappears, and the monster arrives in his place. It is slower than that. Quieter, more uncomfortable. He changes by learning how to explain himself better. Every compromise that he has to make when the world wants to pull him down, finds a justification. Every betrayal he faces gets wrapped in purpose. Every wound he causes becomes, in his mind, part of a larger design only he is brave enough to see.

That is what makes Matka King interesting. Not the gambling, not the empire of satta matka that the real-life Ratan Khatri (whose life the character is loosely based on) created, and not even the underworld.

It is the slow horror of watching a man mistake his own mythology for morality.

Brij’s “integrity” is one of the show’s sharpest ideas, almost like a character study. At first, it feels real and almost old-fashioned. He wants to do things differently. He wants to build something cleaner in the world of gambling than the men before him. He wants to believe that he is not like Lalji Bhai, not like the men who profit from desperation without ever touching its consequences.

But integrity, in Brij’s hands, begins to change shape.

It stops being instinct and becomes all about image.

The white suit he starts donning says it before he does. It is not subtle, and perhaps it does not need to be. Brij wears purity like a costume long after purity has left him. The cleaner he looks, the more compromised he becomes. The more he speaks of legacy and not compromising on honesty in gambling, the less he can see the people standing in front of him.

That is the real rot.

Not greed alone. Greed would have been simpler to defend.

Brij’s downfall is more dangerous because he still believes he is noble.

This is where Vijay Varma becomes impossible to look away from. He does not play Brij as a villain waiting to be revealed. He plays him as a man who keeps adjusting the mirror until he can still recognise himself in it. There is charm, warmth, calculation, insecurity, pride, tenderness, and cruelty, often within the same stretch of silence. You understand why people follow him. You also understand why they eventually begin to fear him.

I fell in love with Vijay Varma while watching this. Not in the casual “good performance” way. More in the sense that you begin trusting an actor so completely that even when the writing slows (and in 50-min episodes, it does), your attention stays because he is still working, still shifting, and still letting something decay behind the eyes.

And Matka King gives him a strong world to decay within.

Lalji Bhai (Gulshan Grover) represents the older system that Brij first enters. He is the established order, the man who understands power as control, access, dominance, and hierarchy. Brij’s early rebellion against him feels almost righteous because Lalji Bhai belongs to a world that already looks morally exhausted. You want Brij to defeat him because Brij seems to promise something different.

That promise is what makes the later transformation hurt.

Because Brij does not simply defeat Lalji Bhai. He absorbs the logic of the system and then convinces himself he has improved it.

Darab (Viineet Kumar Siingh's cameo) stands at the other end of that journey. If Lalji Bhai is the old order, Darab is the future waiting with less patience and more blood. He represents the future world Brij thinks he can outsmart, contain, or negotiate with. But men like Darab are not interested in Brij’s idea of ethics. They are what happens when power stops pretending it needs dignity.

Between Lalji Bhai and Darab, Brij is trapped between the past he wants to replace and the future he cannot control.

And somewhere in that space, he loses himself without realising.

The tragedy is that people keep showing him what he has become, but he refuses to acknowledge it (or even act on it.)

Barkha (Sai Tamhankar), his wife, sees it first, or at least sees it most clearly. She is not just the moral anchor of the show; she is the life Brij betrayed. Her becoming stoic is not a dramatic rebellion. It is quieter than that, and stronger because of it. She refuses to let his money or empire become her son’s inheritance. She refuses to let comfort become complicity.

She is right to leave.

But her leaving breaks something in Brij, too. The thread that connected the old Brij to the new one.

That is the painful part. The people who do the right thing around Brij also become mirrors he cannot bear to look into. Barkha’s refusal tells him that his story about himself is no longer convincing. Not to her. Not to the person who knew him before the suit, before the numbers, before the throne.

And then there is Anmol, his son.

A child’s refusal carries a different kind of violence. Adults can argue, adults can justify, adults can lie to protect themselves. A child refusing to meet you leaves no room for performance. It says what no speech can say.

You have lost the future you thought you were building for.

His brother Lachu’s (Bhupendra Jadawat) betrayal and confrontation cut differently. He is not simply the brother who wrongs him or gets wronged by him. He is part of the life Brij came from. The family line, the original world, and in fact, the reason why he started his whole journey in satta matka. When that relationship breaks, the damage is not only emotional. It is structural. It shows that Brij’s empire is no longer expanding outward; it is eating inward.

Brij wanted to build something that would protect his people.

Instead, it becomes the thing his people need protection from.

