CONTENT WITH CONTENT

Back when the boy I loved stopped talking to me, my parents took me to watch a movie which I found to be the most beautiful interpretation of The Godfather I've ever seen. A perfect amalgam of breathtaking visuals, a goosebump inducing soundtrack and an exceptionally talented cast with a man my grandmother, my mother and I were all infatuated with at the helm. For those 144 minutes, I was a stranger to the misery I was in.

When my first love story fell apart, a tinder match who grew to be a friend told me that he was excited for my journey of watching a show about an alcoholic horse. And so I watched it. And I laughed. And then I cried a whole lot more. It made me feel seen. For the first time in my life. I was made aware of the multitudes of pain in this world. And somehow, I was able to find comfort in it.

As the boy I loved prepared to move to another continent, I started to watch a cooking show set in his destination. I found out that 21 years of eating didn't teach me that food, was love. That it tastes better when raw emotion goes into it. And someone at my house must've been mimicking the moves of the ones on TV as they sliced into their onions because every single episode left me teary eyed.

After I finished school, I was so lost, for so long. My best friend who moved away for my last 2 years of schooling, lent me a copy of a book my best friend who helped me get through those last 2 years kept telling me about. It had lotuses on the cover and heartache within the pages. I started that book on a train ride to Thiruvananthapuram and when I finished it, I was not the same girl who got on that train. Some things evoke such strong feelings from within you, especially when it's something so closely tied to your homeland.

When I was 12 years old, I was in a classroom full of new kids at the beginning of a school year for the second time in a row. I think that was my first ever episode. As I was feeling what it meant to be blue for the first time, my new classmate told me to listen to yellow. And soon enough I was introduced to the USB of her brother. The contents of that little SanDisk, that music, saved this mortal soul. If I ever win an award, before I thank God or the universe, I will thank Mohit Chettan's playlist.

When I had to leave my life in Bangalore, move back home and start attending classes on a screen, something inside me withered away. I watched as my room got messier every day, and I just couldn't find it in myself to clean it. But then I found my old watercolour set. Till then, I was only familiar with the joy of experiencing art. But during that phase, I experienced the exhilarating thrill of creating. It was a new kind of escape. Pure brilliance.

A little more than 2 decades of living and a dozen or more episodes have taught me that art always feels better when you're miserable. For me, it almost makes it all worth it. Every time I make it out of that ever-tightening spiral, I come out of it having found and experienced so much beauty. That's almost a fair trade, I guess, right?

You lose a few weeks of your life as you watch the ones you love worry about you, but you get to feel art on a whole other dimension. It doesn't completely compensate for all the pain, but atleast it makes me feel better about feeling worse.

I'm all caught up with Masterchef Australia. I don't have anything else to turn to right now. I'm trying to find my refuge in words this time. Let's hope it works.