I was never good at anything. Neither creative nor academic. My entire life is a baggage of failure that made my parents utterly frustrated. I am, till date, a failure. I almost do nothing. Yeah, you heard it right, almost.
I am 27 and by this age, I should have had some notable works, income, stable life etc etc. And, tbh, I have none. It’s not like, I could. Nope, how could I? I am miserable since childhood. Some day, my consciousness bloomed and I just wanted to die at once.
When I dived into philosophy, Nihilism fitted me. So, I thought maybe I am nihilist. The more I aged, I got to realise, this whole Western Philosophy thing – is a hoax. I have nothing to do with it. Never mind.
I read some deeply amazing books when I was a student. Those days were truly the best days of my life. Alike everyone around me, I stopped reading. There was a time, I couldn’t manage to sleep without reading at least one page. All these sound like a lifetime ago. Untouchable and irreversible.
Once I read books irrespective of time and writer. I grasped them all. I had this only good habit in me. And sadly enough, I bid farewell to my most productive habit — reading.
There’s another habit I may call my personal muse or salvation — cinema. What does it take to be a cinephile? I never knew. I felt reborn with every good cinema being watched. That was the magic. For a cinema lover, cinema encapsulates everything. Cinema is both the book of art and the book of life.
No amount of grievance will rectify my lost passion of cinema. It felt like I could wake up in cinema, be in it, talk about it and think about it until I fall asleep. It’s not just the story itself but the entire form of art that a cinema has to offer. How far away that time seems now!
Have I lost it all? The inert passion and ruthlessness for book and cinema? I don’t know. I don’t know my new self either. It’s true I was anything but a creative person but atleast I knew how to appreciate every form of Art. The great cinemas of ’60, ’70, ’80 have changed my life forever. They reshaped my thought process and made me artistically ambitious.
I wish, my long-gone cinema and book lover entity be resurrected again. Maybe then, I could go through this endless loop of mediocre life without feeling the worst.