Hello my dearest readers,

I am so sorry for the radio silence. No I haven’t lost my love for oversharing, I was only recovering from an academic year of adulting. I was marinating in my mother’s hugs and relishing my father’s foot rubs. I was gaining some weight from all the delicious food and losing the track of time talking to my sister.

I was home.

And while there were various moments I wanted to write about: angry rants about disguised inequalities, sad poetry on nostalgia, long letters full of love or just a detailed log of how amazing and wholesome my days were at home to revisit later, I just didn’t find the time or the motivation to sit down by myself and put my thoughts and feelings into words.
I was just so busy absorbing all that was around me.
This brings me to a conversation I had with my father about seven months ago. I had just posted this blog about a breakup that in all honesty never was, I made it up in my head, like most of my blog entries, but I digress. So I had just posted that blog and the next day I saw my cousin who also likes to write post this caption on Instagram about this “him” who left her heartbroken. Heartbreak seems to be a common subject in most of her captions. She is the youngest of all and forever our little baby so I wondered angrily- who hurt her?
My father says he too wonders who hurt me. And I realised that I too write about some delusional “him” on my blog.
This sends me in a spiral. Why am I always pulled to write about heartbreak and grief? Why am I always romanticising this imaginary pain and struggle?

Here is my penny on the matter-

Why does most art we know or create have some relation to pain and grief and suffering?

Remember the premise of Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar? It took Janardhan being disowned by his family, homelessness, hunger and a heartbreak to be able to become Jordan.

Anupam Kher once asked Gulzar Saab, if it is necessary for a poet to be sad and Gulzar Saab, in his forever metaphorical way, said that joy is like a firecracker, a sparkler. It burns, extinguishes and passes quickly, but sadness is like an incense stick. It keeps burning, and keeps the room smelling good for a long time.

“Great art comes from great suffering” was fed to us by most media and artists. I too grew up believing just this. However, my father recently said something that kept me wondering.
This brings me to hypothesis 1:

A broken heart is fierce enough to create immaculate art. Van Gogh is our prime example.
But my father thinks there is a way to escape suffering and still become an artist- fill your heart with so much love and gratitude that it overflows into art.

This I think is a beautiful way to look at life. But my observation differs. Which brings us to hypothesis 2:

It is more comfortable to sit with your pain than it is to deal with it.
If I had a disastrous fight with my lover I will much rather be sitting in my bed, sulking, talking to ten different friends about it than having a difficult conversation.
I would rather write a sad poem about losing my beloved than to process the grief of never hearing their voice again.
When we are hurting, we will do anything than to deal with that hurt.
Write a song, paint a wall in your room, learn how to play the ukulele, colour your hair, or repost sappy videos on Instagram.

It is not that we won’t be as artistic if things were going well, we would still know the same words and we would still have the same wall in our room and we would still choose to colour our hair purple.
But who has the time to think and to make choices and to create and to edit and to share when you are busy living the best days of your life????

When I was home, I was too consumed by love and affection and belonging to sit by myself and reflect and write.

In conclusion,
I don’t think great art only comes from great suffering but you see only hurt, sad, and lonely people seek creativity. Only those in times of need and desperation and suffering find solace in creating art.
The rest are busy. They are busy marinating in their mother’s hugs and relishing their father’s foot rubs, in gaining some weight from all the delicious food and losing the track of time talking to their sister.