Dagdu (Siddharth Jadhav) may be the show’s most quietly devastating presence. He begins as witness, companion, narrator, and almost keeper of Brij’s humanity. He sees the man before the myth settles fully over him. His loyalty does not feel blind at first; it feels grateful. Human. There is affection in it, and pity too.

That is why the shift matters.

For so long, Dagdu calls him “Seth.” There is reverence in that word. Habit too, yes, but also distance. Brij is above him, ahead of him, someone to serve, follow, explain, protect.

And then betrayal arrives.

Suddenly, he is Brij.

Not Seth.

Brij.

It is such a small linguistic shift, but it says everything. Respect does not always die with a scream. Sometimes it dies in how someone says your name.

Dagdu turning grey does not make him less moving. If anything, it makes him more human. He does not break because he is greedy; he breaks because Sulbha (Jamie Lever) becomes the line. There is only so much watching, absorbing, and enduring a person can do before loyalty begins to feel like self-harm.

That is another thing Matka King understands well. Brij does not fall alone. He pulls everyone into the moral weather of his own making. The people around him are forced to become harder, quieter, more compromised versions of themselves simply to survive proximity to him.

Gulrukh (Kritika Kamra) is different. A young, beautiful widow cut off from her family, she first enters Brij’s life as access to a world otherwise closed to him, the polished, elite circles his ambition has always looked toward but never fully belonged in. But what begins as strategic proximity gradually becomes something more corrosive.

Whatever exists between them never feels like love. Not truly.

Gulrukh sees the king in Brij before most others do, and Brij, by then, has slowly already begun craving that version of himself. In her admiration, he finds not intimacy but affirmation. She reflects back to him the man he wants to believe he has become. As she rises beside him into the role of the Matka Queen, becoming the refined face of the empire in rooms his usual world could never enter, she does not merely accompany his ascent; she accelerates it.

Because Gulrukh does not pull Brij away from who he is. 

She rewards him for becoming someone else.

That makes her dangerous.

Not because she corrupts him, but because she confirms him.

Barkha knew Brij before he needed an audience. Gulrukh meets him closer to or on his way to the throne. And Brij, by then, is already beginning to prefer admiration over intimacy.

There is a cruelty in that, too.

Not loud cruelty. The ordinary kind. The kind where a man starts choosing the version of himself that flatters him most, and calls that destiny.

The show’s most revealing moment, for me, is not one of the big confrontations. It is the situation around his brother’s wedding. On paper, it is almost a flex. Brij showing what he can do, how far his system reaches, and how much he knows & controls.

But emotionally, it feels like something darker.

It is the moment where he begins to behave as if probability and fate are the same thing. As if knowing people and patterns means controlling outcomes. As if the world itself has become another matka number he can read before anyone else.

That is where the God complex begins to show.

Not in violence.

In certainty. And the people around him can't help but notice.

The pacing does hurt the show at times. There are stretches where you feel the length, places where the series lingers without deepening as much as it could. A tighter version may have carried more force. But even when it slows, the character work keeps the centre intact. You stay because Brij is still changing, and because everyone around him is changing in response.

That matters.

Because Matka King is not at its best when it explains the mechanics of matka, detailed though those explanations are. It is at its best when it shows what happens to a man who begins believing that honesty in one part of his life can excuse corruption in all the others. Brij convinces himself that because he brought integrity to the game, because he made matka fair where others made gambling crooked, everything else can be rationalised. The lies, the betrayals, the compromises, the blood around the business, none of it, in his mind, negates who he is at his core. If the foundation is honest, he believes the structure built on top of it cannot truly be rotten.

And the finale makes that clear.

By the time Brij is shot in prison, the honest version of him has already been dying for a long time. The bullet is not the end of innocence. It is only the confirmation. The man who once believed in integrity has already turned integrity into performance, family into collateral, loyalty into debt, and ambition into destiny.

By then, the white suit still remains, but is stained by blood.

That is perhaps the cruellest part of it.

The image survives longer than the man does. The performance of purity outlives the purity itself. Even when everything beneath it has changed, Brij continues dressing like someone untouched by what he has become.

And maybe that is the tragedy in its simplest form: he does not stop pretending because he no longer knows he is pretending.

That is why I am not sure I am excited for Season 2 in the usual way.

I will watch Season 2. Of course I will. I want to know what happens next.

But I also suspect the most compelling part of Matka King may already be behind us.

The empire may grow or fall from here, the violence may escalate, the world may get bloodier, louder, harsher, but we have seen versions of that story before.

What made this season linger was not the king after the crown. What I found more compelling was this season’s quieter tragedy.

It was the man before the myth fully swallowed him.

And that man, I think, is already gone, fully disappeared into it.

Maybe that is why Matka King stayed with me. Not as a perfect show. Not as something without pacing issues or flaws. But as a story about a man who outlives the best version of himself and keeps calling it success.

Some falls are loud. Some are public. Some arrive with blood, betrayal, and prison walls.

But some begin much earlier.

In a white suit.

In a justified lie.

In the moment a man stops asking whether he is still good, because too many people have already started calling him great.

Notun Itihaas: A Cross-Border Bengali Rock Collaboration by Soumya Ghosh and Blade Baksi

It was past midnight in Kolkata.

Early evening in Calgary.

Two time zones. Three glowing screens. One guitar leaning casually against a wall behind Blade. A slightly unstable Wi-Fi connection. A conversation that felt steady.

That’s how this began for me.

Not with a press drop. Not with an algorithm. Not even with the song.

With a Zoom call.

And then, later, with the track playing on repeat in my room long after the call had ended.

The first thing you notice about Notun Itihaas isn’t its geography.

It’s its build.

The guitar doesn’t rush. The rhythm doesn’t panic. There’s a deliberate lift in the structure — a slow rise that feels intentional, almost patient. And when the chorus lands, it doesn’t explode for drama. It arrives because it was always meant to.

The song feels claimed.

And once I spoke to Soumya "Som" Ghosh and Priyam “Blade” Baksi, it became clear that the feeling started long before the first note was recorded.

Running Toward Alignment

Som’s journey into this moment didn’t begin with this collaboration.

It began years ago.

On Zoom, when I asked him about leaving his corporate career in 2015, there wasn’t nostalgia in his tone. There was clarity.

When you left your corporate career, were you running from stability, or running toward a version of yourself that felt unfinished?

Som: “I wasn’t running from stability — I was running toward alignment. Corporate life gave me security, but music gave me meaning. The longer I stayed away from creating, the more unfinished I felt. It wasn’t about rejecting a safe life; it was about choosing an honest one. Leaving was scary. It meant giving up certainty for a dream with no guarantees. But I realized I’d rather build something uncertain that feels true than live something secure that feels incomplete. I didn’t leave to escape. I left to become who I was meant to be.”

That word — alignment — echoes through the track.

You hear it in the steadiness of the vocal. In the absence of hesitation.

But the sharper shift came in 2025.

When he stopped performing covers.

When you chose to stop performing covers in 2025, what did you have to let go of — security, familiarity, audience comfort?

Som: “When I stopped performing covers in 2025, I had to let go of comfort — not just the audience’s, but my own. Covers come with built-in familiarity. The crowd sings along, the response is predictable, and there’s a certain safety in that. Walking away from it meant giving up that instant validation and the steady engagement that comes with known songs. But I realized I didn’t want borrowed applause. I wanted to build something of my own. Choosing originals meant accepting silence before recognition, risk before reward. It meant trusting that my voice, my stories, and my sound were enough — even if it took time for people to connect. I didn’t stop covers because they were easy. I stopped because I was ready to be heard for who I truly am.”

When you listen to Notun Itihaas, that readiness is audible.

It doesn’t sound like someone testing originality.

It sounds like someone standing in it.

Bangla, Without Changing the Guitar

Blade joined the Zoom from Calgary. Calm. Focused. Measured.

His sonic language has always leaned into classic ’80s rock and glam metal — structured riffs, soaring leads, controlled aggression.

But this was his first song in Bangla.

His mother tongue.

And that shift wasn’t superficial.

You’ve written and performed in English for years. What changed when you stepped into Bangla — emotionally, musically, instinctively?

Blade: “Writing in English often felt like speaking to the world. Writing in Bangla felt like speaking to myself. There’s a directness in Bangla that’s hard to escape. In English, I could intellectualize emotion — frame it, stylize it. In Bangla, I felt exposed. The words carry cultural weight, childhood echoes, conversations overheard growing up. So emotionally, it was less performance and more confession. Musically, I will say nothing has changed. My style, my sound which is 80s Rock/Hair Metal, that’s still there. So I didn’t feel like doing any significant changes in music just because the language is changing. Instinctively, I stopped trying to ‘write a song’ and started trying to ‘say something.’”

That distinction matters.

The guitar still carries its classic rock backbone.

But the emotional register feels closer to the skin.

Blade also arranged, mixed, and mastered the track.

And when I asked him about the build — that gradual lift that refuses to rush — he explained why it stayed.

When you were shaping the final sound, what feeling did you refuse to polish away?

Blade: “When shaping the final sound, I refused to polish away the gradual lift of the track. It would’ve been easy to shorten the build to make it more radio-friendly, but that slow rise is the heartbeat of Notun Itihaas. Hope isn’t instant — it builds. And I wanted listeners to feel that lift.”

That lift is the emotional spine of the song.

It’s not engineered for skip culture.

It’s structured for immersion.

Clarity That Doesn’t Apologise

On first listen, one thing stands out immediately — the lyrical directness.

There’s no metaphor maze. No protective distance.

So I asked Som directly:

The lyrics here are unapologetically direct. Was that a conscious choice to strip away layers, or does clarity feel more honest to you now?

Som: “It was conscious — but it was also inevitable. Earlier, I enjoyed writing in layers, letting metaphors carry the weight. But over time, I felt clarity becoming more honest for me. When you’ve lived through enough doubt, risk, and reinvention, you stop wanting to hide behind clever lines. With Notun Itihaas, I didn’t want ambiguity. I wanted impact. Being direct felt vulnerable at first — there’s nowhere to hide. But it also felt powerful. The message is about resilience and rewriting your own narrative, and that kind of energy demands clarity. So yes, I stripped away the layers — not because subtlety is weak, but because right now, truth sounds stronger when it’s loud and unmistakable.”

That loudness is not volume.

It’s conviction.

The First Time They Heard It Back

When a song lives in drafts and demos, it’s theoretical. When it’s mastered, it becomes real.

When you heard the final mastered version for the first time, did it sound like the song you imagined — or did it surprise you?

Som: “It surprised me — in the best way. In my head, I knew the fire the song needed to carry. But when I heard the final mastered version, it felt bigger than my imagination. Fuller. Louder. More fearless. What I had envisioned emotionally, Blade amplified it sonically. The guitars felt sharper, the rhythm more commanding — it wasn’t just my idea anymore, it had evolved into our sound. That first listen wasn’t just creative satisfaction. It was a moment of quiet realization — this is what happens when vision meets the right collaborator. It didn’t just match the song I imagined. It exceeded it.”

That amplification is exactly what the track feels like.

Shared energy. Not divided authorship.

Naming a New History

When you chose the name Notun Itihaas, was it about the collaboration — or about personal turning points in your own journeys?

Som: “It was both — and that’s what makes it meaningful. On a personal level, Notun Itihaas represents a turning point in my own journey. Leaving comfort, choosing originals over covers, stepping fully into my identity as an independent artist — all of that felt like rewriting my narrative. But at the same time, the collaboration with Blade was also a new chapter. It wasn’t just two musicians working together; it was two visions aligning at the right moment. That synergy gave the title even more weight. ‘Notun Itihaas’ isn’t just about starting something new. It’s about consciously deciding that the next chapter will be written on your own terms. So yes, it’s personal. Yes, it’s collaborative. And in many ways, it’s symbolic of both our journeys converging to create something that feels bigger than either of us alone.”

Blade: “It was both. On the surface, Notun Itihaas — ‘New History’ — marks this collaboration with Soumya (Som) Ghosh. Two individual paths crossing at the right time. But personally, it represents a quiet rebellion against repetition. We all reach moments where we realize we’re either rewriting old patterns or consciously creating something new. This song is about choosing the latter — musically and emotionally. It’s about not inheriting narratives that no longer serve us.”

Alignment Without Friction

Before you began writing together, what was your one non-negotiable? What could not be compromised?

Som: “My one non-negotiable was honesty. No matter how big or small the song became, I didn’t want to dilute the emotion just to make it safer or more “acceptable.” The sound could evolve, arrangements could change, but the core truth of what we were saying couldn’t be compromised. If the lyric felt raw, it had to stay raw. If the energy demanded aggression, it couldn’t be softened for comfort. Before we began writing together, I was clear about one thing — I don’t want to create something that sounds impressive but feels empty. It has to mean something. It has to come from lived experience. Everything else is flexible. Authenticity isn’t.”

Blade: “Honesty, If a line didn’t feel lived-in, it had to go. We agreed early on that we wouldn’t write for trend, for radio structure, or for algorithmic comfort. The emotion had to be real — even if it meant keeping imperfections.

The song could evolve in sound, arrangement, even genre shades — but it could not lose emotional truth.”

And when I asked about disagreements:

Was there a moment during production where you disagreed — and what did that disagreement teach you about each other?

Som: “Honestly, we didn’t have any disagreements during the production. Blade arranged the song so beautifully from the very beginning that it actually guided the writing. The sound carried a certain emotion — intensity, urgency, conviction — and that made it easier for me to pour my feelings into the lyrics. Instead of friction, there was flow. The arrangement didn’t restrict me; it inspired me. It felt like the music already understood what I was trying to say, even before the words were fully formed. Sometimes collaboration is about debate. This time, it was about alignment.”

Blade: “Honestly, no — there wasn’t any real disagreement.

What surprised us both was how naturally aligned we were. Even when we explored different ideas, it never felt like friction. It felt like expansion. If one of us suggested a change, the other instinctively understood the intention behind it.

That alignment taught me something deeper — that we were both serving the song, not ourselves. There was no need to defend choices or prove points. The focus stayed on what Notun Itihaas needed in that moment.”

Sometimes alignment is louder than conflict.

You can hear that cohesion in the finished track.

The Listener’s First Moment

When someone presses play for the first time, what do you hope they feel in the first 30 seconds — before analysis, before judgement?

Som: “In the first 30 seconds, I don’t want them to think — I want them to feel. Before analysis, before judgement, I hope they feel a surge. A sense of movement. Like something inside them just woke up. The opening energy is intentional. It’s not meant to ease you in gently — it’s meant to pull you forward. I want the listener to feel urgency, confidence, maybe even a little rebellion. Even if they don’t understand the lyrics yet, I hope they sense conviction. Because before music becomes intellectual, it’s physical. If the first 30 seconds can make their heartbeat shift even slightly — then we’ve done something right.”

Blade: “Recognition.

That subtle feeling of, “I’ve been here before.” Before they process the lyrics, I want the atmosphere to pull them inward — almost like the first few seconds of a memory returning. Not drama. Not spectacle. Just an emotional door opening.”

That pairing — surge and recognition — defines the intro.

And in a world shaped by playlists?

In an era where music is shaped by playlists and algorithms, how do you imagine someone discovering this song — and what do you hope makes them stay?

Som: “Today, most people won’t discover a song intentionally — they’ll stumble upon it. Maybe it appears on a playlist, maybe the algorithm places it between two completely different tracks. That’s the reality of this era. I imagine someone hearing the opening riff unexpectedly — maybe while working, travelling, or scrolling — and something about the energy makes them pause. What I hope makes them stay isn’t just the sound, but the sincerity. Algorithms can deliver a song to your ears, but only emotion can make you not skip. If the conviction in the voice feels real… If the intensity doesn’t feel manufactured… If even one line feels personal to them… Then it stops being “another track in a playlist” and becomes their song in that moment. Discovery may be accidental. Staying is always emotional.”

Blade: “Maybe they’ll find it through a Bengali rock playlist. Maybe through Soumya (Som) Ghosh’s audience. Maybe accidentally at 1:13 a.m.

Discovery today is accidental and infinite. But what makes someone stay isn’t strategy — it’s still goosebumps. If one line feels personal to them, if the chorus feels like something they couldn’t say but needed to hear, they’ll replay it. Algorithms can deliver a song; only emotion can make it linger.”

That line alone explains why this track works.

What Comes Next

If Notun Itihaas is chapter one, what would chapter two refuse to repeat?

Som: “If Notun Itihaas is chapter one, then chapter two will refuse to repeat hesitation. This song was about reclaiming voice, choosing conviction, and stepping forward without apology. Chapter two won’t look back for validation. It won’t soften its edges to fit expectations, trends, or comfort zones. It will refuse self-doubt. It will refuse creative compromise. And it will definitely refuse to repeat anything that feels safe just because it worked once. Growth, for me, means evolution — not repetition. Every chapter should feel like risk again. Because the moment it becomes predictable, it stops being honest.”

Blade: “It would refuse safety.

Chapter one is about beginning. Chapter two would be about consequence — going deeper, riskier, maybe darker. It would refuse to dilute itself for comfort. If we’re truly writing a new history, it can’t echo old formulas.

Every new chapter has to challenge the last one. Otherwise, it’s not history — it’s habit.”

After living with Notun Itihaas beyond the Zoom call, beyond the first listen, what remains isn’t just the collaboration.

It’s the build.

The way the song rises without rushing.
The way Bangla carries weight without softening the rock backbone.
The way honesty sounds when it isn’t negotiated.

This isn’t novelty.

It isn’t nostalgia.

It’s two artists deciding that alignment matters more than comfort.

And you can hear that decision in every bar.

You can listen to the song here.